Shanna Daly, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has received the 2024 ASME Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award.
This award recognizes “a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.”
Her research focuses on design innovations through divergent and convergent thinking as well as through deep needs and community assessments using design ethnography.
Specifically, her work includes investigations of concept generation and development practices of novices through practitioners, intersections of diverse disciplines and experiences of individuals and teams that yield innovative thinking, the role of creativity in engineering and how to foster it, exploring problem spaces to identify real needs and innovation opportunities, and developing flexibility to design both radically and incrementally.