ABET assessment of student initiated interdisciplinary senior capstone project

In most capstone engineering projects, it is not unlikely to have collaborative work between engineers of different disciplines, but few projects incorporate the work of disciplines outside of the engineering school. This paper is a case study of a student initiated capstone engineering project which incorporates collaborative work between engineering and fine art students. The problem statement of the proposed project was “to build, fabricate, test and install an interactive outdoor sculpture for the Binghamton University campus.” The design process of the project will be reviewed at different stages: from artistic design, through structural analysis, to construction of a scale section of the sculpture for testing purposes. This paper will describe the collaboration of designers (artists, engineers) for whom the practice of “design” is different. A comparison will be made between previous interdisciplinary projects. In addition, the ABET assessment of this interdisciplinary project will be presented.