Steven DeLucry, MS ‘21 sees the situation from a systems engineering perspective.
I’m a first-year student in Drexel’s Systems Engineering Master of Science program and hoping to graduate in Winter 2021. Currently I’m participating in a GAANN fellowship that has a focus in infrastructure and research.
Steven DeLucry
I’ve been at Drexel since my undergrad studies in Mechanical Engineering. There have been some pretty drastic changes to the layout of our Blackboard Learn interface during my time here, so I’m pretty familiar with our university’s online infrastructure. Transitioning to fully online classes has been a manageable process for me because of my comfort level with the technology.
I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which my in-person classes have adapted to a synchronous video lecture system. Zoom, the video conference platform that everybody in the world is now familiar with, seems to be more conducive to certain classroom activities than others. For instance, I think the “bre akout rooms” feature is a super useful tool for encouraging meaningful, small group discussions, while the standard general room set-up can present some challenges for large group participation. All in all, I’m encouraged by the effort that professors and faculty are putting in to provide comprehensive and worthwhile learning under these circumstances. It any new situation it is hard to know what experience will be like for the user, or in this case, student, but generally faculty are being very thoughtful about student needs in this environment.
In the face of this pandemic, I’ve been inspired by the efforts of communities to provide support and care for one another as our traditional systems for meeting basic needs are currently strained and, in some cases, inaccessible. A community organization called Philly Socialists is using its resources and organizational infrastructure to develop a mutual aid grocery delivery system from the ground up. I’ve participated in this system as a delivery driver several times, bringing food and supplies to our extended community of families and membership network in order to maintain social distancing and self-quarantines. The backbone of this project has systems engineering built into it, with robust logistics operation involving contact data management, request intake, delivery routing, dispatching, fundraising, and dynamic response to user needs.
The mutual aid network represents an effective (albeit, limited in scale) execution of the many planning and logistics practices associated with my area of study. More importantly, however, this project echoes some of the most crucial discussions right now within the world of systems engineering about implementing community-based design and the concept of project stakeholders. The idea is that effective design projects are the result of a thorough process of establishing consensus among the community members that the project will directly (and, in some cases, indirectly) impact. In other words, this design methodology presupposes that the users of any development project or infrastructure system should be considered the highest priority stakeholders, and the influence of “external” stakeholders must be minimized or even removed entirely from the design process. It has been interesting to see the mutual aid network as a system designed specifically around user needs and, essentially, as a system whose structure has been dictated by the users themselves.
This horizontal, user-centric approach to system design, that has built out for fundraising and food distribution to meet the needs of our Philadelphia community members, can serve as a call to action for the next generation of systems engineers. It can help us as we aim to tackle complex issues like climate change, public health, and access to fundamental resources.
After graduation, I’d like to work in city planning where I can directly interface with community members to incorporate their needs, desires, and values into designing the future for our cities. I hope to develop effective systems for facilitating community-based design and advocate for major structural changes to that end. In our rapidly changing world, where a handful of powerful and wealthy individuals may soon be able to completely consolidate control, we need to put the people first.