Three Devices in One: Participatory Research, Public Engagement, Three Devices in One: Participatory Research, Public Engagement, and Engineering Workforce Development in the My Streetscape and Engineering Workforce Development in the My Streetscape Summer Research Institute

This article examines the My Streetscape Summer Research Institute at the NSF Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3), a six-week program for rising high school seniors hosted at Columbia University and Florida Atlantic University. The institute integrates engineering workforce development, participatory research, and public engagement in urban testbeds in Harlem, New York, and West Palm Beach, Florida, with a focus on youth from communities historically affected by technological interventions. The authors present the program’s underlying triadic model in which local youth receive interdisciplinary training, conduct fieldwork, and act as intermediaries between university researchers and neighborhood residents. Through mixed-methods activities—including interviews, surveys, ethnographic observation, and photovoice—youth participants elicit community perspectives on emerging urban technologies such as sensing infrastructure, smart crosswalks, and mobility systems, paying particular attention to how community members navigate questions of privacy, safety, and institutional trust. In this program, student-generated deliverables (e.g., needs assessment and research reports, photovoice exhibits, technology demonstrations, and conceptual prototypes) function as recurring, youth-led needs assessments that shape CS3’s research agenda and co-design efforts. The article argues that positioning youth as community researchers within this organizational and public feedback loop reframes trust-building and public engagement as core youth development outcomes within a new approach to engineering education in the United States.