Educating the responsible engineer: socially responsible design and sustainability in the curriculum (original) (raw)
Related papers
An Ethical Stance: Engineering Curricula Designed for Social Responsibility
de Vere, I., Kapoor, A., Melles, G. (2011) An Ethical Stance: Engineering Curricula Designed for Social Responsibility, International Conference on Engineering Design ICED11, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark
Engineering must provide the global community with socially responsible, ethical and sustainabledesign solutions. The potential for engineering designers to contribute positively to the betterment of society, through product service systems that provide opportunities for sustainable development,enhance societal well-being and empower communities to be self determining, must be realised. Thiswill require the engineering community to take leadership roles in product design and developmentand to engage with emerging economies to deliver appropriate designs and sustainable technologies.Social responsibility and sustainability will need to be at the forefront of product design anddevelopment and more importantly, integrated throughout engineering education. As global designers,engineering graduates must be ethical and responsible, fully cognizant of the consequences of theirprofessional activities, their potential for global societal contribution and their responsibilities to allstakeholders and communities. Opportunities exist for well considered curricula to drive newengineering paradigms and determine attitudinal change amongst the next engineering designers.
Engaging engineering students in socially responsible design using global projects
European Journal of Engineering Education, 2019
Engineering education for sustainable design often focuses on technical solutions with little consideration of social impact. This paper presents a case study of a project-based learning (PBL) studio course engaging engineering students in social and sustainable design practices with external clients in developing economies. The case is a review of how concepts from Socially Responsible Design (SRD), Appropriate Technology (AT) and Human-Centred Design (HCD) integrated into a pedagogical model (Locale) focusing student effort on the socio-cultural, technical, economic and environmental aspects. Drawing on data from ten years of course operation the analysis identifies three distinct variants. Reexamining all 186 design projects using a new metric based on the pedagogical model (Locale) revealed an upward trend in the socio-cultural and economic appropriateness of the solutions without any diminution of technical suitability. Thus, the paper provides a new approach for designing and evaluating PBL courses specifically focused on social and sustainable design.
Embedding sustainability in Product Design Engineering curriculum. A comparison of needs on an international level. Product Design Engineering is a relatively new engineering discipline that combines Mechanical Engineering studies with Industrial Design. The emergence and credibility of this field has created graduates who can successfully combine the creative thinking of design with the analytical thinking of engineering. A Product Design Engineer forms a vital role in a product development team making it even more necessary to ensure graduates from this field have sustainability embedded into their skill-set. Product Design Engineers are at the forefront of product development; this in turn puts them at the forefront of unsustainable patterns of production and consumption that currently plague the manufacturing industry. Due to this, it is imperative to ensure all Product Design Engineering outcomes have implemented sustainable practices to develop quality products with environmen...
Educating the responsible industrial designer
Iceri2012 Proceedings, 2012
The profession of industrial design is credited for the everyday products that help make our daily lives pleasurable; it is equally implicated in the stylistic obsolescence, excessive consumption, and mountains of landfill where most short-lived stuff get discarded at the end of their useful lives. The current state of our global environment dictates that we re-examine the unsustainable consequences of our practices, and education is seen to hold the key to progressing towards a more habitable world. This paper investigates how design education is addressing these concerns, using the lens of the higher education provider and the lens of the design student as education receiver. Specifically it scrutinizes the industrial design programs of universities in 7 countries, searching for evidences of both ecologically sustainable and socially responsible design in their program descriptions, curricula, syllabi, galleries of student works and capstone projects. Website content analysis was used to understand how universities are showing commitment and capability in promoting the teaching and learning of sustainable and responsible design.
Ethics and social responsibility: integration within industrial design education in Oceania
2012
Industrial design schools have typically functioned as training grounds in which future designers are skilled into becoming proficient creators of more ‘stuff’, many of which prove to be unnecessary and unsustainable. Several research publications examine the integration of sustainability in industrial design education, but most of these focus on ecological aspects, especially because environmental improvement has been the focus of government policymaking and product innovation in the last two decades or so. The social pillar of sustainability has received less attention; in fact there is no accepted definition in the design industry about what constitutes this area. This research investigates whether industrial design education institutions present themselves as being concerned about socially responsible and ethical design aspects, and if there is evidence in their curricula, syllabi and descriptive text regarding coverage of these issues, either as theory-type courses or as studio learning activities. A comprehensive content analysis of the websites of 39 industrial design programs, was conducted, including both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, in 17 universities in Australia and New Zealand. This work in progress is the first phase of a project which aims to measure the extent of inclusion of environmental and social responsibility in the curriculum of industrial design degree programs. This initial stage covers the Oceania region; an expansion of the study would include design universities in other technologically advanced countries. The second phase would include analysis of curricula and course outlines collected from around the world.
Inclusion of environmental and social aspects of sustainability in industrial design education
2012
The imperative to teach future generations of industrial designers about the ecological and social sustainability aspects of their practice needs no argument. The profession has generally been blamed for promoting conspicuous consumption and stylistic obsolescence, and designers are considered indirectly responsible for the masses of discarded and short-lived objects in landfill. This paper examines how industrial design education is making up for past errors in design practice. It looks at the undergraduate and postgraduate programs of industrial design universities in various countries around the world, searching for evidences of both ecologically and socially sustainable design in the program descriptions, teaching and learning modules, and galleries of student works appearing on university websites. This research will be useful for industrial design course leaders and academics who are interested in benchmarking the extent to which they cover sustainability in their educational programs, and help them gauge how they fare in educating their students to become more responsible practitioners in the future.
Experiences of sustainable design among practicing engineers: Implications for engineering education
An understanding of sustainable design will be essential for engineers to practice responsibly in the future. What sustainable design means in practice is a contested issue, varying between engineering disciplines, industry sectors and even individual practitioners. How then can we, as engineering educators, encourage and teach both current professional engineers and engineering students about sustainable design.
Integrating Sustainability in Design Education
While the potential for designers to affect positive change is significant and widely acknowledged, this has remained largely untapped both within industry and education. Although some new educational curricula with environmental emphasis have begun to be developed and implemented. But this is barely a beginning and the new generation of designers still needs to be more educated in sustainability. Current design education have been rarely recognized as a relevant factor in the sustainability discourse. Furthermore, the educational practices are mostly related to eco-design strategies (e.g. energy efficiency, dematerialization, longevity, use of recycled materials, recycling). But Design for Sustainability (DfS) goes beyond the eco-design. DfS integrates social, economic, environmental and institutional aspects. Hence, it is necessary to expand the scope of design education and practice beyond style, fashion or limited trends of environmental concerns to include behavioral, social, institutional issues. Accordingly, an educational experiment is undertaken by the industrial design students of the Art University of Isfahan, Iran which provides a more coherent framework for sustainable design education. Students have the responsibility to not only include ecodesign strategies but also establish Design for Sustainability which promote socially responsible behavior among people. The paper contributes to the knowledge and experience on how integration of sustainability issues in regular product design courses can be accomplished the design activity in order to positively and effectively contribute to the radical change required by the transition towards a sustainable society.
Sustainability’s relationship with Product Design Education
ERSCP-EMSU 2010 CONFERENCE This abstract is submitted under Theme 1A Sustainable Education and Educational Programmes. Sustainability’s relationship with Product Design Education Keywords: EDUCATION, DESIGN, WELLBEING, INNOVATION. This paper shares the experiences of delivering dedicated curriculum in sustainable design (BA & MA Programmes at the University for the Creative Arts) and integrating sustainability into already congested Product Design Programmes (BA & BSc Programmes at the University of Hertfordshire). With the former sustainability is the key driver for design innovation, while with the latter sustainability is balanced against the commercial restraints of the professional product designer. As such it introduces the notions of responsibility, issues and stakeholders to other drivers for design such as new technology, brand awareness and profitability. The concepts of needs/issues, both environmental and social/cultural, strategies and assessment in relation to evolving a sustainable world are discussed with students in open forums. There is a shift in delivery whereby students are encouraged to design the experience or response to need rather than assume design propositions have to be products. In effect the mandate for product design has expanded to encompass services and systems. Importance is placed on research identifying real rather than assumed needs and students are taught to think holistically beyond the lifecycle of products. The financial concept of the single bottom line is expanded to the triple bottom with happiness and well being examples of the parameters used to gauge the success of design propositions. Finally the paper reflects on what depth can be achieved within a standard three year degree programme and what aspects of sustainability can only be dealt with superficially. 237 words Julian Lindley Senior Lecturer University of Hertfordshire e-mail: j.lindley@herts.ac.uk 22nd February 2010
Sustainability, 2011
In order for our future engineers to be able to work toward a sustainable future, they must be versed not only in sustainable engineering but also in engineering design. An engineering education must train our future engineers to think flexibly and to be adaptive, as it is unlikely that their future will have them working in one domain. They must, instead, be versatilists. The School of Engineering at James Madison University has been developed from the ground up to provide this engineering training with an emphasis on engineering design, systems thinking, and sustainability. Neither design nor sustainability are mutually exclusive, and consequently, an education focusing on design and sustainability must integrate these topics, teaching students to follow a sustainable design process. This is the goal of the James Madison University School of Engineering. In this paper, we present our approach to curricular integration of design and sustainability as well as the pedagogical approaches used throughout the curriculum. We do not mean to present the School's model as an all or nothing approach consisting of dependent elements, but instead as a collection of independent approaches, of which one or more may be appropriate at another university.