The challenge of providing a high-quality life by the year 2050 to 9 billion people in light of global climate change, crumbling or nonexistent infrastructure, and decreasing resources has become a central focus of the College of Engineering. Meeting the 2050 Challenge requires a new way of thinking about engineering and its roles in society. Engineering cannot be focused strictly on the development of technology or structures but must also take into account the effects of that technology on the integrated social, economic, and environmental processes that constitute our society. While schools of engineering have an excellent record of preparing students for the technical aspects of the challenges of sustainability, they have largely failed to capture the context in which engineering must work now and in the future. At the College of Engineering, we have begun a new approach to teaching sustainability that incorporates at its core this more comprehensive view of engineering.
Implicit in our approach is a description of society as a system, by which we mean a set of interrelated processes (e.g., cultural, economic, technological) that form a unified whole. A sustainable society is one that equitably meets societal needs while maintaining the integrity of the environment and ecosystems. Thinking of a society as a system is essential. The optimal technical solution for a given situation may not always be the best solution for society as a whole. Thus, traditional linear, sequential optimization strategies are inadequate.
One way to define engineering is “design under constraint.” With this view, engineering as part of a societal system faces a new set of constraints. As we move toward the future, the physical constraints on technology will be increasingly stringent as we face potentially high energy costs, a need for low emissions of greenhouse gases, scarcity in other natural resources, both actual and political, and so on. Equally demanding will be the societal constraints.
The idea that technology should reflect societal constraints is not new. Schumacher, in his 1973 book Small is Beautiful, introduced the concept of an appropriate technology, by which he meant a technology that is appropriate to the environmental, educational, cultural, and economic situation for which it is intended. The principles of appropriate technology have been most commonly applied in the developing world, where, for example, bringing advanced technology that requires power sources, extensive maintenance, and materials that are not readily available to a village with no electricity, a semi-literate population, and few resources, is not appropriate. More subtle, but very common, problems arise when applications of technology do not appropriately take account of the local culture, leading to many failed projects. Indeed, the developing world is littered with failed technological solutions developed by well-meaning people who did not work within the local culture, education, and environment. Appropriate technology is not, however, a concept restricted to the developing world. Technology must reflect its impact on all societies. For example, cultural differences often lead to failures to adopt technologies in the developed world as well. The car-centric United States offers a clear example, in which it has been much less willing to adopt mass transit solutions than European nations.
Teaching sustainable engineering in the context of societal systems and appropriate technology thus provides students a change in viewpoint, in which they receive a broader sense of the impact of engineering on society. This puts into perspective a series of interrelated courses that has been introduced in our engineering curriculum over the past few years. A schematic view of these courses is shown in Figure 1. Taken as a whole, they present a range of technical and societal issues, with the balance between them depending on the class. While the courses make an interconnected set, linking to and growing from each other, they are independent and thus can serve the needs of a broad group of engineering students.
One class (Sustainable Engineering for International Development) was started a few years ago as a collaboration between a number of departments in the college. This fall, the Departments of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) have formed a section that is specifically geared toward meeting the goals outlined above, incorporating complex systems, sustainability, and an analysis of water, energy, and materials issues in U.S. towns and African villages. This course, while predominantly technical, contains a significant focus on economics, anthropology, etc. The ME course Design for Appropriate Technology offers a new take on design, with a focus on creating appropriate solutions for specific applications in the developing world. Students are asked to respond to defined needs of people in a poor village in Africa. They have access both to previous designs as well as assessments of how well those designs have worked in a practical application. While this course is predominantly technical, its problems are motivated within a societal context.
The final course in this sequence is the most unique. Applied Methods in Sustainable Engineering for International Development is a summer course taught in a small village in Mali, a country in western sub-Saharan Africa. Students immerse themselves in this disadvantaged village (extreme poverty, subsistence-level farming, no electricity), implementing projects from the senior design course and creating the systems-level description of a village used by both the above-mentioned courses. We have many goals in this course, including creating an environment in which students can learn how to work effectively in a culture that is very different from their own; i.e., that they become what is known as culturally competent. However, the major goal of this course is to change how students view the role of engineering in society and how they view themselves as engineers.
We are still in the beginning stages of learning how to teach this broader view of sustainable engineering. Other universities have also been developing new curricula based on these ideas, and, indeed, a few have even created centers focused on these issues. The key point for all of us is that the technological solutions that are being proposed for sustainability, including green designs, renewable energy, and a host of others, cannot meet our future challenges unless we find appropriate technologies and paths for our society and ourselves. Our job in the university is to ensure that we prepare engineers who can do so.