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Abstract Though academic research for identifying and considering the social impact of products is emerging, additional insights can be gained from engineers who design products every day. This paper explores current practices in industries used by design engineers to consider the social impact of products. Forty-six individuals from 34 different companies were interviewed to discover what disconnects exist between academia and industry when considering a product’s social impact. These interviews were also used to discover how social impact might be considered in a design setting moving forward. This is not a study to find “the state of the art,” but considers the average engineering professional’s work to design products in various industries. Social impact assessments (SIA) and social life cycle assessments (SLCA) are two of the most common processes discussed in the literature to evaluate social impact, both generally and in products. Interestingly, these processes did not arise in any discussion in interviews, despite respondents affirming that they do consider social impact in the product design. Processes used to predict social impact, rather than simply evaluate, were discussed by the respondents. These tended to be developed within the company and often related to industry imposed government regulations. To build on this study, the findings herein should be further validated for executives, managers, and engineers. A study specific to these roles should be designed to understand the disconnect better. Additionally, processes should be developed to assist engineers in considering the social impact of their products. Work should also be done to help educate engineers and their leaders on the value of considering the social impact in product design.
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Integrating Sustainability into Engineering Education: Building a Pathway to Scale
Sustainability, including environmental and social sustainability, has been identified across all sectors, from government to industry to academia, as a critical area for action. Sustainability goals and actions, by necessity, require input from many fields, but engineers play a potentially outsized role due to the structures and products they build, and the associated choices they make. The Engineering for One Planet (EOP) initiative aims to address this challenge by ensuring all future engineers, no matter their discipline, are equipped with the skills, knowledge, understanding, and mindsets to design, build, and create in sustainable ways. Much has been achieved to date by the EOP initiative, through a process of multi-stakeholder engagement, in both understanding and piloting solutions to realize the EOP vision. However, in order to achieve the far reaching systemic changes desired, a roadmap for a Collective Impact-informed, cross-sector, collaborative initiative was developed. This roadmap leverages the approaches yielded from the recent National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded EOP Scaling for Impact Workshop, the lessons learned and results achieved from the initiative to date, and key considerations drawn from a Collective Impact approach that centers equity. This roadmap calls for stakeholders—including academia, industry, accrediting and professional organizations, community organizations, non-profits, funders, and those communities most impacted by the negative impacts of environmental and social sustainability challenges— to move beyond singular programmatic interventions, and instead work to collaboratively understand and construct coordinated solutions, to integrating sustainability into engineering education and the engineering profession. The roadmap’s call to action invites collaborators to join this initiative and engage with the roadmap as a starting point for their work together; the roadmap provides immediate action steps, and invites collaborators to further shape the roadmap into a collective, achievable plan for systems change, that they, their institutions/organizations, and other cross-sector collaborators can embrace. For systems change is never complete and the solutions not finite; it is only through ongoing, collective action that we can fully understand, and learn how to address the lack of sustainability in engineering as the complex, social problem it is.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2147632
- PAR ID:
- 10498436
- Publisher / Repository:
- 2023 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 ASEE National Conference
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- collective impact, roadmap, sustainability, engineering education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Proceeding:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--43779
