Engineering Education in 2050/High-Sōsh Techniques

Introduction to High-Sōsh

Sōsh: environmental or societal impact (high = good impact, low = bad impact).

The techniques employed by engineers can be placed on a spectrum from high-sōsh to high-tech, depending on the amount of technological resources required. High-tech generally has been the preferred side of the spectrum, as it represents the cutting edge of modern advancements. Everybody wants to contribute to the latest and greatest, so an enormous amount of effort goes towards these advancements. However, this often leads to high-tech tools being prescribed to problems where a high-sōsh tool would've been more than sufficient, as people are looking to apply these new advancements. This raises concerns, as high-tech tools, by definition, require more resources than their high-sōsh counterparts. So, an engineer should carefully gauge whether this tradeoff of more resources is warranted, but little attention is given to this in our current engineering education. Some would argue that engineers should only consider technological forces in design, that social forces are best left to business leaders and executives. However, social forces are absolutely as important as technological forces to engineers, as these forces are acting on designed tools everyday. For example, psychological reactance is a subconscious behavior that causes users to defy a tools intended use as an automatic response, without having any prior biases against it. Immediately, it's apparent how just one behavior can spell disaster for engineers. High-sōsh engineering is about considering all types of behaviors when improving a tool.

To illustrate this spectrum a little bit better, here are some examples:

• An engineer who's trying to regulate indoor temperatures:
  • (High-Tech) Upgrade to a stronger, more advanced HVAC system.
  • (High-Sōsh) For a large building, install revolving doors so that less air is released from the indoor environment.
  • (High-Sōsh) For a smaller building, use transoms to create a natural breeze during the summer.
• An engineer who's trying to slow down drivers:
  • (High-Tech) Install speed monitors and automatic ticketing systems.
  • (High-Sōsh) Design roads such that they only support the desired type of driving (narrow, curvy roads for urban areas).
  • (High-Sōsh) Paint a zebra crosswalk, as done in Iceland, to slow drivers with an optical illusion.

Our Vision

Our vision is that, in 2050, the mindset of people will have shifted to be more sustainable, leading to more thought towards the tradeoffs between high-tech and high-sōsh designs. Over-engineering will be considered distasteful, as simpler designs that require less resources will gain recognition. The cutting edge will represent innovations where high-tech and high-sōsh techniques are balanced to get the best results for humans as a whole, rather than representing innovations that contain the most advanced technology. People will be more interested in finding sustainable ways to address problems that would traditionally use high-tech means.

This mindset shift will necessitate engineers to diagnose problems based on the context of the entire system, rather than the few components that they have expertise on. They will no longer have a very specific set of tools that biases the way they solve problems, instead having a broader set of tools that allows them to view problems from more nuanced, diverse perspectives. This will lead to engineering programs becoming multidisciplinary. More specifically, we believe that the majority of engineering curricula will fall under one broad 'full-spectrum engineering' major, where students have access to courses across all applied sciences. This will allow them to gain the knowledge to assess situations from a much wider perspective, while also being able to specialize where they see necessary. They'll start their education with the same foundation of math and sciences that engineers currently do, but will follow it up with advanced courses from many different areas of interest, rather than one specific discipline.

Feasibility and Credibility

We believe that the overall shift in mindset will be fueled by the outcomes of climate change. One study found that, without significant policy change, we'll see 2°C of global warming by the 2040s. This amount of warming is predicted to increase the Fire Weather Index (FWI) by up to ten points in much of North America, South America, Europe, and the Middle East, which translates to more than a quarter of the world experiencing an extra month of severe heat stress every year. As these consequences become apparent to more and more people, mindsets will adjust to account for the urgency of the situation. This wouldn't be new, either, as we've seen it before with the Montreal Protocol, which was a global agreement to phase out the chemicals that were depleting the Ozone layer. It's been successful in eliminating around 99% of such chemicals, putting the Ozone layer on a recovery track. There's no reason to think we can't seek this type of global collaboration again, and it's easy to see how that could drastically change mindsets as people come together to address the problems we're all experiencing.

As for the shift in engineering education, there are many signs in industry today that point to that fact that current engineering degrees do not serve graduates well enough. One sign is that the current separation of majors creates a culture of narrowed perspectives which can be very dangerous for engineering design. The notorious Boeing 747 Max incident is a prime example of what happens when technical knowledge is limited and not shared across disciplines. The culture at Boeing resulted in teams constantly shifting blame because an issue was outside of their area of expertise, which may have been avoided if the engineers had a wider understanding of the new designs of the aircraft (especially with the faulty component, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). Another sign is that engineers are constantly working outside of their major, which brings into question why these multidisciplinary skills are not emphasized in education if it is expected of every new hire? A current trend is the rise in Mechatronics degrees, a degree focused on combining Mechanical, Electrical, and Software Engineering, has grown by 15.6% since 2021. This trend rose out of an industry need for engineers who can understand a system from end to end, rather than one particular component. All these signs point to traditional degrees not preparing graduates for the problems that the industry is focused.

A 2050 with no more engineering majors sounds very bold, but what might surprise people is that glimpses of this future are happening right now. Olin University, a private school in Massachusetts, is ranked #2 in the US for undergraduate engineering programs without a doctorate. This program only offers 3 majors: Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Engineering. Every student declares one of these majors and also picks up a concentration. Concentrations are composed of classes of a specific area of interest, for example: robotics engineering, network security, or sustainable engineering. Graduates come out with the foundational engineering knowledge in physics, chemistry, and math, and specialized skills in a concentration of their choosing. At the University of Virginia, the McIntire Commerce school is a highly ranked business program which aims to produce the worlds leading corporate executives. A student at McIntire pursues a general liberal arts education with a concentration within a field of their choosing. McIntire credits their ranking to this model of interdisciplinary education, and states that Commerce School graduates need to be able to handle problems of the future in whatever field they originate from. This goal should also apply to engineering education, where engineers should not only understand complex tools, but also understand how users should remain at the center of these designs. One counter argument is that, while commerce can afford to have a broader range of education, an engineering education requires that students learn specialized skills within narrow fields such as: Fluid Dynamics, Machine Learning, and Bioengineering. However, a concentrations model for engineering does not need to be overly broad. These concentrations can focus on specific fields where students can still pickup specialized skills, just with the option of doing so across multiple areas of interest. A curriculum could combine major specific classes into more relevant courses. For example, instead of taking Ordinary Differential Equations in the Math department and Fluid Dynamics in the Mechanical engineering department imagine "Intro to Fluid Dynamics" a class where relevant differential equations is taught within the context of fluid dynamics. This could make course space by saving on credit hours, provide better education because students can connect concepts easier, and make lab applications more relevant to industry practices.

Accreditation will change by 2050 to reflect these new priorities. Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) in their 2022-2023 "Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs" "specify subject areas appropriate to engineering but do not prescribe specific courses". Already, accreditation is making space for revamped technical courses that better reflect industry. To incorporate interdisciplinary studies, ABET should require concentrations within their specific subject areas. Understandably, this is a big change for all at once but ABET will be eager to adopt due to the desirability explained above. Some bridge programs could include a new accreditation standard that highlights interdisciplinary studies the same way a college is recognized as a research university. At UVA, concentrations in engineering have already mended well with ABET standards. System engineers can pick up concentrations in Human and Technology Interaction, Information and Intelligent Automation, and Operations Research and Analytics. What about students who do not know exactly what they want to do? The open curriculum mentioned above gives them freedom to not be confined within a major.

Rigorous evaluation for a student who knows exactly what they want to do vs. a student who takes some time can be solved by revamping the capstone project. Capstones are the closest thing to a job environment, where students will inevitably work outside of their coursework. However, one missing component of capstones is the client. In 2050, capstones will adapt a real project timeline with clients and team members of different technical backgrounds. This opens the project to bring in students from different concentrations where they learn to explain unfamiliar concepts to peers (like in the real world) and each has valuable skills. For example, a 2050 capstone might be designing a new smart parking lot where engineers take on tasks related to marketing, advertising, coding, client relations all in one project while working with non-technical background peers.

Conclusion

In 2050, full-spectrum engineers will lead the charge of saving our environment and bringing people together for societal interests. They'll have the tools to address problems with humans in mind, where the design process puts the user first. This will give us systems that are used as intended, in contrast to current designs such as Tesla's Autosteer, where people circumvent safety restrictions by simply jamming an orange into the steering wheel. Instead of seeking to develop the latest and greatest technologies, engineers will seek to find higher-sōsh ways to address existing problems. They'll have a broader range of tools, allowing them to analyze systems as a whole rather than only the individual components they're familiar with. Industries are already seeking engineers with multidisciplinary skillsets, and this will only continue with mindsets shifting to prefer high-sōsh techniques. As this happens, the social impacts will be increasingly noticed, creating a positive feedback loop. Engineers seeking better outcomes for humans will lead humans to understand the better outcomes we're capable of achieving. Curriculum changes are already happening today to educate engineers. By 2050, curriculum will fully support new learning objectives with detailed and proven concentrations. Lastly, students will prove their education in a revolutionized capstone project where they will learn professional practices.