Sociotechnical Engineering Research Articles

Growing the Entrepreneurial Mindset in First Year Engineering Students Using Sociotechnical Design Challenges

Engineering graduates must acquire both technical knowledge and a diverse range of professionalskills to effectively address the current global challenges. Equally important is aprofound understanding of how technological solutions are influenced by the human andnatural environments in which they are implemented. An open-ended, team-based designchallenge integrates entrepreneurial-minded (EM) skill development into an interdisciplinaryfirst-year engineering course that approaches engineering from a sociotechnical perspective.A mixed-methods study using a post-course reflective questionnaire explored students’self-perceived development of EM skills. Quantitative results from a series of 5-point Likerttypequestions indicate that students felt they developed EM skills in all three areas of the 3-Cframework, with average mean scores above 4.0 in all three categories. Scores were significantlyhigher in the Connections and Create Value subscales (mean 4.31 ± 0.62 and 4.23 ± 0.76,respectively) compared to the Curiosity subscale (mean 4.04 ± 0.84). Student comments onopen response questions support the overall value of the project and the broader sociotechnicallearning outcomes that were achieved. Overall, this study suggests the effectiveness ofincorporating open-ended, sociotechnical engineering design challenges to develop skills thatwill better prepare students for collaborative work on complex, interdisciplinary problemsthey may encounter in their professional careers.

The “Who” in Engineering: Sociotechnical Engineering as Memorable and Relevant

Does emphasizing the role of people in engineering influence the memorability of engineering content? This study is part of a larger project through which our team developed a new undergraduate energy course to better reflect students’ cultures and lived experiences through asset-based pedagogies to help students develop a sociotechnical mindset in engineering problem solving. In this study, students in the class were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews (n=5) to explore our effectiveness in helping them develop a sociotechnical mindset around energy issues and conceptualize engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor. This study focuses on an activity during the interview where the participants were asked to sort a variety of images associated with class learning experiences along a spectrum of least to most memorable. Emergent themes from students’ responses revolved around learning experiences that included global perspectives and emphasized a “who” (i.e., whose problems, who is impacted by engineering, and what type of engineers the students will choose to become) as the most memorable. Our results indicate that students found the sociotechnical aspects of the course more memorable than the traditional canonical engineering content. These findings suggest that framing engineering content as sociotechnical can be one strategy to increase student engagement, increase memorability of lessons, and help students to think more deeply about their own goals as future engineers.

Using an open-ended socio-technical design challenge for entrepreneurship education in a first-year engineering course

Engineering graduates must be prepared with sound technical knowledge and a range of 21st century competencies and professional skills such as creativity, interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, and innovation to successfully solve today’s complex, global problems. Equally important is a deep appreciation of the degree to which technological solutions are situated within the context of human and natural environments. Despite calls from the National Academy of Engineering and several professional organizations to broaden engineering education to embrace these skills, most engineering programs persistently focus on the importance of technical skills. This paper describes an open-ended team-based design challenge that integrates entrepreneurial-minded (EM) skill development into an interdisciplinary first-year engineering course that approaches engineering from a socio-technical perspective. The challenge was implemented in two simultaneous first-year classes (n = 49), with the goal of fostering students’ broad professional skills and their appreciation of the links between engineering technologies and societal context. The action research study used a quasi-experimental design with convenience sampling and no control group to explore students’ self-perceived entrepreneurial-minded (EM) skills development. Data were collected with a retrospective questionnaire comprised of a series of 5-point Likert-type questions that asked students to assess the development of their EM skills in all three areas of the EM framework: Exhibit Curiosity, Establish Connections, and Create Value (the “3C” framework). Results indicate that students felt they developed EM skills in all three areas of the 3C Framework, with more fully developed skills in the Establish Connections and Create Value categories. Overall, this study suggests the effectiveness of using open-ended, socio-technical engineering design challenges for developing skills that will better prepare students to work collaboratively on complex and interdisciplinary problems they will face in their professional careers.

The Complexities and Benefits of Community-Partnered Projects for Engineering Capstone Design Students

Community-partnered engineering projects provide a mechanism for cultivating the development of sociotechnical engineers prepared to design within diverse and complex cultural, environmental, social, and other contexts. During the 2021–2022 academic year, we guided three teams of senior undergraduate engineering students through year-long community-partnered projects for their required capstone design course, which instead typically features corporate/industry-sponsored projects. We analyzed end-of-semester reflections (both fall and spring semester) from each student using inductive thematic analysis to explore how they perceived their experiences. The themes that emerged from the student reflections, including connectivity, transdisciplinary, multiple stakeholders, sustainability, justice, and ethics, are all components of the sociotechnical engineering capabilities that we are working to develop in our students. We consider these findings encouraging, and suggestive that integrating community-partnered projects into engineering capstone design offerings is worthwhile and effective. However, our implementation was not without challenges, such as trying to force the projects to fit into a course structure and timeline developed to support corporate/industry-sponsored project teams, which was burdensome to the community-partnered project teams. In this paper, we highlight both the complexities and benefits of this approach and insights gained from student and instructor reflections.

A novel approach for the analysis of engineering complex system accidents: The casualty of the M/V Vitaspirit

Modern sociotechnical engineering systems are comprised of dynamic and complicated man-machine-software interactions. These complex systems, such as ships, also pose a wide range of catastrophic risks. In this study, a real ship casualty that occurred in recent years was analysed using the rule-based Fuzzy Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FFMEA). FMEA is a risk analysis technique applied before the event; however, it has been used in this paper as an accident analysis tool by handling its limitations in a fuzzy environment. A bulk carrier case was evaluated by revealing its 15 root causes with expert judgment. Then, the most critical factors are found as poor situational awareness about ship technical specifications (R7), delayed notification of the main engine cooling water leakage to the bridge (R5), and lack of reporting about the failure cannot be repaired without stoppage of the main engine (R6). Furthermore, RPN and FRPN outputs were compared and corrective actions for the critical factors offered. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate that the rule-based FFMEA is an effective method that can be applied in the accident analysis process. The findings of the study can provide significant perspectives for stakeholders to take risk-reduction measures at both onboard and company levels.

What about sustainability? Adding the “S” to leadership and management competency development in the engineering curriculum

To provide a framework for engineering educators to map leadership and management skills development in the curriculum, the authors previously created a Leadership-Management Development Model (LMDM). In this paper we look to extend the model to include sustainability by using an “environmental limits approach”, creating a Leadership-Management -Sustainability Development Model (LMSDM). Adding the sustainability dimension provides a contextual purpose for leadership and management development as it relates to creating and stewarding sustainable socio-technical engineering solutions. This can set a common language and a harmonized framework in the context of skills development and application in engineering practice to complex socio-technical problems. Ultimately the model will allow programs and instructors to map and situate the development of leadership, management and sustainability concepts in their programs in an integrated manner., and to examine learning outcomes relevant to the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) graduate attributes (GA). Curricular examples are provided to give insight into application of the LMSDM in engineering courses and programs. Future work will include mapping the developed LMSDM to engineering curriculum at multiple institutions.

Taming air and water: The fight against shimoke in artisanal and small-scale gold mining in South Kivu

How do miners in South-Kivu tame air and water in the underground? And in doing so, how do they manage and moderate leaks that creep into their mining gear? In this article, we use the so-called shimoke, deadly, invisible, and odorless fumes that exude from a small water pump, as an ethnographic entry-point to engage with these questions. In doing so, we weave a story that meanders and traces engagements from the import of mining gear under colonial rule to current underground attunements and aboveground socio-technical engineering.

What Is Engineering and Who Are Engineers? Student Reflections from a Sustainability-Focused Energy Course

In the spring of 2021, the University of San Diego’s Department of Integrated Engineering taught the course, “Integrated Approach to Energy”, the second offering of a new required course, to nine second-year engineering students. The sociotechnical course covered modern energy concepts, with an emphasis on renewable energies and sustainability, and it exposed the students to other ways of being, knowing, and doing that deviated from the dominant masculine Western White colonial discourse. Following the course completion, we interviewed five students by using a semistructured protocol to explore how they perceived of and communicated about engineers and engineering. We sought to identify the takeaways from their course exposure to sustainability and the sociotechnical paradigm, which were central to the course. The findings suggest that the students were beginning to form sociotechnical descriptions, and that they were still developing their understanding and perceptions of engineers and engineering. Moreover, we observed that they were still wrestling with how best to integrate sustainability into those perceptions. There was an a-la-carte feel to the students’ conceptualizations of sustainability as it related to engineering, as in, “you can ‘do’ sustainability with engineering, but do not have to”. We argue that engineering students likely need these pedagogical paradigms (sociotechnical engineering and sustainability) woven through the entirety of their engineering courses if they are to fully accept and integrate them into their own constructs about engineers and engineering.

Sociotechnical design a review and future interdisciplinary perspectives involving thermodynamics in today societal contest

This paper results from a critical literature overview on systems theory and socio-technical engineering. It has allowed exploring a vast interdisciplinary domain along an interdisciplinary path. It starts from a preliminary analysis of Kondratieff cycles and today's transition from mature to innovative technologies, which will characterize the future decades. Then, it discusses the genesis of the socio-technical problems from its philosophical roots and the evolution along a non-linear path that involves philosophy and system theory, psychology, philosophy, and engineering. The results evidence the foundations of both system theory and socio-technical engineering. Different criteria for building a robust and consistent socio-technical model have been identified and discussed. Therefore, it analyses the possible links between contemporary philosophy, psychology, engineering, thermodynamics, and physics, which have the possibility of active cooperation toward supporting the design of more effective socio-technical systems. The importance of modern thermodynamics and constructal law has been discussed. Finally, the actual social trends are discussed: the populisms which agitate society against scientific objectivity and social and environmental responsibility. On the other hand, Pope Francis moral teaching and Greta Thunberg's movement promote the paradigms toward responsibility and change. Hence, some reflections on the possible future role of socio-technical engineering have been proposed.

Sociotechnical engineering is one facet of prismatic liberal education

The ideas of mutual integration of the liberal arts and engineering resonate powerfully with our institutional values and with many ongoing practices at Lafayette College, an undergraduate-only liberal arts college whose 35+ major options include 4 ABET-accredited BS engineering disciplines and 1 non-accredited AB in Engineering Studies. In addition to many course-level integration efforts, the College's program in Engineering Studies offers a model and a history that may be of interest to those designing new programs.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile by Eden Medina (review)

Reviewed by: Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile by Eden Medina Juan Poblete Keywords Socio-Technical Engineering, Socialism, Cybernetics, History of Technology, Management, Technopolitics, Utopia, Chile, Fernando Flores, Stafford Beer, Salvador Allende Eden Medina. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge: MIT, 2011. 312 pp. Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries is an extraordinary first book. It is a model of thorough and ambitious research, and clear, effective presentation. It deals with one of the least known aspects of the efforts of the Allende government (1970–73) to organize Chilean society according to the ideals of democratic socialism. At the center of the book are the human stories and the political and technological history of project Cybersyn (cybernetics and synergy) or Synco (Sistema de información y control), which the Allende government created to help it increase, regulate, and inform Chilean economic production. The book is organized into six chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue. The first chapter introduces us to the figures of Stafford Beer, a British consultant specialized in management cybernetics, and Fernando Flores, a Chilean engineering academic and technical expert who, in July 1971, wrote Beer to ask him for advice on how to incorporate his ideas on scientific management into the administration of the Chilean economy, and more specifically of its nationalized sectors. At the time, Flores was the general technical manager of the State Development Corporation (CORFO) but would soon rise to become, at the age of twenty-nine, minister of finance. From this moment on, a potential alternative story to give shape to this book emerges—the contrasting story of Beer and Flores’s trajectories during and especially after 1973. According to Medina’s Epilogue to the book, both Flores and Beer came to understand how the political context affected the possibilities of successfully implementing project Cybersyn. However, while Flores came to doubt the centrality of Cybersyn to the success of the Unidad Popular regime, Beer came to see the potential for an even deeper integration of politics and cybernetics. Additionally, after the coup, Flores’s trajectory went from concentration camp imprisonment to a Ph.D. at Berkeley and a very lucrative California-based business career in human systems organizations, [End Page 104] followed by a gradual move to the political right. Flores’s conservative shift culminated, now back in Chile as a wealthy senator in congress, in his support of the right wing candidate in the 2010 presidential elections. Beer, on the other hand, remained an international consultant, did significant work trying to help his Cybersyn Chilean colleagues after the coup d’état, came to question his own lifestyle in a capitalist society, and ended up living like a hermit in Wales, in a cottage without running water. This fascinating alternative story—so capable of encompassing both the practical social and individual economic possibilities of cybernetic management, as well as the hopes and frustrations of the 1960s social transformation projects and their actors—never takes center stage in this book. Instead, Medina’s real interest is the history of project Cybersyn in the context of an equally fascinating set of broader disciplinary questions: “This book is an attempt to understand: (1) how governments have envisioned using computers and communications technology to bring about structural change in society; (2) the ways technologies have tried to embed political values in the design of technical systems; (3) the challenge associated with such efforts; and (4) how studying technology can enhance our understanding of a historical moment” (7). Clarifying her focus, Medina adds: “Here I use the history of a technical system, project Cybersyn, to illustrate the diversity of opinions present in Chile’s socialist experiment and to show how technologies, government officials, factory managers, and workers struggled to define a course of action. I use the history of a technical system to open this black box of politics, just as I use politics to open this black box of technology.” While it may be natural for a project of this nature to favor some voices (technologists, consultants, and government officials) over others (factory managers and workers), Medina does manage to shed light on the broader issues at the intersection of...

Design concerns in the engineering of virtual worlds for learning

The convergence of 3D simulation and social networking into current multi-user virtual environments has opened the door to new forms of interaction for learning in order to complement the face-to-face and Web 2.0-based systems. Yet, despite a growing user community, design knowledge for virtual worlds remains patchy, particularly when it comes to an understanding of the particular nature of design in virtual environments, the relationship between virtual and real-world contexts of design, as well as the engineering issues it raises and the management of any related risks. In this article, we explore such issues based on our experience of socio-technical engineering of a novel learning programme for higher education with a substantial virtual component. The project's significance stems from the large number of stake-holders involved, the relatively large scale of the virtual world development and the strategic significance of such a development within the learning programme. Of particular novelty is our exploration of the relationship between virtual and real-world contexts of design, indicating when they align and differ, showing when tools and techniques translate and when new tools and techniques may be required.

The quickening of science communication.

In this month's essay, Robert Lucky examines the central sociological impacts that communications technologies have had on the way science is done as well as the critical influences science has had in the evolution of communications technology. He traces the evolution of today's infrastructure for research and collaboration in science via the Internet and the World Wide Web back to the invention of the telegraph, which first freed the flow of information from its reliance on the physical means of transportation and allowed communication to occur in real time. According to Lucky, the remaining technical hurdles in providing unlimited bandwidth are relatively simple to overcome compared with the sociotechnical engineering required to improve the three dimensions of communications--human to information, human to human, and human to computer.

The Structure of Sociotechnical Engineering — A Review of the New Sociology of Technology

The Structure of Sociotechnical Engineering — A Review of the New Sociology of Technology