Dean Nieusma

Alternative Design Scholarship: Working Toward Appropriate Design

Design scholars from diverse fields have attempted to assist marginalized social groups by redirecting design thinking toward their needs. By offering alternatives to dominant design activities, “alternative design” scholarship seeks to understand how unequal power relations are embodied in, and result from, mainstream design practice and products. Alternative design scholars analyze how technologies and other designed artifacts are implicated in larger social problems, such as rampant consumerism, sexism, ecological abuse, lack of user participation and autonomy, and restricted access to built environments, among others. Through these efforts, alternative design scholarship offers designers an opportunity to think about how their work might be directed as wisely and fairly as possible. Efforts to redirect technologies toward the needs of marginalized people have a long and varied history. Dating back to the 1960s and before, technology transfer advocates argued for transferring Western technologies to the third world.1 They hoped to take advantage of the intellectual and financial resources already invested by the West to benefit those who seemed to need technology the most. But it soon became evident that the transferability of technology among contexts is far from straightforward. Limited resource availability (capital, expertise, spare parts, etc.), different perspectives on the nature of the problem/solution, and a lack of familiarity with similar technological systems led to dashed hopes and expensive failures for technology transfers, such as the numerous decentralized power systems fallen into disuse throughout the developing world.2 Technology scholars came to realize that differences between a technology’s developmental context and its use context were significant. In part as a response to failures of technology transfer approaches, “appropriate technologists” argued that context suitability should be central to identifying technologies relevant to poor people of the Third World and other marginalized social groups.3 Developing appropriate technologies required accounting for the needs of others by paying careful attention to the use context of that technology, as well as to local perspectives on the problem to be solved. Attention to contextual particularities became one of the guiding approaches to appropriate technology and, hence, unlike technology transfer scholars, appropriate technology thinking took design as the point of intervention. Through the 1970s, appropriate 1 Werner J. Feld, “The Transfer of Technology to Third World Countries: Political Problems and International Ramifications” in Mathew J. Betz, et al., eds., Appropriate Technology: Choice and Development (Durham, North Carolina: Duke Press Policy Studies, 1984), 49–63. 2 Frances Stewart, Technology and Underdevelopment (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977). 3 E. F. Schumacher was early to make this observation in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). A generation of scholars and practitioners followed.

Engineering and War:Militarism, Ethics, Institutions, Alternatives

This book investigates the close connections between engineering and war, broadly understood, and the conceptual and structural barriers that face those who would seek to loosen those connections. It shows how military institutions and interests have long influenced engineering education, research, and practice and how they continue to shape the field in the present. The book also provides a generalized framework for responding to these influences useful to students and scholars of engineering, as well as reflective practitioners. The analysis draws on philosophy, history, critical theory, and technology studies to understand the connections between engineering and war and how they shape our very understandings of what engineering is and what it might be. After providing a review of diverse dimensions of engineering itself, the analysis shifts to different dimensions of the connections between engineering and war. First, it considers the ethics of war generally and then explores questions of integrity for engineering practitioners facing career decisions relating to war. Next, it considers the historical rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, especially from World War II to the present. Finally, it considers a range of responses to the militarization of engineering from those who seek to unsettle the status quo. Only by confronting the ethical, historical, and political consequences of engineering for warfare, this book argues, can engineering be sensibly reimagined.

Challenging knowledge hierarchies: working toward sustainable development in Sri Lanka's energy sector

Abstract This paper analyzes sustainable development practices within Sri Lanka’s energy sector. It directs attention to how expertise functions in development decision making in ways that can unintentionally inhibit sustainable development. Understanding expertise as merely specialized knowledge clouds its role as a social activity. In practice, expertise is a combination of knowledge and authority, and expert knowledge exists within a hierarchically ordered authority structure of diverse knowledge domains—what is referred to here as “knowledge hierarchies.” Knowledge hierarchies exclude the participation of some relevant knowledge domains, and thereby preclude the possibility of local sustainable development. The Energy Forum of Sri Lanka, a small renewable energy advocacy organization, strives to enable sustainability by going beyond facile calls for greater inclusion to confront the mechanisms of exclusion. The paper documents three of the Energy Forum’s development interventions intended to level out the knowledge hierarchy that inhibits sustainable energy development in Sri Lanka. Drawing insights from the Energy Forum’s approach, the paper argues that experts who wish to contribute to sustainable development must attend to the knowledge hierarchies in which they operate to ensure that their own authority does not exclude other relevant knowledge domains.

Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace: Strategies for Educational and Professional Reform

This chapter surveys a range of educational and professional reform efforts in engineering carried out by the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace network and its members. These efforts are categorized in a way that highlights the diversity of the approaches taken as well as their interconnections. Beyond documenting and categorizing a range of contemporary initiatives in engineering and social justice, the chapter argues that, to be most effective, ESJP members attempt to integrate their particular values orientations and commitments with systematic attention to a wide range of organizational and conceptual problems that inhibit engineering for social justice and peace.

Analyzing Context by Design: Engineering Education Reform via Social-Technical Integration

This chapter describes and analyzes one model of engineering education reform aimed at enhancing students’ ability to engage wide-ranging contexts of engineering work. Rensselaer’s Programs in Design and Innovation (PDI) use a dual-major strategy to engage engineering students in contextual analysis in a way that is continual and dynamic. The chapter summarizes PDI’s approach, assesses its significance, and identifies its limitations. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to characterizing PDI’s approach, first by reviewing its curricular structure and then by describing some of the didactical strategies used in its core courses. Next, PDI’s achievements are assessed in terms of how they work to transform students’ experiences with engineering education in a way that enhances their ability (and willingness) to engage contextual matters. Finally, prominent limitations of PDI are identified.

Contextualizing the Code: Ethical Support and Professional Interests in the Creation and Institutionalization of the 1974 IEEE Code of Ethics

ABSTRACT In many engineering ethics classes, codes of ethics are presented as if they are self-evident yardsticks for gauging ethical decisions in engineering. In this article, we argue that focusing solely on the content of ethics codes without examining the professional contexts in which codes are created – and are made meaningful – misses important opportunities to understand the engineering professions ethical aspirations and how such codes affect engineers’ professional identities. Our analysis demonstrates a ‘contextualized reading’ of an engineering code of ethics through a historical case study consisting of two successive episodes: In the first episode, we show how engineers’ yearning for ethical support and their competing interpretations of professional interests catalyzed the creation of the first Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Code of Ethics in 1974; the second episode of the case documents the complex institutional processes followed by IEEE members to ensure compliance with the code of ethics in professional practice. For engineering studies scholars, tracing the historical context of codes of ethics offers a pathway to understand engineers’ ‘existential struggles’ – that is, how engineers responded to major challenges and crises as a profession – at a particular historical moment. For engineering ethics educators, revealing how ethics codes operate in the institutional context of professional organizations prepares students to appreciate the ethical horizon of the profession they inherit as well as to redirect or expand that horizon moving into the future.

Conducting the instrumentalists: a framework for engineering liberal education

This short paper comments upon a concern repeatedly voiced by would-be engineering education reformers, namely what to do about the profound instrumentalist orientation to education prevalent across engineering. Especially among promoters of engineering and liberal education integration, great anxiety arises in response to todays slide toward instrumentalist rationales for higher education generally and their acute manifestation within engineering programs in particular. This paper reviews one programs strategy for responding to this instrumentalism. Rather than merely augment the existing technical core with liberal education content, our program strives to frame the entire educational experience of our students: It seeks to provide the curricular, conceptual, and pedagogical frameworks to situate students’ engineering coursework (i.e. the technical core) as well as their identities within a more expansive vision of engineering in society. The paper reviews three mechanisms through which we embrace our students’ pragmatic impulses and then leverage them to help students reflect critically on the role of education in advancing their personal, educational, and career goals.

Materializing Nano Equity: Lessons from Design

Many engineers and designers got into their professions in large part because they wanted to create products that help people. Translating this desire into material objects is not a straightforward process. Contexts and complexities often make it difficult for such visions to be realized. In this chapter Dean Nieusma offers advice for designers who want to assist the world’s poor and disadvantaged. Unfortunately most of the existing structures and institutions that shape or direct the practice of designers are geared towards the wealthy and powerful. And, as Nieusma points out, understanding both the needs and the context of the “have nots” can be a significant challenge for the “haves.”

Special session - increasing awareness of issues of poverty, environmental degradation and war within the engineering classroom: A course modules approach

The goals of the proposed special session are the following: (1) Describe ongoing efforts at various institutions which attempt to integrate the issues of poverty, environmental degradation and war into existing engineering courses; (2) Describe process(es) used in developing course modules; (3) Provide an interactive, experiential process whereby the session participants will begin to develop their own course modules for use in their respective courses; (4) Further develop a community interested in increasing awareness of issues of poverty, environmental degradation and war within engineering education and the engineering profession; and (5) Explore options for establishing closer ties between the course modules and real-world community agencies/organizations.