Project Team
Chris Rennick, Engineering Ideas Clinic
Ada Hurst, Management Sciences
Reem Roufail, Systems Design Engineering
Christine Moresoli, Chemical Engineering
Derek Rayside, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Sanjeev Bedi, Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering
(Project timeline: September 2023 - August 2024)
Project Summary
Thisproject – the first step of a larger effort – seeks to create a “sustainable design toolkit” for engineering capstone design instructors. This toolkit will be a collection of best practices to integrate the three pillars of sustainability in engineering design courses. All students in engineering are required to complete a multi-term capstone project in their final year, which makes capstone ideal to meaningfully include sustainability as part of students’ design processes. This instruction has the potential for tremendous reach with students in engineering, and if well integrated with the capstone process, will provide an opportunity for students to think deeply about sustainability in relation to a project that they are highly invested in. Capstone courses are also the closest approximation of what students can expect once they graduate, and so this is a key time to reinforce the role of sustainability in engineering design before they enter professional practice.
References
[1] “THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development.” https://sdgs.un.org/goals (accessed May 16, 2023).
[2] M Charter; U Tischner, Sustainable Solutions: Developing Products and Services for the Future. New York, 2017.
[3] L. Gutierrez-Bucheli, G. Kidman, and A. Reid, “Sustainability in engineering education: A review of learning outcomes,” J. Clean. Prod., vol. 330, p. 129734, Jan. 2022, doi: 10.1016/J.JCLEPRO.2021.129734.
[4] “Number of students who graduated from postsecondary institutions in Canada in 2020, by field of study.” https://www.statista.com/statistics/449072/postsecondary-graduates-in-canada-by-instructional-program/ (accessed May 17, 2023).
[5] Nickel, J., Duimering, P. R., & Hurst, A. (2022). Distilling Sustainable Design Concepts for Engineering Design Educators. International Journal of Engineering Education, 38(1), 45-55.
[6] Thürer, M., Tomašević, I., Stevenson, M., Qu, T., & Huisingh, D. (2018). A systematic review of the literature on integrating sustainability into engineering curricula. Journal of Cleaner Production, 181, 608-617.
[7] E. Verhulst and K. Van Doorsselaer, “Development of a hands-on toolkit to support integration of ecodesign in engineering programmes,” J. Clean. Prod., vol. 108, pp. 772–783, Dec. 2015, doi: 10.1016/J.JCLEPRO.2015.06.083.