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An Engineering Dilemma: Sustainability in the Eyes of Future Technology Professionals

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Abstract

The ability to design technological solutions that address sustainability is considered pivotal to the future of the planet and its people. As technology professionals engineers are expected to play an important role in sustaining society. The present article aims at exploring sustainability concepts of newly enrolled engineering students in Denmark. Their understandings of sustainability and the role they ascribe to sustainability in their future professional practice is investigated by means of a critical discourse analysis including metaphor analysis and semiotic analysis. The sustainability construal is considered to delimit possible ways of dealing with the concept in practice along the engineering education pathway and in professional problem solving. Five different metaphors used by the engineering students to illustrate sustainability are identified, and their different connotative and interpretive implications are discussed. It is found that sustainability represents a dilemma to the engineering students that situates them in a tension between their technology fascination and the blame they find that technological progress bears. Their sustainability descriptions are collected as part of a survey containing among other questions one open-ended, qualitative question on sustainability. The survey covers an entire year group of Danish engineering students in the first month of their degree study.

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Notes

  1. In total the survey response rate was 46 %, but with a somewhat skewed representation of different engineering education institutions. This equally applies for the respondents to the open-ended question where there is also an overrepresentation of men (3 percentagepoints in difference) as compared to the total engineering student year group of which 24 % are women. The survey was administered as a bilingual web-survey where non-Danish speakers could answer the English version of the survey. Unless otherwise stated, quotations are translated from Danish to English. The survey was deployed as part of the Programme of Research on Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education in Denmark funded by the Strategic Research Council. The survey focused on the role of societal challenges in the nascent professional identity of a year group of engineering students at all education institutions in Denmark.

  2. Compilation of those answering “Totally agree” or “Tend to agree”.“Do not know”-answers removed from total. Other response options were: “Neither agree nor disagree”, “Tend to disagree” and “Totally disagree”. The survey question was formulated in correspondence with the Eurobarometer survey (TNS 2010) to make possible the comparison.

  3. The remaining 18 items to select from were: Business knowledge, Communication, Conducting experiments, Contemporary issues, Creativity, Data analysis, Design, Engineering analysis, Engineering tools, Global context, Leadership, Life-long learning, Management skills, Math, Problem solving, Professionalism, Science, Teamwork. N = 3,480, weighted figures. Response rate: 44.4 % The question was formulated: Of the 20 items below, please put a check mark next to the FIVE you think are MOST IMPORTANT practicing engineering.

  4. For more theory and discussion on the societal role of this classic opposition see Horkheimer and Adorno (1944), Jamison (1997, 2001) and Wagner (2006).

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  1. The Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Finlandsgade 4, 8200, Aarhus, Denmark

    S. Haase

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Haase, S. An Engineering Dilemma: Sustainability in the Eyes of Future Technology Professionals. Sci Eng Ethics 19, 893–911 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9417-0

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