Sustainable engineering: a model for engineering education in the twenty-first century?

摘要

How do we design a sustainable built environment for ten billion people? What policies, economic structures and social structures will move us in this direction? These are questions that challenge contributors to and readers of this journal. They are also questions that challenge engineering educators, training the designers who will create the built environment of the twenty-first century. Engineering educators often describe their curricula with the metaphor of a toolbox. Engineering principles of mass conservation, energy conservation, and thermodynamics, to name just a few, can be viewed as powerful tools for solving problems and designing processes and products. An engineering education makes students proficient users of these tools. Yet if the toolbox is too limited, the designs created using those tools can be ineffective. To repeat an overused cliche, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.