Engineering education perspective for sustainable development: A maturity assessment of cross-disciplinary and advanced technical skills in eco-design

摘要

Nowadays, more and more students feel a lack of teaching development for sustainability topics in their curriculum. In French engineering schools or universities most of training courses do not answer to this challenge because they modestly include the question of sustainability in their curricula. Companies also strongly evolve in their industrial strategy in order to integrate environmental, economic and social perspectives and criteria in their product development process. Thus, they are looking for new skills by recruiting young technicians and engineers.The question arises how can be improved the integration of basics of sustainable engineering in trainings rooted in technical knowledge. To start addressing such a question, we propose in this paper a skill crossover matrix. Later, this matrix will evolve toward guidelines which may allow combining specific knowledge of eco-design skills and cross-disciplinary competencies.First, we conduct a systematic review of the literature to identify fundamental skills and knowledge associated to sustainable development approach in engineering and then specifically focusing on ecodesign. Second, we have confronted advanced technical skills from engineer's framework to cross-disciplinary skills in order to identify which connection could be possible. Then, we propose a survey with different academic profiles at different levels of training courses in the French education system. This allow us to clearly define what means eco-design teaching for them to compare expectations with reality on the academic ground. Last, we identified which skills need to be developed.This maturity assessment will allow us to define basis for guidelines which must help later teachers in engineering and technology to create and define their own fundamental and training content for ecodesign. Furthermore, this tool will also allow students to have a better vision over of their progress in skill growing level.