Ebook: Engineering For Social Change

We are delighted to disseminate in this book of proceedings a collection of peer-reviewed papers presented at the 31st ISTE International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering (TE2024), held during July 9–11, 2024, at UCL’s East Campus, United Kingdom. The conference was organized by UCL’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP), with support from the UCL Centre for Engineering Education (CEE), United Kingdom, and in collaboration with the International Society of Transdisciplinary Engineering (ISTE).

TE2024 brought together more than 100 participants from reputed educational institutes and well-known global corporates located in 21 countries across five continents to set an international forum for academics and industry professionals to exchange their knowledge and ideas connected to the conference theme “Engineering For Social Change”.

You may well ask, what do you mean by ‘social change’?

We wanted to explore how engineering design and manufacturing processes – whether they are digital twins or systems models, new innovations or the use of machine learning – can be turned towards a wider good? How can product design be better, not just for the business wanting to make a new, better version, but also for wider society and for the environment more generally? How can systems approaches address these challenges and what are the ethical, philosophical and justice considerations hidden in them? What is the role of the engineer in this? How do we train or educate engineers to see the opportunities for inclusive design, sustainable construction or ethical manufacturing? What skills, analytic approaches, design or collaboration practices are effective? What challenges are encountered in working across boundaries – between academia and industry, interdisciplinary practice experiences and insights, especially with the social sciences.

And how then does this relate to ‘transdisciplinary engineering’?

Transdisciplinary Engineering is an emerging approach that extends and evolves the initial basic concepts and practice known as Concurrent Engineering (CE). CE has matured and has become the foundations of many new ideas, methodologies, initiatives, approaches and tools. Generally, CE concentrates on enterprise collaboration and its many different elements; from integrating people and processes to very specific complete multi/inter/trans-disciplinary solutions, taking the user into account. Current research in this area has evolved to be driven by many factors like increased customer demands, globalization, (international) collaboration and environmental strategies. The successful application of such research in the past has opened the perspective for future applications like overcoming natural catastrophes, sustainable mobility concepts with electrical vehicles, and intensive, integrated, data processing, with an increasing importance of Transdisciplinarity. Here, ‘transdisciplinarity’ can be formally described as: “Transdisciplinarity and its application through Transdisciplinary Engineering methods involves the integration of two of more disciplines in an application through both the sharing of both common drivers and goals, into a higher-level transdisciplinary process that combines these and other drivers with the aim of achieving a common goal and output characterized by formalizing and structuring the explicit and tacit, scientific and contemporary, management of knowledge for a holistic goal that is characterised and defined at the highest system level and from all perspectives”. (Curran, R., Foundations of Transdisciplinary Engineering Theory: Sustainable Airport Application. In: Proceedings of the 31st ISTE International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering, London, UK, July 9–11, 2024, Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering.)

And equally, how do we approach ‘engineering for social change’?

Well, engineering plays a direct and indirect role in shaping the lives of everyone in all societies. The kinds of objects and processes that engineers design or maintain or dispose of reflect the kind of society we have. This includes the way in which design and management of engineering allows or prevents different types of people from benefiting from them or bearing the risks generated by them. For TE2024, we took inspiration from UCL STEaPP and UCL CEGE’s new undergraduate degree programme – BSc Science and Engineering for Social Change – to provide a focus for the conference theme. So, if your work normally involved testing or designing a new object or process, such as ways of making an industrial process more efficient, or creating a new product design that makes it simple to manufacture, we asked people to submit a paper that did any of the following:

∙ reflect on who benefits (or who bears what burden) from this analysis or innovation? Is it just the product or process owner? Who else could benefit if the design or approach were different? What challenges does that present for your analysis?

∙ are there opportunities for the design to be more sustainable by using less energy, cleaner inputs or outputs, less waste?

∙ are there opportunities to make the product or process more accessible to different groups of users or even new product designers? Who is in control of the product or process?

How democratic is that, and should - or could - it be?

And that is exactly what 126 authors did and the 103 participants gathered at UCL East for TE2024 to explore our theme of ‘engineering for social change’. We saw an incredible array of papers addressing this topic and the broader field of transdisciplinary engineering in the context of enormous sustainability challenges, and the role of autonomous vehicles, renewable energy and machine learning to support energy planning. We saw a strong focus on the role of digital technologies in industry and the challenges of integrating new systems into old processes, taking account of both worker needs and looking to use technology to maintain and improve wellbeing. This year also saw the first time the TE community gathered with the related community on Transition Engineering – which sees transdisciplinary engineering as a mechanism by which better – more sustainable, fairer and more inclusive – engineering can be achieved. And that is the kind of social change all engineers should have an interest in.

Adam Cooper

Irina Lazar

Richard Curran

Federico Trigos

Josip Stjepandić

Participatory approaches to innovation aim to address persistent failures of technology to respond to end-user needs and context. Here, we present the results of a transdisciplinary project aimed at co-developing new technologies for water quality monitoring in remote locations in developing countries. Drawing from critical social science, we developed and implemented a suite of approaches to engage community members and other regional stakeholders in an innovation process that is simultaneously social and technical. Part of our community engagement activities involved the sampling and molecular analysis of drinking water sources from two communities on the island of Efate in Vanuatu. The results revealed evidence for temporal variations in the extent of faecal contamination from different sources. This analysis was used to help frame discussions about microbial contamination, water quality and health, which, along with other structured conversations, led to technical and institutional specifications for water quality sensing. These co-developed specifications were striking, contradicting widely assumed requirements for handheld, rapid, mobile devices. Informed by these specifications, a device for monitoring colorimetric changes in response to microbial growth was designed and built. This device was able to quantify growth of faecal coliform indicator species Escherichia coli inoculated into sterile media. Subsequently, we showed the device could detect E. coli inoculated into sterilised river water. The limit of detection was as low as a single E. coli cell in 100 mL of liquid. Detection at this low concentration was achieved in 16 hours, meeting a specification requirement established through the co-design process.

In this paper, we aim to facilitate regional development through collaborative meta-governance processes, involving municipalities, energy companies and more actors. The case in point involves increased electrification through the development of local energy systems in a sub-region comprising 15 municipalities and 21 grid owners and is an exemplary case where a transdisciplinary engineering approach is not only suitable but the only path forward. The complex problem landscape comprises interdependencies across different roles, such as politicians, civil servants, and engineers at energy companies, where autonomous entities act independently. We employ a design science research approach to create artefacts to support the meta-governance mechanisms needed to accelerate social change processes. One artefact is a system dynamics simulation model to analyze scenarios considering the electrification of vehicles and implementing large wind and solar energy units to enable the establishment of new industries. We provide brief overviews of how three artefacts assist in visualizing 1) roles, 2) structures, and 3) scenarios to the decision-makers, to facilitate various transdisciplinary decision-making processes in regional development. In the discussion, we synthesize our learnings into a model to support mitigating powerlessness in this complex multi-stakeholder context. Finally, we lay out future research to further contribute to the social change and regional development we believe is necessary.

Snowmaking and snow storing are increasingly used as climate adaptation strategies in ski resorts all over the world, including in the Arctic. While the decrease of the number of snow cover days is slower than in the Alps, snow security is decreasing particularly at the beginning of the skiing season in October-November. As there is up to 30-times difference between minimum and optimal conditions in the energy and water consumption in snowmaking, it makes sense to optimize the timing of snowmaking to ensure that snowmaking will not turn into maladaptation. Climate services are user-friendly ways of providing relevant climate information for end-users. Our team co-designed a climate service prototype for winter tourism centers in Northern Finland in 2017-2020 by a transdisciplinary co-design process involving climate science, modelling, tourism research, and practitioners including snowmaking professionals and environmental experts from a pilot enterprise. The versatile co-design methods utilized included e.g. visual methods and workshops, and co-evaluation of the prototype. The resulting climate service prototype SnowApp provides a reliable 4-week forecast on snowmaking conditions and hence it is a decision-support tool for ski resort management. The prototype is applicable in other geographical locations, too, and for other snow dependent businesses.

The transition towards a circular economy requires an overarching perspective that recognises the dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of our current economic growth landscape. Circular economy inherently involves numerous stakeholders across the product life cycle. To establish efficient circular economy practices among these actors, this study suggests a novel framework for developing collaborative and interdisciplinary decision-making tools. By looking into relevant literature, organising a workshop, and analysing standard tools used in a circular economy like KPIs, risk analysis, Cost-Benefit Analysis, etc., we managed to capture the multidisciplinary challenges and dynamics faced by stakeholders of the circular business model. The contribution of this paper is the development of a framework that bridges requirement management techniques from product development practices with circular economy principles to facilitate effective decision-making processes. The framework effectively balances diverse stakeholder requirements, addressing uncertainties and multi-ownership challenges through product life cycles. This framework may be used to validate existing tools used by businesses and systematically develop new ones when needed. By facilitating collaboration around the circular economy, this framework not only reduces the environmental impact of economic growth but also encourages society to move towards more collective efforts to achieve sustainability. Finally, this article highlights the importance of a transdisciplinary approach in a systematic and effective transition to a circular economy.

The arrival of Level 2 (L2) and Level 3 (L3) of automated driving places new demands on driving behavior, yet drivers who have been accustomed to manual driving do not seem to be adequately prepared. Therefore, to improve driving safety, this study proposes an integrated approach to establishing a safe driving behavior model by combining Hierarchical Task Analysis and Information Decision Action model. Initially, 11 key driving scenarios at the L2 and L3 levels were identified through literature review; Five automated driving experts were invited to grade the importance of the scenarios through the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Additionally, their safety recommendations for each scenario at the L2 and L3 levels were analyzed. Finally, a model of drivers’ safe behavior under L2 and L3 conditions was constructed accordingly. The results of this study can not only guide the cultivation of drivers’ driving habits, but also provide test scenarios with human-machine co-driving perspectives for the development of automated driving.

Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) present a new challenge for design engineers and policymakers aiming to enhance urban mobility and achieve sustainability. Despite the growing interest in SAVs, the role of vehicle design in their adoption remains understudied. This study adopts a transdisciplinary approach, viewing vehicle design as a complex system influenced by various factors such as societal needs and market acceptance. By applying structural equation modelling within the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) framework, we assess how interior and exterior design elements influence user adoption. A total of 313 valid survey responses were collected for analysis. The results show that both interior and exterior design elements positively influence users’ hedonic motivation, effort expectancy, performance expectancy, and price value. However, safety risks act as barriers to SAV usage, with no clear correlation with perceived design quality. This study also conducted a comparative analysis across gender, driving experience, transportation mode, and anticipated scenarios. Overall, this study provides valuable empirical insights into the role vehicle design plays in shaping user acceptance of SAV services, providing a fresh viewpoint advocating the integration of strategic design elements to expand the potential of urban transportation systems.

Maritime transport is critical for global and Japanese transportation infrastructure, facing crew and driver limits. Although autonomous ships are expected as a solution to tackle these limitations, the enabling environment, such as regulations, governance, and social acceptance is essential for their implementation along with technology. Industrial roadmaps can guide the design of autonomous ships, aligning user needs with technology. This study proposes a multi-layered approach to clarify the relationship among industrial systems, navigation systems, and component system performance and to design the concept of autonomous vessels and industrial policies in an integrated manner. The industrial model explores the appropriate decision-making set for maritime stakeholders and presents possible introduction roadmaps. The navigation model evaluates the performance of subsystems to achieve safety goals. This comprehensive approach defines the necessary steps for technology realization and supports achieving broader social goals. Future work will focus on validating these models through interactive workshops with decision-makers and expanding simulation scenarios to enhance the realism and practicality of the simulations.

This study introduces a human-centered and transdisciplinary engineering-centered “4D” design model, comprising Discovering Service Touchpoints, Defining Service Sore Points, Depicting User Experience, and Design Idea Development phases, which are based on service encounter discovery and peal-end rule. The systematic travel experiment involving 30 volunteers across six city tours was conducted to analyze user behaviors and needs. Emotional change curves are utilized to optimize peak and end of travel experiences. The findings validate the 4D model for redefining service encounters and leveraging the peak-end rule for the improvement of public transport services.

Navigating the evolving landscape of energy systems demands a multifaceted approach that combines engineering expertise with a holistic understanding of societal, economic, and environmental considerations. Early career researchers (ECRs) play a crucial role in bridging these disciplines, fostering innovation, and driving sustainable energy transitions. This paper delves into the unique intersection where an ECR in the engineering field transcends traditional technical boundaries, venturing into the realm of social sciences to foster energy communities. By employing a transdisciplinary approach, ECRs are not only contributing to the technical advancements in energy systems but are also actively engaging in community leadership and development, as tenets of energy communities. The role of engineers in this context is redefined – from mere providers of technological solutions to facilitators and catalysts of community-driven change. However, cultivating these initiatives is not without its challenges. The paper investigates the various forms of uncertainty that pose significant barriers to the development of bottom-up energy initiatives. These include regulatory ambiguities, market fluctuations, evolving technological landscapes, and financial constraints. Central to this paper is a case study from North Macedonia – the first energy community in the country, which provides concrete insights into the practical aspects of building and sustaining energy communities in a transitioning energy landscape. This case study not only illuminates the challenges faced but also showcases the strategies and approaches employed to overcome them. It serves as a microcosm of the broader global challenge in transitioning to more resilient, community-driven, and sustainable energy systems.

Technology is a relevant actor in the globalisation process. For instance, blockchain offers society many uses beyond the well-known possibilities of permanent record registration, expanding monetary possibilities through cryptocurrencies, or providing clarity in transactions. This connection underscores blockchain technology’s transdisciplinary engineering nature and potential to bridge various domains, fostering a constructive dialogue that transcends conventional boundaries. Indeed, blockchain may start trends and provide endless solutions through social media platforms based on its distinctive technology development. Research has showcased the value of online platforms by encouraging money-minded dialogues or cause-based movements, resulting in the financial empowerment of individuals committed to sharing, teaching, and learning state-of-the-art technologies applied to finance. Nevertheless, it still needs to be explained how platforms built on blockchain technology could drive social transformation and promote social change, encouraging digital activism and propelling community involvement. Therefore, this investigation targets one of the most notorious social media blockchain-based platforms, Steemit, to demonstrate its positive impact on engaged individuals, helping them to promote a conscious use of finance and taking their mainstream users to a higher degree of expertise when using sophisticated blockchain tools. The contribution of this article provides evidence of a blockchain platform’s influence on a broader understanding of financial knowledge and technology societal roles. Such advancement expands a constructive dialogue to other areas, as far apart from traditional finance as transdisciplinary engineering.

E-participation platforms have emerged as digital tool to facilitate citizen engagement through online deliberation, voting and oversight processes. The digital add-on for participatory democracy (Carole Pateman) can be found in different countries around the world. In Asia, the rollout of two platforms in Taiwan, namely iVoting and Join, has captured the attention of Western media outlets. However, there is little literature on the exact content debated and agreed on these platforms up to this point. Utilising recent advancements in NLP, we explore the content of the proposals that were made. In our study, we combine new approaches of text mining with political analysis on Taiwan’s e-participation platforms. The dataset, which includes 14,118 proposals from 2015 to 2022, has resulted in a distinct topic model being constructed for each platform. With the help of our method, we were able to cluster the proposals thematically and show which concerns were articulated and with how much approval. Based on a random sampling of 110 proposals, we were able to determine that our method assigns 81.82% of the proposals to the corresponding cluster. This can also significantly overcome language barriers, as we employed a translation pipeline within the text-mining process from Chinese into English. Our method is adaptable to e-participation platforms in various languages, providing decision-makers with a more comprehensive tool to understand citizens’ needs and enabling the formulation of more informed and effective policies.

COVID was an unprecedented event requiring an extreme global response to stem the rate of infection. There was a drastic change in product demand with many nations requesting Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) and Lateral Flow Devices (LFDs). The change in demand coupled with lockdown measures exposed the fragility and unresponsiveness of global supply chains resulting in nations competing with one another for supply. Supply was often delayed and insufficient in quantity. Accounts reported it took nearly six months for supply to stabilise. In contrast, Additive Manufacturing (AM) and the ‘Maker’ community thrived in designing and producing products to support society. Through a reflective study analysing COVID test data, this paper shows that the UK’s distributed AM capacity (an estimated 168,000 AM machines distributed across homes, educational settings, offices, and industrial facilities) could have provided the nation with the devices it needed with day-ahead demand forecasting. Government funds would have supported UK AM, reduced the carbon footprint of shipping LFD tests from other nations, manufactured only what was required (25% of PPE was not used) and prevented an estimated 25 swimming pools worth of single use plastic waste. The paper discusses the Social Change and platform required to realise distributed AM as a global supply chain that can support nations in being more resilient, responsive, and sustainable.

The metaverse, building on recent advancements in Virtual Reality (VR) technology, will be a significant driver of social change. Impacting how people live their lives and fostering new applications across fields such as entertainment, fitness, and rehabilitation, these technological advancements facilitate higher engagement of users through immersive experiences. In the short-term, this helps users to overcome barriers to physical activity and it promotes lifelong retention of physical and cognitive skills, a fundamental part of healthy ageing. To fulfil this potential, VR technology needs to be able to empower individuals regardless of age, capabilities, and prior VR experience. However, current fitness applications largely target younger users, often overlooking the needs and limitations of older or vulnerable groups. This work, the result of a transdisciplinary collaboration between therapy science, health psychology, and software engineering, introduces a user-centred approach to utilize VR exergaming for promoting physical activity, tailored to individual capabilities and preferences. Our inclusive approach incorporates a comprehensive user model based on static and dynamic ability attributes. These are assessed through questionnaires, sensor data, and a platform for gamified VR fitness tests, such as the presented prototype for reach and mobility. This model allows for personalized recommendations of VR exergames. We showcase several adaptive exergame prototypes that can dynamically adjust challenges based on real-time sensor data, such as heart rate. Addressing inequality in current VR fitness experiences, this work contributes to the broader understanding of VR exergaming to facilitate the development of VR interventions for promoting physical activity among older or vulnerable communities.

In the pursuit of modern and future-thinking education, students must be more oriented towards research and the practice-oriented development of products and processes. Experts from various disciplines are currently forced to use complex measurement and equipment infrastructure but are unable to adequately combine and visualize the increasingly complex results from the various fields in a suitable form. To explain these complex phenomena to students as intuitively as possible, the augmented reality app ARCTIC (“Augmented Reality Comes To Interactive Campus”) was designed for practice-oriented lectures. This approach enables the projection of (simulation) data into physical spaces using smartphones and facilitates user interaction with 3D models. By using open-source principles, the app promotes collaboration and enables experts from different fields to provide cost-effective solutions for teaching individually. This approach not only improves the accessibility of the app but also promotes a community-oriented, sustainable development model. The app was tested under pedagogical supervision in real conditions with students from various disciplines of chemical and process engineering, as well as AEC companies. The evaluation showed that students and company representatives are extremely open to the developed AR solution. They would strongly support the further integration of the app into teaching. This was also evident from the surveys, in which students participated constructively and contributed further ideas. Augmented reality is a promising technology with the potential to revolutionize teaching. ARCTIC is a successful example of how AR can be integrated into the classroom to explain complex phenomena intuitively and interactively to students.

The advent of Industry 4.0 has led to the need to train highly skilled operators in complex and dynamic environments, through the convergence of physical and digital technologies. In this context, indoor navigation plays a crucial role in the training of Operators 4.0, allowing them to acquire spatial knowledge and specific skills to operate effectively in advanced industrial environments. However, the challenges associated with this technology, such as environmental complexity and obstacles, require an innovative approach to operator training. Mixed Reality (MR) represents a promising technological innovation for the development of these systems. Indeed, MR enables the co-represence of digital and real world, by content overlapping and integrated interaction between virtual and real assets, promoting efficiency, safety and user engagement. Within this scenario, the paper proposes a Holographic Navigation (HoloNav) methodology based on spatial and cloud computing for the development of an indoor navigation application according to a transdisciplinary approach. The application is deployed on the Microsoft HoloLens 2 as MR device, using Microsoft Azure Spatial Anchors (ASA) and Cloud Storage Account resources. This study aims to provide an applied methodology and guidelines for application development, and to analyze the broader social implications and potential for social change of such MR technology to support training processes. The proposed ASA-based HoloNav approach was applied through a case study, where a tour inside the spare parts warehouse was developed for new operators who need to start familiarizing themselves with all the different areas.

The paper describes the use of immersive technologies and Digital Twins in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. Immersive technologies have immense potential to improve interdisciplinary collaboration as they utilize a visual representation of virtual objects in their real-world perspective. This immersion facilitates effective communication between all parties involved, e.g. to identify errors during the planning and construction of buildings. A specific example of such interdisciplinary collaboration is kitchen planning. The architect draws the house and room plans, the kitchen planner plans the kitchen according to the homeowner’s wishes and the craftsmen then carry out their installations according to the plans for electricity, water, and heating. All plans are based on flat floors and perpendicular walls. However, this is rarely the case in a real building. The challenge with the exact visual representation of virtual objects in the real world using AR therefore lies in the positioning of objects such as a cupboard in relation to the non-orthogonal coordinate systems that result for each room from the real floors and walls. The paper presents an assistance system that integrates immersive technologies and Digital Twins. It is a solution approach for the transformation of object properties based on orthogonal coordinate systems into the non-orthogonal coordinate systems prevalent in reality. With the assistance system, the kitchen planner can create his plans using virtual reality (VR), customers can experience their kitchen virtually and the craftsmen can then be guided using augmented reality (AR), e.g. by precisely localising drilling positions for cabinets.

As environmental concerns continue to rise, the design industry is shifting its focus towards sustainable products and adopting circular economy principles. Design students are similarly incorporating this focus into their school projects. However, the selection of sustainable strategies often neglects or compromises user experience, as these strategies do not directly correlate with how users interact with and perceive the products. This oversight can lead to difficulties in the initial design stages and even potential market rejection if a product, while sustainable, fails to deliver a satisfactory user experience. Hence, this study aims to explore the link between product types, sustainable design strategies—biodegradability, longevity, servitization, and upcycling—and user experience, focusing on the degree of user body contact. Then, 31 participants underwent a one-week trial, experiencing various sustainable strategies applied to 16 intimate or non-intimate products. The user experience was assessed based on utility, attractiveness, and green awareness. Feedback was collected through online surveys and open-ended interviews. Both quantitative and qualitative data were used to summarize the relationship between product intimacy, sustainable design strategies, and user experience. Results revealed that no specific circular design strategy significantly influenced user experience for both intimate and non-intimate products. However, non-intimate products generally received better user feedback compared to intimate ones. Interviews suggested this preference may be due to users’ strong attachment to familiar products, emphasizing the need for new products to significantly outperform existing ones to garner positive reception. Overall, this study contributes to comprehension of user experience and developing of sustainable products.

There are numerous initiatives and lighthouse projects around Gaia-X to create the basics of open, trustworthy data ecosystems. One of the challenges in building these data ecosystems is to convince everyone involved of the advantages of multilateral data sharing. A prerequisite is also a common understanding of the rights of use and access to the data. Data sovereignty means that the data provider decides which data with which usage and access rights he wants to make accessible to which user group. Standardised digital representations by, for instance, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS enable creation of such data ecosystems, interlinking the physical and digital space. In the paper at hand, a conceptual approach named Decide4Eco is presented with the aim to enable systematic and flexible decision-making support for product planning and development concerning the sustainability of a product and the entire value chain. Methods of sustainability assessment are expanded to include predictive AI-based effects analyses.

Littering in public areas presents a significant health and environmental challenge. This case study explores the use of design interventions to reduce such behavior and encourage social change. We focused on the trash disposal area in our school department, which has long been in state of disarray. Our goal was to modify user behavior through design, thereby maintaining cleanliness in the environment over the long term. Following the redesign and reconstruction of this space, we conducted a two-week experiment, utilizing camera footage to observe user behavior and surveys. Upon conclusion, a total of 72 responses were collected through an online questionnaire. Participants were asked to provide feedback on their experiences and perceptions regarding the redesigned trash disposal area. Further statistical analysis, including the McNemar Test, backward elimination logic regression, and independent samples t-test, was employed to assess the effectiveness of the overall trash disposal space planning and various design elements. From the results, we found a significant improvement in satisfaction and identified a design factor, posters featuring divine patterns and slogans, which significantly influenced user behavior. This study not only observed whether design could alter behavior and optimise the environment but also incorporated some clever ideas into the design to resonate with both teachers and students. We hope that even the simple act of disposing of trash can be enjoyable and that such designs will encourage the faculty and students of the design gallery to collectively maintain a clean and comfortable learning environment.