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