Educating engineers for/in sustainable development? What we knew, what we learned, and what we should learn

In the past decade, several engineering universities, mainly in Europe, but also in Australia, North America, and Japan, have been addressing the issue of sustainable development. Engineering education in sustainable development has been discussed at many occasions. What questions have been addressed, what answers have been provided, and what are the main remaining topics for research into engineering education in sustainable development? What should engineers learn regarding sustainable development? How to trigger institutional change within engineering schools: top-down or bottom-up? How to trigger cultural change, how to win the hearts and souls of the faculty? Curriculum change: starting new programs or changing existing ones? The contribution of active learning and project based learning? The role of external stakeholders, external cooperation? How to measure sustainable development learning effects? Practice what you preach: how to green the campus, diminish resource consumption and sustainabilise procurement? How to teach normative content in an academic context? The paper, based mainly on the European literature on EESD of the last decade, discusses the answers that were provided and present an agenda for further research in EESD (This paper has mainly a European perspective. An overview of sustainable development engineering education in the USA can be found in [80]

Learning resources for sustainable design in engineering education

This paper presents the results of the Circular Design Project, European project funded by Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance within the social business and the educational innovation field. The project have three major learning objectives: to increase and improve the learning strategies of Design for Sustainability; To gather and cluster open educational resources in Innovative Design for Sustainability; To train up innovative and entrepreneurial designers in Design for Sustainability. This was achieved through a knowledge co-creation process and the development and pilot training materials in order to teach and train students, faculty and enterprise staff of the design sector. The project formed by 12 partners is organised around four country hubs in Ireland, The Netherlands, Catalonia and Sweden. Each country Hub consists of one university, one company and one national design association. The project main results are: • The Open Educational Resources database (http://circulardesigneurope.eu/oer/) where resources in Circular design are clustered in three taxonomies: Categories (First-timers; Practitioners), Level (Beginner; Intermediate; Advanced) and Tags (calculator; report; …). • The Best Practice Publication, shows the whole design process, materials, challenges, problems and other key issues of Circular Design case studies • Four international one-semester internships for undergraduate design students in the four universities with the participation of 11 companies and 45 students. • The Circular Design Digital Fabrication Lab Handbook to introduce students, companies and academics to the open-source, participatory, experimental and design & build approach within digital fabrication labs. • The Professional Development Course in circular design. • The Policy Paper in Circular Design Educatio