EAGER: Social Impact Modeling for Engineered Products

Brigham Young University, Provo UT

Investigators

Abstract

Every manufactured product has three areas of impact: economic, environmental, and social impact. Positive impact in all three of these areas leads to sustainable engineering, such that the needs of the present are met, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Unfortunately, the social elements of engineering decisions -- meaning how they affect the day-to-day quality of life of persons -- have not yet been the focus of significant engineering design research. As a result, models to help engineers evaluate the social impact of engineering decisions do not yet exist. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award supports an interdisciplinary study (engineering and sociology) to explore how social impact models can be created for engineered products, how the uncertainty associated with social issues can be included in those models, and how the quality of those models can be judged in a product development setting. Successfully completing the goals of this research will bring US engineers one step closer to sustainable design and engineering. The concept of social impact is broad, unwieldy, and currently undefined as it relates to engineered products. This research will begin to define the boundaries of social impact as it is influenced by engineering decisions. The research team will perform a number of tasks aimed at accomplishing this, including: (i) identifying social impacts and social influences (i.e., ways social issues can affect the adoption and impact of a product) in the literature and through interactions with industrial partners and their existing products; (ii) integrating and classifying these social impacts and influencers into broad dimensions or issue-areas that are relevant for engineering design; (iii) identifying ethnographic instruments or administrative data for measuring each social impact; and (iv) executing empirical studies to understand modeling formalisms for evaluating the social impact of products. The intellectual merit of the research is to understand the most unknown, uncharacterized, branch of sustainable design -- the social dimension. This research is motivated by the reality that until the social impact of engineered products can be modeled, fully sustainable design is out of reach for the engineering community. Additionally, as engineers become more capable of modeling the social impact of products, the complex tradeoffs between economic, environmental, and social sustainability will begin to dominate the discussion. Successful research by the team will enable product-specific tradeoffs between economic, environmental, and social sustainability to be explored numerically using traditional trade-space exploration methods.