Creating and Using Social Impact Models for Engineered Products

Brigham Young University, Provo UT

Investigators

Abstract

Every product has economic, environmental, and social impacts on those who produce and use it. While environmental and economic impacts are relatively well known and appropriate measures have been identified and implemented, very little work has been done to help guide engineers, understanding of social impacts. Therefore, this project focuses on creating ways to measure and evaluate the social impacts of engineered products. Accordingly, the research questions pursued in this project are: (i) How are social impacts of products influenced by engineering decisions, (ii) What studies can be carried out to evaluate the social impact of existing products? (iii) What are social impacts as they relate to engineering decisions that can be observed in existing products? (iv) What is an appropriate framework to guide engineers "understanding of anticipated social impacts of products they're designing" This research promises to improve industrial competitiveness by enabling engineers to account for social factors that oftentimes dictate the success of engineered products, but currently are difficult for engineers to consider formally. It also will promote a vision of sustainable design and engineering in which needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Thus, this research intends to have a broad impact on industry and society by transforming how the social impact of engineered products can be understood, predicted and considered in the design and optimization of engineered products. This research will be carried out by, first, defining the boundaries of social impact. This part of the research tames the unwieldy concept of social impact and frames it in a way that links it to engineering decisions, making it tangible to engineers and laying the foundation for future research in sustainable design and engineering. Second, this research will execute empirical studies to model the social impact of existing products. This area of focus involves examining a variety of products/projects with industrial collaborators all over the world who have agreed to provide us with access to existing product and project data. These collaborators bring insight ranging from medical products to consumer products to humanitarian projects and they will provide data and insight from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Third, this research will extract principles from the empirical studies that act as a foundation for developing a framework for engineers to improve social impacts of their products. Key principles will be extracted and articulated after observing the social impact modeling patterns in the empirical studies. These principles will be at the foundation of the modeling framework created. Fourth, the research will create a principles-based framework to guide engineers in developing social impact models--deterministic and non-deterministic. This portion of the research seeks to develop a generic framework for identifying a product?s social impacts, converging on one or more social sustainability measures for the product, and linking those measures to the engineer-controlled parameters of the design. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.