TY  - CONF
A1  - Steuer-Dankert, Linda
A1  - Leicht-Scholten, Carmen
T1  - Social responsibility and innovation - Key competencies for engineers
T2  - ICERI 2016: 9th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation: Conference Proceedings : Seville (Spain), 14-16 November
N2  - Engineers are of particular importance for the societies of tomorrow. The big social challenges society has to cope with in future, can only be mastered, if engineers link the development and innovation process closely with the requirements of people. As a result, in the frame of the innovation process engineers have to design and develop products for diverse users. Therefore, the consideration of diversity in this process is a core competence engineers should have. Implementing the consideration of diverse requirements into product design is also linked to the development of sustainable products and thus leads to social responsible research and development, the core concept formulated by the EU.
For this reason, future engineers should be educated to look at the technical perspectives of a problem embedded in the related questions within societies they are developing their artefacts for. As a result, the aim of teaching engineering should be to prepare engineers for these requirements and to draw attention to the diverse needs in a globalized world.
To match the competence profiles of future engineers to the global challenges and the resulting social responsibility, RWTH Aachen University, one of the leading technical universities in Germany, has established the bridging professorship “Gender and Diversity in Engineering” (GDI) which educates engineers with an interdisciplinary approach to expand engineering limits. The interdisciplinary teaching concept of the research group pursues an approach which imparts an application oriented Gender and Diversity expertise to future engineers. In the frame of an established teaching concept, which is a result of experiences and expertise of the research group, students gain theoretical knowledge about Gender and Diversity and learn how to transfer their knowledge into their later field of action.
In the frame of the conference the institutional approach will be presented as well as the teaching concept which will be introduced by concrete course examples.
KW  - diversity
KW  - innovation
KW  - social responsible engineering
KW  - engineering education
Y1  - 2016
UR  - https://opus.bibliothek.fh-aachen.de/opus4/frontdoor/index/index/docId/10195
SN  - 978-84-617-5895-1
SN  - 2340-1095
SP  - 5967
EP  - 5976
ER  -