TY  - CHAP
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
SN  - 978-84-617-5895-1
U6  - http://dx.doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2016.0353
SN  - 2340-1095
SP  - 5967
EP  - 5976
ER  - 
TY  - CHAP
A1  - Steuer-Dankert, Linda
T1  - Training future skills - sustainability, interculturality & innovation in a digital design thinking format
T2  - Proceedings of the 19th International CDIO Conference
N2  - The complex questions of today for a world of tomorrow are characterized by their global impact. Solutions must therefore not only be sustainable in the sense of the three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social) but must also function globally. This goes hand in hand with the need for intercultural acceptance of developed services and products. To achieve this, engineers, as the problem solvers of the future, must be able to work in intercultural teams on appropriate solutions, and be sensitive to intercultural perspectives. To equip the engineers of the future with the so-called future skills, teaching concepts are needed in which students can acquire these methods and competencies in application-oriented formats. The presented course "Applying Design Thinking - Sustainability, Innovation and Interculturality" was developed to teach future skills from the competency areas Digital Key Competencies, Classical Competencies and Transformative Competencies. The CDIO Standard 3.0, in particular the standards 5, 6, 7 and 8, was used as a guideline. The course aims to prepare engineering students from different disciplines and cultures for their future work in an international environment by combining a digital teaching format with an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and intercultural setting for solving sustainability challenges. The innovative moment lies in the digital application of design thinking and the inclusion of intercultural as well as trans- and interdisciplinary perspectives in innovation development processes. In this paper, the concept of the course will be presented in detail and the particularities of a digital implementation of design thinking will be addressed. Subsequently, the potentials and challenges will be reflected and practical advice for integrating design thinking in engineering education will be given.
KW  - Design Thinking
KW  - Sustainability
KW  - Future Skills
KW  - Interculturality
KW  - Interdisciplinarity
Y1  - 2023
N1  - Proceedings of the 19th International CDIO Conference, hosted by NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, June 26-29, 2023
ER  -