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Engineers and therefore engineering education are challenged by the increasing complexity of questions to be answered globally. The education of future engineers therefore has to answer with curriculums that build up relevant skills. This chapter will give an example how to bring engineering and social responsibility successful together to build engineers of tomorrow. Through the integration of gender and diversity perspectives, engineering research and teaching is expanded with new perspectives and contents providing an important potential for innovation. Aiming on the enhancement of engineering education with distinctive competencies beyond technical expertise, the teaching approach introduced in the chapter represents key factors to ensure that coming generations of engineers will be able to meet the requirements and challenges a changing globalized world holds for them. The chapter will describe how this approach successfully has been implemented in the curriculum in engineering of a leading technical university in Germany.
Anti-bias trainings are increasingly demanded and practiced in academia and industry to increase employees’ sensitivity to discrimination, racism, and diversity. Under the heading of “Diversity Management”, anti-bias trainings are mainly offered as one-off workshops intending to raise awareness of unconscious biases, create a diversity-affirming corporate culture, awake awareness of the potential of diversity, and ultimately enable the reflection of diversity in development processes. However, coming from childhood education, research and scientific articles on the sustainable effectiveness of anti-bias in adulthood, especially in academia, are very scarce. In order to fill this research gap, the paper explores how sustainable the effects of individual anti-bias trainings on the behavior of participants are. In order to investigate this, participant observation in a qualitative pre-post setting was conducted, analyzing anti-bias trainings in an academic context. Two observers actively participated in the training sessions and documented the activities and reflection processes of the participants. Overall, the results question the effectiveness of single anti-bias trainings and show that a target-group adaptive approach is mandatory due to the background of the approach in early childhood education. Therefore, it can be concluded that anti-bias work needs to be adapted to the target group’s needs and reality of life. Furthermore, the study reveals that single anti-bias trainings must be embedded in a holistic diversity management approach to stimulate sustainable reflection processes among the target group. This paper is one of the first to scientifically evaluate anti-bias training effectiveness, especially in engineering sciences and the university context.
Sustainability is playing an increasingly important role. Not least due to the definition of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the framework of the agenda 2030 by the United Nations (UN) in 2015 (United Nations, n.d.), it has become clear that the cooperation of different actors is needed to achieve the defined 17 goals. Industry, as a global actor, has a special role to play in this. In the course of sustainable production processes and chains, the industry is confronted with the responsibility of reflecting on the consequences of its own trade on an ecological, economic, and also social level and deriving measures that, according to the definition of sustainability (Hauff, 1987), will also enable future generations to satisfy their needs. While the ecological pillar of sustainability is already being addressed by different industrial initiatives (Deloitte, 2021), it is questionable to what extent the economic and, above all, the social pillars of sustainability also play a decisive role. Accordingly, it is questionable to what extent sustainability in its triad of social, ecological, and economic aspects is taken into account holistically at all, and thus to what extent the industry contributes to achieving the 17 goals defined by the UN.
This paper presents a qualitative study that explores these questions. Interviewing 31 representatives from the manufacturing industry in Germany, results indicate a Paradox of Sustainable Production expressed by a theoretical reflection of the need for focusing on people in production processes on the one hand and a lack of addressing the social pillar of sustainability in concepts on the other hand. However, while it is a troublesome finding given the striking need for sustainable development (The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2022; Kropp 2019; von Hauff 2021; Roy and Singh 2017), the paradox directly lays out a path of resolving it. This is because, given its nature, we can see that we could resolve it via the implementation of strong educational efforts trying to help the respective people of the manufacturing industry to understand the holistic and interdependent character of sustainable development (The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2022).
Like all preceding transformations of the manufacturing industry, the large-scale usage of production data will reshape the role of humans within the sociotechnical production ecosystem. To ensure that this transformation creates work systems in which employees are empowered, productive, healthy, and motivated, the transformation must be guided by principles of and research on human-centered work design. Specifically, measures must be taken at all levels of work design, ranging from (1) the work tasks to (2) the working conditions to (3) the organizational level and (4) the supra-organizational level. We present selected research across all four levels that showcase the opportunities and requirements that surface when striving for human-centered work design for the Internet of Production (IoP). (1) On the work task level, we illustrate the user-centered design of human-robot collaboration (HRC) and process planning in the composite industry as well as user-centered design factors for cognitive assistance systems. (2) On the working conditions level, we present a newly developed framework for the classification of HRC workplaces. (3) Moving to the organizational level, we show how corporate data can be used to facilitate best practice sharing in production networks, and we discuss the implications of the IoP for new leadership models. Finally, (4) on the supra-organizational level, we examine overarching ethical dimensions, investigating, e.g., how the new work contexts affect our understanding of responsibility and normative values such as autonomy and privacy. Overall, these interdisciplinary research perspectives highlight the importance and necessary scope of considering the human factor in the IoP.