Increasing Social Literacy In Future Innovators

[Music]

hi

i’m an engineer by training and i think

we can all agree

that we have a lot of significant

engineering challenges facing the world

today

i’m here today to share with you a new

approach to teaching future innovators

to consider both the social

as well as the technical challenges when

crafting a solution to these problems

you know how they say the apple doesn’t

fall far from the tree well in my case

that probably should be

trees my father is a retired chemist

and my mother is a retired sociologist

and so in my case the apple fell

somewhere between these two trees

and i’m here to tell you that these two

trees science

and sociology grow well together as

witnessed by my parents 65 years of

marriage

and these two areas science and

sociology should be

intertwined and i’ve made it my mission

recently

to create socially literate engineers

so for most of my life science has been

my passion

however recently i started to think

about how we might

teach future innovators to think just a

little differently

this was probably my mom whispering in

my ear moms are like that

so the national academy of engineering

has identified 14 grand challenges and

these are truly worthy

challenges for example making solar

energy affordable

perhaps through the use of new materials

or

improving medicine perhaps through the

use of nanoparticles

or improving urban infrastructure

through the use of materials like

flexible concrete

or improving the clean water supply

through the use of membranes

or sequestering carbon dioxide before it

enters the earth’s atmosphere

are obviously technically challenging

problems but they’re also socially

challenging

and while science may focus on the

fundamental nature

of things engineering is inherently a

social exercise

we engineered to help society and

because of this society has a huge

impact on our innovations a successful

solution

to any grand challenge is going to

require that we not only solve

the problem technically but that we also

create a solution that is

socially economically politically

and sustainably acceptable and to do

this

we need to work in multi-disciplinary

teams

today i’m going to show you how we can

use material science and engineering

to help create these teams

so you might ask why do we need to work

in diverse teams

well i might discover a new material

that makes solar energy affordable

however if this material is politically

entangled with another country

say for example through trade issues or

if the extraction of that material

harms the miners for example in the case

of

rare earths and radioactive waste

or if the supply chain for this material

results in a conflict material

for example tantalum in the congo then

the technical

solution may not be socially acceptable

so from this perspective it’s obvious

that we need

students with a wide range of

disciplines working together in teams

to help form these teams universities

need to teach

non-engineers that they too have a seat

at the innovation table

and that we also need to increase the

social literacy of engineers

it has been my experience that students

today

care deeply about society i blame this

on their parents

i mean my generation for the most part

only cared about making money

but the students today genuinely seem to

want to save the world

given this it would seem like it’s

fairly straightforward to get

non-engineers

and engineers to work together in teams

however this is not as easy as you might

think

for reasons that baffle me

non-engineering students are not

terribly excited about taking an

engineering class

apparently word has leaked out that

there are aspects of

engineering courses that can be a bit

intimidating and while this may be true

for a lot of areas of engineering there

is one area of engineering that is

inherently

familiar to both non-engineers and

engineers alike

and that is materials so what are

materials

well in engineering we make things and

we have to make those things

out of something and the things we use

to make those things are called

materials

and the field that studies these

materials is called material science and

engineering

so we have a long history with materials

we named all our ages after materials

we had the stone age and then the bronze

age

and then the iron age and we’re now

living in the silicon age

we name our ages after materials because

materials enable us to evolve socially

and because we can see and touch

materials they’re inherently familiar to

us

for example everyone listening to this

as a child

knew the difference between a plastic

fork

a metal knife and that ceramic plate

that your mother told you to be careful

with right before you dropped

and we’re fascinated by materials it’s

almost impossible to open a news page

these days without reading a story

about some cool new material that has

some fascinating property

like vantablack which uses carbon

nanotubes to create the blackest

material

we’ve ever made and while this is

helping to improve telescopes

what really makes it cool is how it

looks when you put it on a car

so if we’re going to use material

science and engineering

to create a bridge between engineers and

non-engineers

then we need to develop a class to help

form these teams

in 2010 i reached out to dr sophia acord

a sociology professor at the university

of florida to see if she was interested

in creating such a class fortunately

sophia is one of the most enthusiastic

and open-minded people i have ever met

and she pounced on the idea we decided

to call the class the impact of

materials on society

or imos together

we wrote a grant to the department of

defense and got six hundred thousand

dollars to help create this class

she subsequently reached out to seven

liberal arts and sciences faculty

members and i reached out to

many material scientists from around the

world and together we created

the imos class the class

format is unique in that there are 12

modules and each module deals with a

different material

like ceramics or gold

or aluminum or silicon

each module follows the same structure

on monday there is a science lecture

on wednesday there is a social science

lecture

on thursday the students watch a video

and on friday

we flip the classroom and the students

work on a team innovation exercise

for example in the module on iron

on monday i would give a lecture about

iron and steel

the students would receive samples and

discuss the properties they observe

we would do they would learn about the

science of iron and its alloys

they would see demonstrations and they

would learn about the history

of iron then on wednesday there is a

lecture about

a social aspect for example

in the iron module professor sean adams

a history professor gives a lecture

about

andrew carnegie and the birth of u.s

steel

during the social science lecture the

students also learn a social principle

for the iron module for example the

social lesson is creative destruction or

the concept that when you create a new

technology

you destroy an existing one and that can

have significant

social ramifications think coal miners

being displaced by renewable energy

so for the iron module puddlers who were

people who through

sight smell some even say taste could

tell when

iron become steel lost their job

to the bessemer furnace they were

victims of creative destruction

and because of this it resulted in

significant

social stress we next used the

government funding

to create videos about a new or

future material for example during the

iron module

the students learn about magnesium

alloys which are replacing

steel in many car parts because of their

light weight

the students watch these videos on

thursday and then on friday

we flip the crash classroom and they

work together in multi-disciplinary

teams

however there’s a catch they must apply

the social principle they learned on

wednesday

to the new material that they learned on

thursday

so for example i had one group that

wanted to make

drones for the movie industry out of

magnesium they wanted to do this because

the

drones would be lighter in weight and

therefore could fly longer

when i asked them who is the victim of

creative destruction

they said well they would probably be

the helicopter film crews

losing their job so i asked them how

could they address this creative

destruction challenge

and they said well they could teach the

film crews to fly

their drones so i asked them what impact

would this have on their innovation

and they said well they have all the

contacts in the movie industry

and therefore it would increase the

probability of success

of their drone this is just one example

where considering the social challenge

can have a significant impact

on a technical innovation as stated each

week we examine a different material

and the students learn a different

social principle so that by the end of

the semester

the students leave with a set a toolbox

that contains social principles like

entanglement intrinsic versus extrinsic

value

delegation and sustainability and they

learn to work

in multi-disciplinary teams with support

from the university of florida we

created an open source textbook

this textbook is free and available to

all students taking the class

and with support from the government we

were able to put

all the materials necessary to teach the

class

lecture notes slides demonstrations

homeworks even exams don’t tell the

students

on the materials research society

website and they’re free and available

to anybody to download

the national science foundation was so

excited

about this course that they sponsored a

series of workshops

around the country and abroad in

countries like

mexico tanzania

botswana the goal of these workshops was

to help teach

other universities how to teach this

class

many universities princeton michigan

tennessee boise state are all teaching

the class in fact over 40 universities

have expressed an interest in teaching

this university of florida class an

article about the class appeared in time

magazine online and got over a hundred

thousand downloads which is pretty cool

and in 2018 the course was awarded the

national award for innovation and

materials education

in conclusion if we were to create

successful

solutions to the grand challenges we

face

it would be great if we could teach

students with diverse areas of interest

to work together in teams on these

solutions

i have hopefully shown you that by using

the fascinating world of materials

we can help non-engineers and engineers

learn to work together

and we are hopefully giving them the

tools they need

to create socially acceptable

engineering solutions

and finally on a personal note it

sometimes helps to remember

that the apple doesn’t fall far from a

pair of wonderful trees

thank you

you