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