 Well, hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Happy New Year, happy 2021, and welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today, we're very pleased to bring you our first installment of the new year of our seminar series. As you all know, the seminar series aims to intellectually develop the field of Engineering for Global Development, and we host a new research institution monthly to learn about their work in advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Today's seminar will be presented by the founder of the series himself, Dr. Jesse Austin Breneman, who is joining us from the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. My name is Yana Aranda, and I am the director of ASME's Engineering Global Development Group, as well as the president of Engineering for Change. The seminar you're joining us in today will be archived on Engineering for Change's website, along with our YouTube channel. Both URLs are listed on the slide for your reference. Information on upcoming seminars is available on E4C site. E4C members will receive invitations to the seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments and recommendations for future topics or speakers, we invite you to contact the E4C team at research at engineeringforchange.org. We also invite you to share your feedback at the end of the seminar to inform our strategy overall. You will see the link on the slide here, and it will also come up in your browser at the end of the seminar. If you're following us on Twitter today, I invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C seminar series. As I mentioned, the series was founded by Dr. Jesse Austin-Bernerman. Today he is going to share some reflections from the past year. For those of you who are new to our seminar series, just a little bit of background, Dr. Austin-Bernerman is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. He earned his PhD in mechanical engineering in 2014 from MIT. He also holds an SMM mechanical engineering and BS in ocean engineering from MIT. Before he started in academia, he worked as a development engineer in Peru, working with rural communities and alternative business opportunities and with local doctors groups on medical device development. He also spent two years as a high school math teacher in Boston, Massachusetts. He currently is the director of the Global Design Laboratory, which focuses on developing design processes and supports tools to help multidisciplinary design teams think at a systems level when performing complex system design tasks. This includes investigating the best way to incorporate systems level interaction between stakeholders and emerging markets into the decision-making process. So one item for us to just unpack before we move on to Jesse and his insights is for all of you to get a little bit of background in engineering for change. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform, and global community of more than one million engineers, technologists, and development practitioners leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by developed underserved communities. Some of these challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, information and communications technology, agriculture, and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders like Jesse, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships, and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online and regional events and access to resources aligned to their needs. We invite you to visit our website to learn more and sign up. Our research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by engineering for change research fellows annually on behalf of our partners and sponsors and delivered as digestible reports with actionable insights. We invite you to visit our research page. The URL for that is listed on this slide to explore our field insights, research collaborations, and review the state of engineering for global development. There's a compilation of academic programs and institutions offering training in this sector. As you can see, we have covered a large portion of the world, but opportunities remain for new insights. If you have a research question or want to work with us on a research project as a fellow, we invite you to contact us at research and engineering for change. And on that note, I'm very excited to share that our research fellowship is open and we are accepting applications now until the end of February of this year. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the fellowship is our unique workforce development program in engineering for global development, serving to activate and empower engineering students and early career engineers, as well as other disciplines. We host architects and scientists annually, as this is a multidisciplinary effort to solve local and global challenges. If you're interested in the fellowship and wish to get information on how to apply, please do fill out the form which will be shared in the chat now, as well as is listed on the slide, or you can visit the E4C Fellowship page. The URL is listed here in order to get more information. Or if you have any questions, feel free to contact our team, fellows at engineeringforchange.org. So really excited to share this with you. This is a once a year opportunity for you to apply. So do get on that if you qualify. All right. So now we want to hear a little bit from you. We want to know where in the world you are joining us from. So we'd like to encourage you to go ahead and enter your location into our chat. So just let us know where you're joining us from. I'm here in lovely Brooklyn today. We have Maryland, I'm in Minnesota, London, UK, and of course, Michigan. I see folks from Nairobi and from Bogota, Colombia, from, oh, I can't say this, but you can't Kentucky. That's a new one for me. Portland in New Jersey, Minneapolis in Venice, Italy, Tennessee and New Hampshire, Pakistan, and more folks from the UK, as well as Pennsylvania, Seattle, Nepal, Kathmandu, welcome, and South Sudan originally represented. So really nice, diverse audience day. We're so excited. Welcome, everyone, to today's seminar. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Now, if the chat is not open on your screen, do try to click the chat icon at the bottom of the screen, which is in the middle of the slides. As a reminder, we would like to consolidate all questions in the Q&A window. So that's the little bubble, two bubbles, Q&A. So do click that icon at the bottom right of your screen. If you're not seeing that, you know, so that we can make sure to organize all those questions for our presenters. We do try to address questions that weren't answered following the seminar. So it'll be great for us to be able to get those from you. Alright, so without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen and turn it over to our presenter, Dr. Austin Brennan. Thank you, Yana. So hopefully, I will hit the button. We're good. This is the thing that you can never, they should have some better way of monitoring what's actually happening. Because you always hear this at the beginning of talks, hey, can you see me? Am I immune? What's going on? You're doing great. We live in the future, but we don't. So we'll get started. So thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Very excited to have such a wide representation geographically, by discipline and an organization. We're very excited. You know, I started the seminar series last January, I gave the first one. And it is has definitely improved. Since that first one, all the rest of them were quite amazing. And we're going to go over those today. And so today's talk is just going to be about engineering for global development research or EGD research, a review of community perspectives and project pathways. And what I'm really trying to do here today, I gave the first one sort of setting up the seminar series. And we at the EGD research committee felt that this would be a good opportunity to sort of reflect back on the last year of talks and think about, you know, the purpose of the seminar series was to add and grow the research community. And so I wanted to sort of reflect and give a space for people to talk about what I thought I had gotten out of these talks, but also have a conversation with you through the questions and answers to talk about, hey, where do we want to go next and set up the next year of seminars that we have planned for you that we're really excited about. So with that said, I want to start with something that I learned from watching several of the other speakers discuss. And I wanted to acknowledge that the University of Michigan was established through the removal of the Potawatomi people from the land that it sits on through the Treaty of Fort Meigs in 1817. The Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Ottawa and Potawatomi people were and continue to be central to any of the advancement of knowledge made by the university. I actually in my research group had an Ojibwe student, which I didn't know until the end. And I think that that history is important to the work that she was doing and that the work that the university does. And in particular, the Treaty of Fort Meigs actually had a clause in it that said that the University of Michigan, the land grant that started, founded the central campus of the University of Michigan, and funded the original endowment actually can't leave has to stay in the endowment that money. And that there's a clause that the university should be dedicated in part to the education of indigenous youth. And I'm not sure that we have lived up to that. But I want to acknowledge that at the beginning of the talk that that's the organization, the history of the organization that I work for here at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And I saw similar and I thought to do this because of some of the previous speakers in our seminar series, made similar acknowledgments to the contributions of the indigenous people in their own work. And I thought that since I'm going to be talking about context today, and I think context is incredibly important to our discipline that I should do the same thing in my talk. And I want to thank the previous seminar speakers who inspired me to do this and to learn more about the history of the organization I work for. All right, so with that acknowledgement, I want to talk about some of the motivation that we have in general as a discipline in terms of doing this type of work. And I think the motivation starts for many of us with the sort of trying to work on the sustainable development goals, work towards the sustainable development goals. And in particular to reducing poverty. So I think broadly, if I were to speak, you know, generally, I would say that most of the people in this field are trying to reduce poverty, the level of poverty globally. And I think that there's been a lot of advances in reducing poverty, a lot of achievement in reducing poverty over the last 30, 30 to 50 years. You can see specifically from 1990, this number of people living in extreme poverty. This is a screenshot and I'm going to do this throughout I've taken screenshots of our YouTube channel, not only to promote our YouTube channel, which by the way, smash that like button, ring that bell, whatever subscribe. But I wanted as sort of a sighting of the people that have done this. So I'm reviewing this is not I'm not trying to put forward new stuff that that I'm doing. I'm synthesizing the work that our community and I really wanted to highlight that by leaving in the picture of the person who was saying it. So here Evan Thomas was talking shared this figure, which I have used in many talks since then, which shows that although we've made a lot of advances, you can actually see like in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people in extreme poverty has grown, and is projected to continue to grow. And that a lot of the advances are in China and in India, where the large governmental programs were actually sort of one of the major reasons why poverty was reduced. And so when we think about ourselves as engineers working to create and develop technologies or solutions, and I don't want to just say technologies, but we are engineers, we do make in general artifacts or systems or processes that have to do with that. So in general, the motivating question for me is, how do we create solutions with sustainable impact? And impact is defined differently by different people and we'll discuss that. But in general, we're looking at working impact towards achieving the sustainable development goals. Right? So what's the problem? What's the challenge? Why do we need a whole, why do we need something to say is why can't we just do that right now with the engineering that we have? And why is this a research question? So I'll just use a personal example. I'm a have an ongoing project where we're working with communities on informal e-waste recycling in Thailand and Northern Thailand. So you can see someone here taking apart a stator in order to get the copper that's down here. I don't know if you can see my cursor, but down here, this copper, get that copper out. So they're using a chisel, break this apart. And in general, I think what you can see with an engineering process, you sort of do this needs identification, there's some problem, you want to work on it, you know, create an artifact, develop a technology. And so you do engineering, right? So we do some needs identification that's part of the engineering process. But however we do it, we get on a project, we do engineering, and we come up with a technology. In this case, we came up with just a chisel with a handle, we were doing a collaboration with public health and the business school. We can talk offline if you're interested about sort of the details of it. But I'm actually more interested in the fact that what we care about in terms of reducing poverty happens after we've developed the technology, right? So we do all these engineering decisions. Okay, does it work? How does it work? What's it going to look like? But the impact, if we care about sustainable impact happens after we've developed it in time, right? So it's through the use of the product or system or process. It's through, you know, the consequences of that within a system. And so when we talk about sustainability outcomes, and if we care about sustainability, which I believe we all do, that all happens here. Now the decisions we make in the engineering affected, but the outcomes happen afterwards. And so when we look at these axes of sustainability, and this is, you know, there's there's a wide range of research on this, but I'm just going to generalize it into three areas of impact. We have economic impact, environmental impact and social impact. And we in traditional engineering, I would say, at least the mechanical engineering, you know, we have designed for market systems as we're thinking about the economic impact. How do we engineer that economic impact? We've had a lot of growth over the last 20 to 30 years in sort of life cycle analysis, and other ways in environmental engineering advances, in order to try and understand the environmental impact of our technology development, right? So what happens afterwards in terms of, can I predict or think about model what the potential environmental impact is going to be? Not saying life cycle analysis is the only one, it's just an example, right? So there's whole fields, environmental engineering as as as a as a discipline, but in general, we have a lot we're developing tools towards that. We don't really have that in social impact, we are beginning to have that you're beginning to see papers on that. But I would say that program evaluation and other disciplines, you know, economics, we're thinking about sociology, there's a lot of different people have thought about how do we think about social impact, but we not have not really developed that to a mature level within engineering. And so when I think about this economic impact, what is the potential economic impact of this, you know, tool that I designed? What is the potential environmental impact? What is the potential social impact? Well, the difficulty comes because this impact, you have to understand it within the system that is operating it, right? And so just to give you a system level view, here's the person that we're talking about this e-waze recycler, they actually have an employer whose decisions affect the way that they're able to use that tool, what tool they're even using. Let's just give that person a picture too. So everyone that's going to be in a box here, I don't have pictures of everybody, I just want to understand these are real people stakeholders within a system. And so you see if we go out there talking to an e-waze collector who's bringing them the e-waze, that's going to affect what potential environmental and social impact you have. You have a mid-tier recycler who's recycling it, what are their capabilities. If we zoom out even further, there's a bigger recycler that's taking that mid-tier recycler stuff and it's recycling it in some way. You have the municipal waste, how is that being collected? Who's the end user that's generating that e-waste? Right? You have a government industry ministry that's sort of regulating all of these things. And then community members whose health is being affected or who are being part of the economic system that this recycler is a part of. You have even bigger, you have the OEM, you have the distributor, you have the other government ministry. And so that's sort of the recycling system. And then you can also see, well, there's a health system that's going along with that. Well, the potential impact depends on what the health system is. You have an economic system, that country, the regulatory, the market system that's there. Those are going to affect the potential sustainable impact. So these outcomes are at this very big system level, right? And sorry, we're having some disturbance behind me here. Glad we have a virtual background. And so the challenge, the challenge really is that we are making decisions and doing engineering at sort of this local level, right? So we're doing human centered design, we're doing all of these things where we're really focused on what is going on with this person and my development, my development is happening at this smaller level. But the outcomes that I care about are happening at this bigger level, right? So we have these two different scales that we want to understand these sort of local decisions. What is their potential impact within this bigger system? And I think that what you see here, and I'm going to share just one more screenshot from Evan for the moment, system science, impact evaluation, remote sensing and instrumentation, standards development, graduate education, environmental health, pay for performance contracting. These are all things that were central to the stories and messages and projects that were presented throughout the year in our seminar series that don't have to do with that first part of like the when we say technical performance engineering, those engineering models, these are all things that are happening afterwards because we care about that impact, right? We care about impact and we need to develop new tools and new methods. And that is what we've been seeing all year. Our people, you know, really addressing these challenges of how do I understand whether the engineering I'm doing now, what its potential impact is. All right. And I'm just very excited that that's what we have seen. And I just want to highlight that as one of the challenges, the main challenge, in my view, that we have as engineers working in this space. So given that that's the question, right? How do we create solutions with sustainable impact? How do we understand that? How can we know ahead of time what the potential impact is going to be? I'm now going to say try and answer for you today in today's talk and then discuss with you what did we learn over the past year. And so this is my year in review. It's almost like a React video. I was going to do a shorter one on YouTube, but I figure a week, just a research seminar, maybe we could be a little bit more serious. So please go to this playlist. I've actually watched them all multiple times over the past, you know, several weeks of preparing this talk and inspiring all over again. I had forgotten a lot of the the nuances that were being brought up and just really get inspired just watching this place. So I'm just going to watch it, refresh it every once in a while, just get those views up. Obviously also you want to get those happening. And so I'll just go through. I'm just going to go through the year of what happened, just the main topics. I know not everybody has has seen all of them. So maybe there's something there that I go over that might catch, you know, your interest and then go and do that. And then I'm going to talk about what are some of the synthesize some of the perspectives that were shared. And then also some of the project pathways that we saw that I thought were novel to me new to me. And I thought we're really interesting to bring up in this talk. So in February, the first one again, was myself setting it up. So I'm not going to go over that one. But we were starting in February. We had Conjun Mehta from Lehigh University. And he shared about their educational program of how they're deeply integrating real ventures and real impact and starting there as we want to create something that has a sustainable impact. But integrating that into their global fellows program and into their educational mission, such that students have authentic experiences that can really push forward. But starting from the point of we want a real market based venture. So that was this is an example that they had from the the test strips that they were developing. And you can see here that all of this is a long term institutional investment in a particular venture and using that as their academic experience. Right. Then we had Nathan Johnson from Arizona State who talked about micro grids. I'm going to be showing you in each of these screenshots sort of the process that the person was using because I'm a process based person. We did talk a lot about some of the technical details of these technologies. But I think what's interesting and what we can synthesize from this is their approach to these problems. So Nathan really looks at both an academic and business perspective with his collaborators as industry collaborators and uses that to drive the innovation in products or processes. And what I thought was really interesting about this was his melding of looking at micro grids is not just we need technical performance, but we need a particular type of system in order to make this work in the long run. And there was a lot of focus on how do we make this work for the different stakeholders and understanding those systems within micro grids and the larger energy systems. Evan Thomas then gave a talk from CU Boulder, gave a talk about global engineering and their work. And again, you've seen this already, but he's really presenting sort of this ecosystem of how the discipline should move forward in terms of professionalizing and giving tools to practitioners that can really generate sustainable impact and looking at the root causes of poverty and going from sort of a bigger scale, if you will, not only in terms of people, but in terms of the system that they're trying to engineer. Amy built in talked about energy and water technologies, but within the context of not only a deep interaction with the communities, and, and, and really using that interaction with communities to drive an understanding of what fundamental physics and technology should be understood to drive the solution development, but also within the university itself. So really thinking about what is the team that you have to put together? What are the structures that you have to put together in order to have a successful project? And I thought that was really inspiring and interesting, along with the sanitation and water and energy technologies that she discussed. James Rajanayagam from IIT, Madras, gave a real, a really great talk. I was one of my favorite ones because I just love process and I love the way he laid it out, but he really was looking at this sort of technology transfer framework. How does it work in it? How does it change within that SDG context? So he was really looking at, well, starting from whoever, you know, is developing the technology to improving or engineering the technology to then the market entrepreneur and user looking at past cases. So he looked at a bunch of different technologies and said, where was the fit between the technologist and the engineer or the market fit or the solution fit with the user? Looking at which of these, how all of those relationships between the different stakeholders in the technology development process itself, how that affected the impact of the final product, right? Whether it was being used at the end. And what were the barriers and tools that needed to be put in place in order to improve each of these relationships? We then had two in a row that were really based about system. So taking it to another level in terms of the research around using system science or Jeff Walters from George Fox University talked about stakeholder driven modeling where you're working with stakeholders to generate different system maps to try and understand and improve the service performance and sustainability. And similarly, Erica Grahla from George Washington University in Washington, DC talked about how she used similar system tools, not to look at necessarily system dynamics, but to like Jeff was doing in the prior talk, but to look at key pathways to outcomes that they cared about. And using those to decide what data they needed to generate or what data they already had, whether it was useful, but also to identify barriers and leverage points. And this is one of the things that I was most inspired about the entire year was this idea that, you know, and it's come up many, many times people, you know, we've talked about it a lot. It's this idea that, well, technology may not be the issue, right? So maybe we don't need a new technology, maybe we do. But this was an interesting to me a way of looking at that system and trying to say ahead of time, hey, what technology do we need? Do we need a technical improvement, a higher technical performance or lower cross or whatever it is? Where can technology affect this pathway? And is it necessary? And this was to me a really systematic way about going about trying to identify that. So that was very exciting to see. I highly recommend watching that one. Esther Ebonio from Penn State. I don't want to say blew my mind, but it did. My mind was exploded after watching this one. But just really the integration she talked a lot about how they use their extension program and their status and position as a land grant university using those extension workers with the deep community to integrate with their education and their research and use that as a platform for dissemination. And I really had not seen a program that that had used that process before. And so I was very excited not only by the technology she talked about affordable roofing and housing and what does it mean to have equity in housing. But just by having that relationship already established through the extension workers, we've seen that a lot in health where we have community health workers. But this was something that had taken it into a new sector, a new space and integrated not only with the education, but also with with their engineering research. And I was just very excited about the possibilities afforded by that that type of a process. Then Natasha Wright from the University of Minnesota, good friend of mine who does amazing work in desalination looking at the basic physics of how do we get these community level water systems, whether it's for reverse osmosis or different ways of doing desalination. And you know, her process what I thought was interesting was she really thought deeply about how the stakeholders were engaged at different points and which stakeholders were engaged at different points. So not only did she present some really interesting novel, you know, technical improvements, but also sort of thinking about, well, why are we doing these? What is it that we act? What is the technical performance we actually need to have in order to provide access to water in different situations and using that to drive the research? Carmelo de Maria from and probably because I am not Italian butchering that name. So I apologize, Carmelo from the University of Pisa you know, presented his work on you Bora, which is an open source hardware initiative around developing medical devices and medical devices as a field in the design of medical devices is really hard in the barrier to entry is really high because of the high level of regulatory frameworks that you need in order to certify like, hey, this is actually safe to use. You know, you can use it to improve someone's health that's not going to hurt them or kill them. And so there's a lot of sort of legal things that make it very hard to come into as a as either a new company or even as a student and have a real authentic experience because you just need a lot of domain knowledge. And so not only did they set up the tools to sort of say, OK, here's this website, we're going to help you understand where the risks are and where you need help and get people to help you with these projects in terms of the risk assessment and meeting ISO standards, what ISO standards are important for your situation. You know, really helping people do that. But they've also set up this whole system around having design schools and summer schools at different universities around the world and really building that capacity. So it's a holistic approach to not only am I, you know, just go to my website. You can have you borrow. We have this tool. It'll do the risk assessment for you. But also we're going to go out and work with you so that you can use our tool more effectively. And we're going to have design competitions in order to encourage your students to learn how to use it and how to how to do this effectively. I think they're just making amazing advances in terms of advancing the ability to design effective medical devices and have an impact across of this by providing that support network. So those those are really inspiring, great talk. And then finally we ended the year with our Australian friends, Brown and Rosenquist, Nick Brown and Tonya Rosenquist. You're also my favorite new pop duo from RMIT. And they talked a lot about their perspective developing the humanitarian engineering track in terms of at RMIT educationally, but also how organically as as a nation, Australia has been developing engineers without borders and this humanitarian engineering framework and teaching and what their plans are for taking the next level. So I think they're actually if you look at the research from E4C, I think they're I would say ahead of the US in terms of their coordination between the different organizations and universities and their education space around humanitarian engineering. And I think that you know there's a lot to learn and they shared a lot of really interesting insights into how they had got to where they are and where they're going next and what that what we can learn from that to inform our own development of our research community here in North America but also how can we interact with them and blow it globally, right which is what we're interested in. So those are all the talks that we had. So hopefully that just gives you a little overview a little taste that's going to have you go to that YouTube playlist and select the one select the one that you were excited about or all of them which is what I did and I would suggest it was very exciting make it a marathon get out the popcorn and from that I'm now going to share with you my synthesis of some of the community perspectives that that came across to me in watching all of these again and participating in them the first time but also sort of what I think we should be focusing on as a research community. So I want to be clear this is my synthesis this is not you know I'm not presenting the necessarily the views of the people who who gave the talk but this is what I take away and I really want to present this as a way of a starting point for a continued discussion with all of you where we say as a research community what are we doing next and how should we be doing it I think that's a key thing that we need to continue to grow is consensus on the methods and processes that we use such that we can engage and build on each other's work. Alright, so the three areas that I'm going to do it talk about the first one is what I call a shift to impact and I'll discuss that in a moment and then we looked at understanding context which I thought was really key and then finally building capacity and I don't mean just education of university students but building capacity throughout all of the stakeholders within the system I thought that was really important to many of our seminar presenters. And okay, my dog has decided that squeaking the squeaky toy right next to me during the talk is the important thing to do which move on. Alright, so in terms of the shift to impact we have engineering knowledge and this is, you know as academic researchers this is our job we are supposed to generate original engineering knowledge create new novel engineering knowledge and in general, traditionally we would say that that engineering knowledge is applied to improve technical performance. So we want to say we want to make it stronger we want to make it faster more efficient more powerful whatever that technical performance objective is our engineering knowledge is this is the ways in which you can achieve better technical performance and if we read journal papers this is sort of what you're seeing but I think the shift to impact that I'm talking about is what we discussed at the beginning is the shift to instead of creating engineering knowledge and proving that we have if you use this particular alloy if you have this magnet you use this design process you get a more efficient outcome what we are saying now is what is the value at the system level so we need to create engineering knowledge which allows us to actually reduce poverty and that means or achieve some one of the other moves towards achieving one of the other SDGs and in order to do that that's really hard right and that's something that we have not done in my view as well or at a mature level within the engineering discipline at RIT Large and so you can see that throughout all of the seminar presenters and I'm just gonna to highlight a few of them but almost everyone was focused on I'm working on a technology but I care about how that what the impact on the SDGs on poverty on some dimension of poverty this technology has and so I am trying to evaluate it at that level rather than just in the laboratory right so laboratory is part of it we need to look at that technical performance but the amount of technical performance and how that technical performance is defined is in relation to this larger system level sustainable impact goal and so you can see here in Kanjan so they were talking about measuring impact was a big thing how do we actually measure impact and demonstrate that my technology or my advancement in this engineering knowledge is leading to potential beneficial impact and so here you can see data collection and progress monitoring here is a huge part of this as well as understanding all of these other systems that really don't have to do necessarily with the technology itself right and so they're looking at that broader impact and trying to measure it Natasha and this is one thing I really want to highlight she had a whole chart where she was saying look here's all the papers that look at reverse osmosis pilot studies and the outcome is the levelized cost of water because that is an impact that is one of the measures of impact is can we reduce the cost of water because this is how people you know how people are going to to use it this is where the benefit is going to come from and she can see there's not a standard way of doing this so we say levelized cost of water but it is included in that are different things and so she was pointing out that as a community they need to come together and try and build some consensus around how we actually reporting this if we are going to build on each other's work and say is my direction how should I you know engage with your advancements and should I incorporate some of your lessons into mine if we're not measuring impact in the same way and I thought that was really insightful one of the other things is that you have to have a theory of change you know you have to know what is the how are we achieving this impact how is this technology going to interact in its operating environment to achieve the impact I believe it's going to have and so you can see in drip and this is from Evan Thomas they have a very explicit theory of change which is not something you generally see in a engineering journal paper and so they're saying at our engineering program we're going to really go ahead and make sure that we know what that theory of change is we have some idea and we're going to be testing it and evaluating it and that's driving their national level you know regional level in East Africa regional level view of how we are measuring the performance of our technical systems right and so here you can look at their using groundwater sensors and it's not just the performance of the sensor it's how does this correlate with food insecurity status and how can we use this information to affect food insecurity which is what they actually care about right and so you're using this technology you're evaluating the performance of the technology not on is the sensor working how accurate is the sensor but in how well this helps us address food insecurity right and I thought that was really insightful this remote sensing idea I think came up in several of the different seminars so Amy built and talked about using this remote sensor to get a better idea of how users are interacting with the sanitation interfaces and I think this is really important and Evan Thomas talks a lot talked a lot about this too in terms of remote sensing the important thing here is that we're sensing the interaction of the user with the technology and so what they're the reason that they're doing is they really want to understand what is the actual impact right you wouldn't want to do this remote sensing if you knew the toilet the sanitation technology worked like okay I know it works but how is the person using it what is the benefit what is the impact that is being realized through the use of this product well now we need to start sensing that and then starting to get engineering tools around how do we use that information to improve the sustainability and improve the impact so that was sort of this shift to impact I think is a real key throughout all of them I didn't mention everybody that I could have put in screenshots from every presentation because I think they all dealt with impact at a community or national level but I think that what I want to talk about now is how do in order to really try and understand that impact we need to understand the context so again the use of the user the operating environment the system within which this technology is working that is going to be what is going to give us that realize that sustainability benefit so I think Nick Brown put it best and again I'm saying things that are not my words engineering is part of the solution so I think engineering is important I'm an engineer I like making things I'd like to make things that reduce poverty so you know definitely having good technologies that have technical performance that you want is important but it's only part of the solution okay you can have all of the efficiency and your stove that you could care about in the world and if no one uses it then you don't realize any of that benefit and I think that all of many of the people that we we saw present in our seminar series we're talking about different ways to approach understanding context so for example the system science and again you know I'm a little bit biased I love you saw in my bio I love systems level thinking that's what I think about a lot but we saw a lot of the other presenters talk about this where they were saying hey let's use system science so Jeff saying let's use the stakeholder understanding not only to to improve our own understanding but to have a way to communicate and talk about with the different stakeholders what is going on in the system how do they view their system and where do they see potential interventions and what is actually going to make a change in their lives similarly you know I discussed Erica talking about these pathways and identifying these leverage points so she was looking at these pathways to that change so not only are we identifying that we need to shift to impact but we're trying to have an explicit representation of that theory of change or of those different pathways of change that we we create in a systematic way right so we can use these system models to look at system dynamics but we can also use them to say okay here's this formal pathway here's an informal pathway and her presentation she really pointed out um and my dog's going to bark in a second because the man just arrived hey this is a system you can see the system around me is suboptimal at the moment I should have maybe gone to my office but we'll move on sorry uh he just wants to be part of the talk yeah yeah let's keep it all in keep it all in all right um so the the the great thing here is that she was talking about how there were pathways that showed up that they didn't even think about right so just laying it out systematically making it explicit making it external using these engineering tools from system science they were able to really identify new pathways and maybe some of the ones that they were basing a lot of their technology development on turned out to be less important right and so so this was something that you know was really inspiring and and again a new way of doing engineering in order to guide your technology development and research process um and and as I say that I want to just point out one of um from Nathan Johnson was talking about micro grids and they were talking about how having it be that vendor agnostic controls was a necessary condition for it to be scale and flexible so you could have the best control in the world but as if it was specific to a particular vendor you weren't going to get the type of scale or flexibility that you needed right and so they did a lot of engineering work that you would not have done otherwise you might have just picked the best vendor said oh this is the most common vendor let's go with this in a different situation but for them given their context they said we need this to be vendor agnostic and spend a lot of time doing integration and testing in order to make sure that no matter what vendor you were using for other other pieces of the system you were going to be able to control it using their their their technology that they developed and so they'd spent a lot of time making sure that it happened and also engineering in the training for the people operating it such that they could make these systems work and achieve the technical performance they wanted from their micro grids as I say that I think it's a good segue to talking about something that's very important to me and I thought the the presenters actually spent a lot of time talking about which is the context of the project itself so you know often we think about understanding context we say okay you know I want to understand what is the community like the country like the situation the market you know where we're going right but I think what the what the seminar a lot of the speakers brought up is the context of you as an academic researcher the organization that you are working in I'll just point out again my acknowledgement at the beginning of indigenous people in the state of Michigan and the history of that but the context of the project so Esther Arbonio's talk where she talks about how the history of extension programs and land grant universities in the United States that's not something you would necessarily see in a normal research seminar but it is central to her ability and her approach to solving the open engineering problems research problems that she has so her approach of using these extension workers was critical to understanding the results from her engineering research and so the fact that she was at a land grant university with a mature extension worker program enabled her to achieve the results that she did in her affordable roofing program if she were at a different university she may not have been able to do that research project and so understanding your own context the context of the projects I'll point out James again from my team address where he talks about you know hey I'm going to try and measure for these different projects what is this fit between these different organizations or stakeholders that's the context of the project that doesn't have anything to do with the technology or the problem that they were trying to solve right this is like what is the fit like what is the incentive of the entrepreneur to do this that doesn't have to do with the problem that you're solving but if you want to have an impact you need to understand that and that he was putting together a whole framework to try and say hey have you thought about the fit between the technologist and the engineer or the technology in the market or the solution or the entrepreneur you know and understanding all of those relationships and how you can improve those is going to you might make different engineering design decisions if you think okay this might improve the entrepreneur's incentive and therefore I'll be able to achieve a higher level of impact so I think this context of the project is really important and I thought that the presenters all of them I'm just pointing out too did a brought up new things that I hadn't thought of around how the concept project affects this and so you can see here I'm sorry I should have gone to the slide where they were doing an analysis of these different fits for the different projects that they had looked at so finally I want to talk about building capacity and so this is education so Kanjan talked about how the student is a product of your system of your organization and one of the main products and so that this education should be for a lifetime of impact and what I took away from this was we need to prepare students to have impact so it's not only just generating the knowledge but preparing students to have the right mindsets and skills and experiences that allowed them to see how they can have an impact so you need to get the person to not only inspire them to want to have an impact but which I think many of us are doing a good job of but giving them the tools and the systems and the projects that enabled to have that and one of the main things was having these authentic experiences so you want to have authentic experiences and in Kanjan's view that's that's having real market ventures that are real companies that the students are working with but you also want to make sure and I think a lot of the presenters talk about this that you're doing the appropriate level so you don't have it students trying to work on something that's you know a medical device that's going to go straight into a person's heart you know you want to have checks on this but you have you want to have these authentic experiences that lead to outcomes that then lead them to be in a position to be successful when they can have an impact so we need to prepare them to have an impact and you know we can see this again the land grant universities the first bullet there is what I wanted to point out is encompassing on-campus instruction and research programs and off-campus extension work and I think the point here is within Professor Bonio's system the off-campus ascension work is integral to the on-campus instruction you can't you get better on-campus instruction because they're deeply integrating this off-campus extension work and I believe that should be true for many of our educational programs I mentioned you Dora you Bora earlier and I just want to point out again how they're holistically building their software platform and engineering tools around helping with medical device design supporting medical device design with these design schools in different countries and I think that that was an amazing program that I hope that we can replicate in a lot of different ways they also use design competitions as a way to incentivize these authentic experiences and you know from Tanya and Nick I want you to just see everyone watching me to see how humanitarian engineering is built throughout their whole curriculum and I think that this combination even if you don't go into humanitarian engineering I think that the future for engineering is to think about this impact ahead of time we need engineering tools methods analysis techniques analytical techniques that help us do this in humanitarian engineering as it's defined in Australia or engineering for global development or global engineering all of these are giving students authentic experiences which they have to think about impact and I think we should be thinking about impact for all the engineering we're doing right and I think the world will be a better place when that happens and so I think that this is great yes go to the freezer and so they also used design competitions so finally so we saw the skill sets there were some learning challenges there's going to be an as there's an ongoing series of workshops that we're working on here in the research committee with NSF and other partners in order to think about what are the learning objectives to help us do this and then what are also the research processes which can generate the type of information that leads to this this type of impact that we're teaching students so those are the three community perspectives I wanted to share and I know basically out of time but I just want to talk about project pathways for two minutes Yana and then I'll turn it over to you so project pathways this is a picture of what I would say is a typical technology transfer office at a university so you can see over here you do research I'm a principal investigator I do some research I develop a new technology or process I disclose that I've invented this or that I've innovated in some way we evaluate it for commercial viability then we assign ownership we protect the IP through a patent or however we're protecting it and then we license it or do a startup and so then you get to some overcommercial regime now as a principal investigator I sort of live over here right I send it to my technology transfer office at my at the university of Michigan and they say okay like let's find some licensees let's do these things but in general like I'm just going back and then generating new new processes or tools or whatever it is and what I want to show is that the seminars that we saw the projects did not look like that right so we did have industry collaborations I talked about Nathan Johnson doing microgrids with many different companies at IET they're working a lot with these but one of the things that I want to point out is that they're actually bringing a lot of this stakeholders from over here back before they're doing the research and doing it in conjunction with developing their research problems right and so I think that that was very interesting in terms of the evaluations Kanjan and Lehigh University they're doing market-based ventures from the get-go so they have the idea we're going to have this ongoing seven to 10-year plan for this this venture we're going to raise capital for it they're bringing that commercialization piece not only concurrently but within the organization as part of their educational mission right with their global fellows and then Evan is doing a public-private consortium so looking at this large scale that we were talking about before I think what's really interesting about this is a project pathway where you're working in order to achieve the impact that you want you have to work with the governments right and so they're working with governments of multiple countries at the same time it's a regional issue right so drought is not you know something one company can tackle you need to be in these large partnerships with the UN with multiple governments and that's a completely different process that is not captured anywhere in our policies in like our standard procedure guide for technology transfer development at our organization so they've really done a lot of work and how do we develop these types of teams how do we put together what does this mean if I develop a new technology that's then being used by the UN or by three different governments how do we is that an appropriate licensee how does that license work right and I think that that was a really interesting thing I've already talked a lot about the expansion program so I'll just move on but I think that again this extension program was new to me and I think a really interesting way of building the community relationship into your research program and and also the open source ecosystems that we saw with you Bora again building those relationships and having design schools I think was critical to the success that they're seeing in their design competitions and the development of their their medical devices so in conclusion how do we create solutions within sustainable impact what did we learn over this past year of seminars well I told you about my problem in which I was working on developing a new chisel for e-way informal e-ways recyclers in Thailand and I think what we saw before is you do needs identification you develop technology you do engineering okay that's what that's what we've been doing and I think that we want a sustainability impact to happen afterwards and we know that it happens afterwards but we want to bring that engineering and I think that what we need to do as a community is to engineer sustainable impact and we need to be looking and and you can see all of our presenters are doing things that you would not normally find an engineering professor doing meaning looking at program evaluation working with governments doing these large-scale long-time timescale projects and I think that we are expanding in the gd what it means to do engineering and I think that that's going to there's going to be a little bit of reverse innovation we're just going to go back in traditional one people are going to be saying oh yeah maybe we should be doing this for all of our technologies and I would agree with that but I think that specifically for the type of work that we're doing if we want to move towards achieving the sdgs we need to be doing this type of work that we've seen from the presenters and I want to encourage all of you to continue to come back for the rest of our seminars for the rest of this year because we are going to be continuing to do that and I look forward to working with all of you to build a community that's working to engineering knowledge in order to achieve these types of these types of methods all right and that's what I have to say wow sorry there's a lot of no no no I mean it's it's such a heavy lift I mean you did such a good job distilling the insights from our presenters over the course of the year and really summarizing beautifully here with this last slide and these three keywords of engineering sustainable impact I think it's really exciting to build on these learnings and bring together additional presenters over the course of this 2021 to be able to continue on these three key themes and understanding them a little bit more and specifically asking our speakers to address those issues so I have time I think honestly freely from maybe one or two questions that most unfortunately so I'm just going to curate those for you a little bit here so one of the things that's really critical at this point and the reality is that COVID-19 has really just highlighted the existing inequalities in society from your perspective given everything that you heard from the presenters over the course of this last year while COVID-19 was raging while we were like in the midst of the pandemic throughout we heard some examples of course how do you think we are going to see increase in inequalities but especially in the realm of research what are we seeing now and what can we do to address that so I think two things I think that it's a challenge and an opportunity so I think that COVID-19 there's a lot of inequalities in terms of in different national environments in terms of the ability of researchers to continue to get funding to have jobs to feel secure in terms of I'm able to work from home and that's okay with my organization and have the technology and infrastructure to be able to work easily in this way so that's a real challenge that I think we need to be thinking about in terms of what sort of emergency support do researchers that are collaborators of for example my collaborators in Thailand what kind of support do they need in order to continue to work effectively at the same time I think that a lot of this work involve travel so you would see a lot of researchers myself included you know taking plane trips and you know bringing that capacity just you know and I think honestly from a sort of research perspective and a time perspective it's quicker to have me travel somewhere and you know bring my capacity there and then to try and you know build a the same type of knowledge somewhere else right but I think that what this is forced to do and this is the opportunity that I saw several of the presenters talk about that COVID-19 has has forced people to say let's really understand how our local collaborators and build those relationships even further such that I don't have to travel to do the research that I'm doing right because I'm now in a position where I can't travel so I think that we had spent a lot of time trying to really develop academic collaborations with the universities and the countries that we were going to but I know that's not the case for all of the research projects that I have been involved with right and I think that having building the capacity at the local level the way UBORA is doing but I also know that many of the other presenters talked about this in terms of in reaction to COVID you can't collect data yourself so you need to have capacity wherever you're going to collect the data and analyze the data and do those types of research projects and I think it should become a norm within our community for example to have co-authors that are from the country you're working in and I think that's not been the case in the past and that COVID-19 may be accelerating our move towards that and that's certainly something that I'm committed to that came from other presenters was presented to me and I think that we should try and normalize something like that in response to the situation that COVID has in terms of the research outcome so that our collaborators are also getting credit at the same level which they should have been getting the whole time that's that's really excellent Jesse and I building on that a little bit and not to be entirely self-serving but this is also what we've been doing quite a bit with Engineering for Change and our research fellows we in fact our fellowship is global more than 70% of our fellows last year were from outside of North America where E4C has its headquarters physical headquarters so it's really for us also paramount priority to cultivate that talent and to enable those pathways for publication opportunity for joined authorship for our research that spans continents to get that on the ground perspective without having to get on the plane so at this where our time I apologize and Jesse if you can advance I don't know if you have the slides the overall slide deck but I just wanted to share with you all thank you all for joining us today you know it's been it's been an incredible kickoff to our our conversation that we're going to have over the course of of this year and I wanted to with that invite you all to our next seminar which is which is coming up in February and I've just lost my spot here I know many of you are dropping off and I don't blame you I know it's time but for those of you who are staying on and for those of you who are here this recording please do join us in February to hear from one of the collaborators with Evan Thomas at the UC Boulder Doris Caberia who will it represents the Millennium Water Alliance and she is their Kenya Programs Director and she will be presenting some of the practical work that they're doing on on the throughout resolution in East Africa along with this private public consortium that Evan is heading up so with that I I'd also like to highlight that there's still for those of you who are seeking to continue your studies and pursue you know masters we also want to highlight there's an application deadline February 1st is the application deadline for UC Berkeley's Master of Development Engineering so more information is available on our Opportunities Portal if you are seeking to expand your professional career please do you consult you know the details there and then last but not least thank you again thank you Jesse for this incredible synthesis it was actually a great travel through time for me I also got to see every outfit that I wore I do I this is the best react video for us and EGD so thank you so much if we didn't address your questions we encourage you to send us your questions directly so we're going yeah send us your questions and we're going to take like Gabriella Robert you guys who submitted these great questions that we didn't have time for right now we're going I'll respond to those in written form and it will be posted next to the the video of this on the E4C page as we've been doing throughout the seminar series so definitely want to have a conversation with that reach out to me only Austin Breneman that exists in the world so it's pretty easy to find me but you can email E4C and I will hopefully be having conversations with all of you so that's the point of this research seminar series all right EGD that's a great start to the new year thank you Jesse have a great day everyone and we will see you on the next E4C seminar take care take care