 Well, hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today we're pleased to bring you this month's installment in the 2021 E4C seminar series. For those of you who are new to the series, the series aims to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. We host a new research institution monthly to learn about their work and advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and more. Today's seminar is going to be presented by Dr. Darshan Karwat, who is at the School for the Future of Innovation and the Polytechnic School at Arizona State University, and also represents the Constellation Prize. My name is Yana Renda, and I am the director of the Engineering Global Development Group at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and also the president of Engineering for Change. The seminar you're participating in today will be archived on E4C site and on our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs further are listed on the page right now. If you have any questions, comments or recommendations for future topics and speakers, we encourage you to contact the E4C team at researchandengineeringforchange.org. We also invite you to share your feedback at the end of the seminar to inform our strategy. There's a link listed on the slide right now, but you will also be getting that through the chat. And if you're joining us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C seminar series. The seminar series was launched by Dr. Jesse Austin Brenerman, who is also going to be a co-moderator for today's seminar, and he leads ASME's Engineering Global Development Research Committee. As you'll see, he has an incredible bio with tremendous experience across a variety of sectors, but currently he is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. So you'll hear more from Jesse towards our Q&A. Now before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit about E4C and who we are. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform, and global community of more than one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and felt leaders, a prior art database of over 1,000 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 interests. We invite you to visit our website, www.engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. Now, E4C's research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by E4C research fellows annually on behalf of our partners and sponsors and delivered as digestible insights reports with implementable insights. We invite you to visit our research page, the URL is listed on this slide to explore our field insights research collaborations and review the state of engineering for global development, a compilation of academic programs and institutions that offer training in this sector. If you have a research question or want to work with us on our research project as a research fellow, please contact us at research at engineeringforchange.org. Now, in addition to the good work that we do in research and academia, we also at ASME host a hardware led social innovation accelerator called the iShow. The iShow happens annually in India, Kenya, United States and is open to anyone taking a physical product to market with the objective of giving social and environmental impact. The iShow is, iShow applications are currently closed for our iShow events in India and Kenya. However, iShow USA applications are open until May 3rd. So we invite you to submit applications if you have a prototype that you've already developed. You're interested in receiving the technical design guidance as well as connections from our expert network, meeting peers in the space, gaining seed funding, and generally having an incredible time. So really invite you all heartily to join us if you are a social entrepreneur taking hardware to market. In addition to that, in terms of events that are coming up that we want to extend an invitation to you, we have a virtual side event alongside the sixth annual multi-stakeholder forum hosted by the United Nations on Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs. This will be on May 3rd at 9.30 a.m. Eastern and it's going to focus on fostering ecosystems for impact and in particular the role of enabling technologies for advancing human infrastructure. You are all very welcome to join us at that event. Registration is available now and entirely free. So do check out that page to join us at that event as well. Now, we're going to take a few moments just to meet our audience. We want to know where you are in the world. So please do use the chat window which is located to the bottom right of your screen to type in your location. And I'll get us started here. I'm here. We already have folks from Mexico. I'm here in Brooklyn, Houston, Texas, Calgary, Michigan, Jerusalem, Colorado and Phoenix, Ann Arbor and California. I love that place Eugene and Stuttgart, Toussaint, which I finally learned how to say as opposed to Tuxin, San Diego and Denver, Ohio and D.C. Brilliant to welcome from the UK and Spain. So lovely to have you all joining us today. It's really brilliant to have such a diverse audience who is interested in learning about activist engineering. So welcome. All right, welcome. Welcome everyone. So just with that in mind, we do encourage you to use the chat window to make any remarks to your fellow attendees, as well as if you have any questions that you have for the admins of the webinar, you can send them a private chat. During the seminar we encourage you to use the Q&A window to type in any questions you have for the presenter so we can really keep track of those and not lose anyone. So welcome everyone again from D.C. to Nigeria and more. We're so eager to jump into today's topic so I'm going to go ahead and start by introducing our incredible speaker. Dr. Karwat is an assistant professor with a joint appointment at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Polytechnic School at ASU, where he runs re-engineered, an interdisciplinary group that embeds environmental projection, social justice and peace in engineering. He's originally from Mumbai, India, but is also at home in Michigan and Washington, D.C. He studied aerospace engineering and sustainability ethics at the University of Michigan, and then spent three years as a AAAS fellow in Washington, D.C. He worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the innovation team, where he worked on climate change resilience and low cost air pollution sensors. And then at the U.S. Department of Energy in the Water Power Technologies Office, helping design and run the Wave Energy Prize and we're actually very excited because we're working with NREL as well in the Water Power Technologies Office. He also works as a co-founder of the Constellation Prize, and he has a particular passion for soccer, as I'm sure many of our listeners do today. So with that, Darshan, I'm going to turn it over to you to present to our attendees. Welcome, Darshan. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I'm very grateful that E4C is a space that is willing to engage with the kinds of ideas that I've been thinking about for the past few years. Thank you, Yana. Yesi, Jesse, Yesi, and Marilin. Let me go ahead and share my screen and just give me a thumbs up to let me know that you can see it. Alright. Do you see a beautiful starry sky like you're camping, but do not see the slides yet? There we go. We see them now. Wonderful. As a space engineer, I care about engineering. As a human, I care about what engineering means to society and the earth. If we take seriously the premise that engineering should promote environmental protection, social justice, peace and human rights, and you can absolutely disagree with me about any of that. But if you do agree, then I would argue that we are far, far from that reality. I think on this challenge about imagining and building an engineering profession that is motivated by these ideas of environmental protection, peace, justice and human rights, by using the lens of what I've been calling activist engineering. Now if you feel uncomfortable with that term, I hope my talk will make you feel a little bit differently about it, and hopefully a little bit more empowered by that term. And again, I just want to thank Yana, Jesse, and Marilin for creating this space for me. I'm very grateful. What I'm really trying to do is basically set up a conversation because as I have grown in age and I'm not that old, I have fewer and fewer answers day by day. I just have more and more questions about things. And so I want to learn from you about how we might think more critically and strategically about what it might take to create a more thriving and vibrant engineering profession that more directly advances these causes of environmental protection, justice, human rights and peace. And this is the key at larger and larger scales. This is the opposite of the kind of engineering where the benefits of our work trickles down to those and that that includes non humans who need it the most and I think this and it is entirely reasonable to think about and try to create. So what I'm going to do is set up some context, define some key terms and present some premises and a proposition to provoke conversation in the end I care about conversation. So I will do, I'll do what I can to infuse some of the research that my lab group reengineered has been doing as well as the research and writing of others. I don't have to go back home to Mumbai, India to find technological inequality and its interplay with poverty and environmental injustice and marginalization. I simply have to walk the streets of the city that I live in right now Phoenix, Arizona, where many still have inadequate access to energy services in the desert summers that are getting hotter and hotter. You could go to San Francisco I could go to San Francisco where tech fuel gentrification and rising poverty has shocked even the UN's poverty expert Philip Philip Alston, who's seen poverty all over the world. I could go to Detroit, who's planning and cars helped create not only an American middle class, but also urban sprawl and inertia for mitigating climate change. Or I could go to Hill County in the south of the United States in the black belt of Alabama, where even today, vast swaths of homes aren't even built a code. So I, you know I recognize that many of those many of you joining us are from all over the world and oftentimes it's you know it's kind of surprising to think that the challenges that we think about existing elsewhere exist in the United States. So the legacy of engineering is not only full of awe inspiring achievements like refrigeration and computing and lasers and getting to the moon. But it's also full of mountain top removal and poisoned waters and racism and the continued development of the capacity to destroy life and the earth. So while these are certainly issues of social policy. They are also issues of engineering technology and science policy. They are issues of what we consider important to invest in technically, and I'll go further and say that they are also issues of how we as engineers justify to ourselves the work that we do. It's about our stake in the world that we build. Now many times people will blame politicians and governments and the market whatever that is for the technically driven problems that the world faces and you can think about war climate change or surveillance disinformation and on and on and on. But why is it that there are almost always engineers and corporations that are willing to design and build those technologies that cause those problems. Many times in spite of knowing about the negative consequences of those technologies. So to spark debate and reflection and action and response to this perceived reality of mine. I started writing about what I call activist engineering when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. And I'll define this term activist engineering a little bit later. So a bit of context before I really dive in, I want to situate my remarks in the context of history, some current findings and research that we're doing. And I think the scale of the conversation, the challenge that I think needs to be confronted. There's an increasing body of work that is showing that engineering. And the way in which we train engineers is creating what is called a culture of disengagement and there's a seminal paper by Aaron sec who's a sociologist at the University of Michigan, who has written about this. And I see Jesse nodding is his head. So she writes about how this culture of disengagement is founded on three ideological pillars deep politicization. The technical social dualism and I'll actually give you an example of what I mean by the technical social dualism and meritocracy so here's a here's an example of the technical social dualism. Here's a quote from an engineer who is part of a team that bid on building the or expanding I should say the border wall between the United States and Mexico. So these is an engineering project engineering firms bid for this project. And here's a here's a quote from one of the managers that bid on this project quote. We see a political backlash, but we are in business to make money and put people to work and provide a good service, whether it's a wall or a substation or airport or prison. We don't want to approach it from a political standpoint, only from a business standpoint. So you can see how that quote is reflective of the way in which engineers oftentimes create this barrier in their minds between the technical work that they do, and the social implications of that work and that's kind of what Aaron sec is getting at regarding the technical social dualism. So that's just one example of an increasing body of work that is talking about this culture of disengagement. The next couple things relate to some of the work that we've been doing in my lab group. I care a lot about getting engineers to engage with people who lack access to engineering services. And what we've been doing is understanding through surveys and interviews, how engineers feel about doing this kind of work about, you know, serving in places where there is a lack of access, as well as from the standpoint of community groups in the United States. And that would like to collaborate with engineers. And again, the work that I've done so far has focused on the US context but I think that the findings that we have are probably generally applicable no matter where you are. First related to barriers, you know, engineers report that there are several barriers to their doing work for communities that lack access to these services. A lack of rapport with the kind of people that they want to serve or engage with the lack of knowledge on how to do it, the time that's necessary, the funds, you know, those are sort of standard things that come up time and again. There's a couple of other interesting things related to how this work just is unrecognized like this work is not valued in the same way that, you know, being part of a team designing a blowout presenter for an oil well gets you recognized right. And there's also this notion of what we're calling a collaboration burden, basically doing this kind of work is intensive in a different kind of way. And I can say a little bit more about that later. At the same time, in spite of the barriers that engineers identify, there is a strong desire and potential for this work engineers time and again say, we want it more valued and recognized, we need more institutional structures to recognize this work yada yada yada Okay, so there's a couple papers that we have written that are focused on this. And I would be remiss to not talk about the historical context here. When we think about the politics of engineering. We need to remember that people for many, many decades have been raising the same questions that I'm raising so in many ways the work that I'm doing is not particularly original right like people have been talking about this for a long time. You can read books by Layton who, you know wrote about the revolt of engineers, some wonderful work work by Matthew was Niosky in a book called engineers for change. And you know the work of when Audinger has been as particularly inspirational to me the way in which he thinks about how engineers think about the work they do. So there's a long historical context there and one example of the way in which people have taken these questions very seriously. I'll provide so in the in the 1960s, during the height of the anti Vietnam War movement in the United States. The MIT fluid dynamics laboratory which at the time was comprised of several full professors assistant professors post doctoral fellows, maybe 20 graduate students. They decided that they did not want to do work that continue to support the military industrial complex. And so they changed the entire focus of the work that they did away from military applications to things like desalination and air pollution and stuff like that. Right. So the same kinds of skills that they had applied to a completely different setting. Lastly, I'll say that the scale of the challenges that we're trying to address here are significant. I'm just going to spend the next couple slides are just to give you a sense of how widespread these challenges are just within the United States. So I care about issues of environment climate and energy and I care about getting engineers and scientists engaged in those kinds of issues more directly. So what you see here is a map of a region of the United States that's called the Appalachia, where there's a lot of historically poll mining, a lot of gas extraction. And we interviewed five different community groups that you see in these different colors here that are spread across this geographic area called Appalachia. These community groups have a different focus, they care about issues related to fracking which if you're not familiar with that. It's basically a way in which natural gas that's trapped in rock formations is released and then and then of course used Community group B cares about watershed issues, C cares about health, D cares about stewardship environmental stewardship, and then the last group care about infrastructure right so you see these five groups in this broad geographic area. And an assumption that I'm making is that the group that the concerns that these community groups care about are in fact perhaps concerns that people all across this wide geographic region care about right these are just community groups that have somehow organized and said that this is something that needs to be addressed right so again there's on the order of 1.2 million different fracking wells across this geographic region right and a lot of these people lack access to engineering and scientific services in ways that could be helpful to them to address the environmental issues that they're facing right so again this just gives you a sense of the scale of the problem across the United States, and you can it's translatable to perhaps your context as well. And when we talk to these community groups. We've interviewed 47 of them so far, we've asked them like what kinds of things do you want engineers and scientists to do with you for you. Right. And this is a simplified version of a more complicated table. That's in a journal publication that's under review right now, which basically shows that it's, you know, all the kinds of things that engineers have traditionally done in whatever company they work for whether they work for government. These are the same kinds of things that community groups care about as well, different kinds of data collection, building online platforms, data analysis mapping formulating research questions, understanding causal analysis like all of these kinds of things that engineers have traditionally done can be applied in context where our services are currently lacking. That's simply the point here. So, I say all of this because we know that injustice and inequity exists and we know that engineers contribute to it. And to me the more important question now is like what do we do about it. Okay, we need to, we, you know, recognizing that what we do and teach and how and who we engage with the research we do and what we build, all of these are choices that we as engineers are making that have deeply, you know, political implications, and they empower different groups differently. We need to remember that. And so how do we align engineering work with directly advancing these causes of environmental protection, justice, peace and human rights at the scale that is necessary. And so that brings me to the title of the talk building structures for activist engineering. And the reason why I named the talk building structures for activist engineering is because it would force me to think about what we do about it. And I don't have any answers to it. And I circle these three words because I want to, or these three terms because they bear that defining right building structures and activist engineering and I use each one of those terms in a very specific way. Building of course is something that engineers do all the time we build things. Right. It's a matter of what we decide to build structures I'm going to define in just a moment, as well as activist engineering. Let's start with activist engineering first. activist engineering is something that I mentioned I've been thinking about for a few years and I coined it activist engineering perhaps because I was a graduate student at the time and I was a student activist at the University of Michigan, and I was like, Let's just call it activist engineering. activist engineering is about having engineers make explicit the values and the key drivers of why engineering is done, and having that knowledge shape how engineering is done. Fundamentally, as I say in the paper that's cited there at the bottom, fundamentally redefining contemporary engineering practice by exposing this political and value based nature of the work we do by applying social and ecological learning to technological design, and by imbuing a different sense of responsibility and engineers by moving the scope of engineering beyond solely technological development. The goal of activist engineering is to get engineers to ask and have a conversation about the question. What is the real problem, and does this problem, quote unquote, require an engineering solution. If an engineer can ask this question. That means can answer this question I should say that means that they can confidently ask this question and have the tools to answer it. And if they can ask this question that converts them from an order taker, which most engineers are in the end order takers to someone who is actively engaged, and will likely have a vested stake in the system being designed. So the next couple slides and I hope to not bore you with a lot of theoretical language here but I am using these terms specifically and my postdoctoral fellow who just left as a sociologist and he made me think very very critically about the way in which I use words. And one of the words that he made me start thinking about his structures. Now in sociology structures focus specifically on macro level things in society, and they are constituted by basically social forces and patterns of relationships institutionalized relationships between different parts of society. Within sociology, there are a handful of important structures that have been researched for a long time right again these are social forces that shape who we are. I studied family, religion, education, media, law, politics and economy, and I circle education, law, politics and economy because those are the kinds of things that perhaps engineers, engineering educators and academics perhaps might be influenced directly by or think more about. What's important about structures is that they organize the relationships that we have with each other. And they create patterns in these relationships hierarchies of who has more power than other than other people or what institutions or organizations have more power than others. And it gives us an ability to understand these power differentials. Now, you know we can take this to the context of engineering. We can say that, or ask what are the kinds of structures that shape what engineering actually is. Right, we can talk about primary education. We can talk about the pipeline that feeds engineering schools. We can talk about the way in which engineering schools like Arizona States University is engineering school or Michigan's engineering school or the school that you're affiliated with in Glasgow. The relationship your school has with different companies and government agencies, and the way in which all of that is influenced by science and technology policy. Okay, as individuals, we, we go through these structures, these structures shape the choices that are available to us. What we think is possible, right, it did sort of dictates what the bounds of acceptability and unacceptability are within our profession, right, so perhaps it is acceptable to talk about the way in which you can use the Navier-Stokes equations and new kind of differential equation solving method to design more efficient, more aerodynamically efficient wing tips that are on a plane, or that could be part of a missile system. It's okay to talk about that. But then, you know, is it okay to say, wait, don't missiles kill people. Why are we doing this. Oftentimes those kinds of conversations are not okay to have right so these social structures and the norms shape what is acceptable and unacceptable. And then the last point that I want to make here relates to do with the how I feel like a lot of the focus of a lot of research has been on organic versus sort of more structural aspects that shape engineering. So how much of the change that we are expecting engineering to take on or younger people at students to take on is unfairly burdensome on them, right. Engineering students might be leaving college and entering these structures that limit their ability to think differently about what they can do and what the possibilities are. And so we're sort of training engineers to fight a very, very, very big fight. Right. So to think about how we might have these issues unfold at larger scales or be addressed at larger scales I really do think it's important we think about economic incentives, a little bit more explicitly. So last slide here where I define a few terms again just to give you a sense of what I'm trying to get at with structures. So there are three other notions within sociology called fields capital and a habit is I'm just going to take them one by one very quickly. Fields are basically the arenas in which people express and reproduce who they are, and what they care about and how they think, right, and it's within these fields that people compete for different kinds of resources. And in fields, there are networks of people. So we can broadly think about engineering as a field, right, in which engineers who have been trained as engineers, go in and do what engineers do, whatever that is, right. And in our work, we use the knowledge and resources that we have in different kinds of ways. We're part of a network of people right I'm a part of a network that's affiliated with ASME. Capital is something that you've probably heard a lot about in different kinds of contexts and they're basically accumulated resources that you can use and that you can exchange. Economic capital, fairly obvious right the work that we do generates revenue it generates profit it creates certain kinds of wealth that wealth is accumulated in different companies or or different governments. The three others are perhaps a little bit less obvious to a technically trained audience like me, for example I had to think about these things a little bit more. Right, social capital has to do with networks of relationships, right, as an engine as an aerospace engineer and part of network of other aerospace engineers, right, and the fact that I have a PhD in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan, gives me a credential in which I can operate in this network in a way that people understand me, or I'm accepted. Cultural capital is a little bit different in that it has to do with how we think about what is happening in society so think about the weight that Elon Musk has in society, right. There is culture that he does work that shapes the way we think as engineers. Right, you can think about that as cultural capital, and lastly there's symbolic capital imagine if you, as an engineer scientist won the Nobel Prize for physics. Right, that gives you a certain kind of prestige and honor recognition that you can use now you can trade that you can enter spaces that you perhaps couldn't have entered before. Those are four different ways in which you think about capital. And again I'll get to why I'm defining these terms in just a moment. The last thing is a kind of obscure word called habitus, which is basically the norms or tendencies that guide our behavior and thinking right as we go through engineering school, we are trained and socialized and conditioned in different ways. Right, we gain capacities and skills, and we lose capacities and skills. Right, research is showing that as engineers go through their undergraduate curriculum, they care less and less about public welfare. Okay, so we form a particular set of norms and ways of being. And the reason why I bring all of this up is just really start thinking about what an alternative field of collaboration could look like. Can we even, can we even think about it. So, you know, I mentioned that there's a field of engineering and science with related capitals economic social cultural and symbolic and habitus and this is sort of the dominant, the dominant, or the status quo of engineering, right. And as I mentioned, I care about engaging with those who lack access to engineering services. And oftentimes those, those folks are organized in community groups. Right, and they have their own set of capitals, right, they fundraise differently they have different kind of well they have different kind of networks they have different kinds of cultural and symbolic capital. And oftentimes there can be a mismatch what works in engineering does not work in this other space. Right, and perhaps many of you who engage in on the ground work in, in different kinds of cultural context realize that what is valued as currency and engineering is not valued as currency in the local community that you're working in. Right, this is basically what I'm trying to get at here, right. Imagine, however, a field of collaboration where there is a new kind of overlap that defines or is defined by different economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital, where it, how we generate revenue, what we consider to be social currency in this space is different. And if we can start conceiving of a new field, we can really start imagining what should constitute it what can support it right, what are the structures that need to be in place for us to build out this new field. And I'm almost done with my remarks. This is the penultimate slide. So I want to throw out four premises to help us build something new premise number one volunteerism and pro bono efforts are only going to bite at the margins. The reason why I say that is because doing work through volunteerism and pro bono is in commensurate with the scale of the challenges that we face and the way in which engineering needs to be turned. And at one point, most people do not want to be entrepreneurs. Okay, there's been a significant focus on entrepreneurship within engineering curricula at least within the United States. Right, that's great. I think entrepreneurship is wonderful. It builds different kinds of skills, but most people want to just show up at career fair and get a job in doing something that they want to do. Right. There's a whole focus on entrepreneurship overlooks the way in which we are conditioned as engineers, and the risk that entrepreneurship actually takes to be able to be an entrepreneur requires you to do something that other people haven't done before. And at least within the United States where student debt is a big issue. The reason why I'd be unwilling to take that risk, and they just want to sign up for a job that gives them a living wage. Okay, premise number three, we cannot focus only on how students are being educated. Okay. The reason why I say that is because it's too organic. It's too long term. We're not really equipping them with the skills and the resources they need to be active political change agents. Right. And so what other resources or enthusiasm can we tap into, and I'll share a little bit about what what I've been trying to do and, you know, share a little bit about how successful we've been. And the last thing is if we build it, they will come. Okay, and this goes back to desire. There is a strong desire on the part of engineers to want to do this kind of work. So we built the constellation price we're just like let's just do this and let's see what happens. And it turns out that people care. So, this just gives you a sense of the ways in which we've been doing some projects within reengineered and I'll just highlight a couple of them. One is called project confluence, which basically is trying to mobilize more engineers and scientists to collaborate with community based organizations in the United States. There are three different aspects to that one has been focusing on academics and having that having them collab. Focusing on academics and understanding what collaboration actually looks like in a way where power dynamics are our point of inquiry for us and understanding. The second is with practicing engineers where we're working on a collaboration with Community Engineering Corps, which perhaps some of you already are familiar with and are again focusing on practicing engineers, not students, not academics. The last is working with retired engineers and help and using their expertise and time and knowledge to help us think about new kinds of business models that can support the work that we do. There's some work that is being funded by the Lemelson Foundation on changing the undergraduate curriculum at Arizona State University. There's some work that I'm doing with the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Lab to really change the way they think about how they frame technological R&D questions. This I think it could be one way that leads to some kind of structural change because if you could change the way a federal funding agency thinks about the work it does, it shapes, it has a significant amount of trickle down effect where faculty members might start thinking differently about the work that they do. The last thing that I'll mention again is the Constellation Prize, which is sort of perhaps an expression of the cultural and symbolic capital aspects of a new field of collaboration. So with that I end, and I just want to ask, what kinds of structures can we build? What policies need to be advocated for and where in the engineering ecosystem? What kinds of laws can we help write to build new kinds of structures? What kinds of businesses can we have build to move us beyond entrepreneurship? So I recognize that we need entrepreneurship to start off, but we want to normalize it. Right, we need entrepreneurship to move beyond entrepreneurship. So how do we make use of limited resources that exist in this space? I showed you the map of Appalachia. If I was given $10 million, it's entirely reasonable to spend all $10 million in one community and focus on impacts in that one community. But what about the thousand other communities that have similar issues? Is there a way to frame the engineering interventions in ways that use the limited resources in ways that have a larger impact at scale? What resources aren't we leveraging and who else needs to be at the table? And with that, I just want to open it up to conversation and you can tell me that I am crazy or I'm wrong. You can say whatever you want. Alright, let's get into it, Darshan. Thank you very much. You know, I started this seminar. Could you leave that slide up actually? Oh, yes, yes. Because I think that's a good one because we can discuss some of those. We do have a couple. So, first of all, just to answer a Q&A question in the chat itself. You can contact you, Darshan. You can either contact Darshan through engineering exchange. You can send it to us and we can contact any of our seminar speakers for itself along. But I believe his contact information was on the first slide, but it would also, is there any way that you would prefer them to contact? Yeah, I'll just put in my email address in the chat. Alright, perfect. So you can contact him directly as well. I want to get to some of these questions. We're getting a lot here in the Q&A. So this is when I started this seminar. We really wanted to bring in people with ideas to have a space where we could have this conversation because I do think that we are constructing, we are hoping to construct new modalities of engineering perhaps. In the language you're saying these fields of collaboration and habitus. And so I think this is a really great dialogue that we need to be having in engineering. I'm going to synthesize some of these questions. I have so many questions that I think we're just going to have to set a separate meeting because I'm so excited about talking with you about this. But let's go to the Q&A. So Balhok asks, why do you think the status quo for engineers as order takers? Why does that exist? Right. And so for example, I think that you, in my language, I would think about objectives. And so you were talking about the credentials or capital, like what you were trying to get out of your job, right, or why you're doing what you're doing. And I think that when you talk about, let's say, defense technologies, right, so a missile, I know that I have chosen not to work on missiles. Right. Like that's my my objective was like I want my efforts. That's not an interesting problem to me. Yeah. But someone else might be interested in that problem. You know, is it, are you saying that engineers should not be working on missiles? Or what is what is the question if someone wants to work on I really care about national defense. And therefore I want to make the best possible missile. And that's what I'm going to spend 30 years of my career is just getting new missile technologies for defense. This is an essential defense thing. Yeah. What is sort of your response to that. That structure and I have a response but I'm interested in your response. So I'm glad this question is brought up. I mean, it is central right because like most a lot of engineering is driven by this. You know, fundamentally, it's a question about values. Right. What are the values that we hold water and and how are those values shaped. And people hold different values. I, I can't argue with that. Right. Like, if somebody feels like something else is more important they're going to spend their time doing that. Right. I would just simply say that it is worth, and even me, like me as somebody who shares or who has shared these kinds of thoughts, I'm constantly questioning my values, and what I believe, and the assumptions that I'm making. And I feel like what activist engineering is about is just questioning yourself and questioning the values. And if you at the end of the day through your, you know, complicated thought process feel like you know what, I still can justify the work that I do. And if there are arguments for it here the trade offs that I'm willing to make, then I can't argue with that. Right. I think it's, it's about whether or not we as engineers are thinking very very critically about what, for example, the public is in public welfare. Who's, who's the public, right, we use that term a lot. Right. Is it just me and the people who look like me. It's the future generations. Right. So, um, so that's one thing is just simply about questioning all the terms that we use the words that we think the values that we hold. The second thing that I that I'll say is because I'm in the school for the future of innovation in society I've been thinking a lot about the word future. So we as engineers design technologies that of course could have an implication or set of implications now, but they have a set of implications for the future that we don't know right with capital investments with infrastructures that we build they're going to be there for a long time. Now the question then arises is, what kinds of thoughts and feelings and emotions and values do I want people in the future to hold. Why if we continue to invest in, let's just say nuclear weapons, right, that means we're making the assumption, or we are setting people up 2030 40 years from now to be thinking about and dealing with nuclear weapons and all the crap that comes with nuclear weapons. Right. So the investments that we are making are not just for now, they're shaping the possibilities of peace and justice and, you know, a verdant world in the future. And I think that needs to be incorporated into how we think about what we do as well. So Darshan you're you're touching on a topic and I'm going to jump around the Q&A here a little bit and try and emphasize because we have a lot of questions you have generated a lot of questions and luckily, you left a lot of time for us to have this discussion. So I'm really excited about it. We're right now talking about the future. And I think that one of the big questions is that sustainability, and we can define sustainability in different ways but in my mind the three pillars of sustainability are economic impact, social impact and environmental impact. Right. That's sort of the literature broadly generalized. The outcomes for sustainability the outcomes for peace and justice that you're talking about the outcomes for environmental are on the order of years if not decades as you're discussing. Right. The, the techniques that we use an analysis that we use in engineering currently are on the order of I'm going to sell you something next week right or like several years from now I'm going to have a product in the market, or I have this thing that I'm building right now or I'm working on right now. Right. So I guess the question comes up, you know, how do you deal with this difference so you talked about scale in terms of like, I interpreted it as scale of components like pieces of the system. So the question of scale in terms of engineering techniques that has to do with time scale, where we're evaluating things what is the strength, what is the force right now, right what is the functionality right now. And we predict those things we say okay, you know, if I build this thing it will have this functionality when I use it. Yeah, don't say, what is the impact of this on social society 30 years from now. Right like we're not, we don't have the, I don't believe we necessarily we have some of that for environmental stuff we're building that. But I think of the issues you brought up. Yeah, like how this is going to affect community organizations 30 years from now I'm like my drill. You know I don't know and I don't even have any way to even think about that. So I wonder this question of time scales. How do you, how do you address this if you want to be an activist engineer. How do you address this difference I'm doing engineering, like the traditional engineering I know, but I want to think about its impact on a very long time scale so how do you, how do you approach that. I don't know. Um, you know a simplistic answer and I use the word simplistic not simple a simplistic answer is, you know, what are the, what are the constraints that we're working with or what are the objectives of the design. Right, if we can maybe reframe the objectives of the design maybe we think a little bit differently I mean I think I've been thinking about this especially with renewable energy technology. Like, we're designing, you know, very sophisticated electrical systems, electronic systems that have particular lifespans that are going to be creating a whole other set of fairly insidious environmental and social challenges, 20 years from now. Right. And we're doing it because we're you know we're trying to deal with climate change and all that. And I don't know the extent to which people are saying like, you know what like the more and more we electrify things, the more and more we in which we design things in ways that they are not reusable or recyclable or whatever. Like, we are creating a different kind of toxic we're trading one problem for other. Go ahead, I want to ask you. Thank you so much Jesse yeah no I just I kind of want to layer on to that and I really appreciate first and foremost your your honesty and saying you know we don't have all the answers for this yet, but I'm curious about the role or the connectivity to frankly existing frameworks and methodologies that we advocate for actively within EGD or engineering development, particularly like human centric design which allow us to really focus on the end user and to unpack potential unintended consequences right at the beginning of the design or for example connecting some of the work we're doing within engineering to frameworks like the sustainable development goals, which also broaden the lens and and really start to help us to think through the, the societal impacts of what we're doing. Yeah, so any, and this is to me where I think I also want to see what your heavy questions of what laws need to be written what policies can we advocate for I want to understand how we are linking to this larger ecosystem. Yeah. I'm not sure if I was able to tease out a question and what you can let me let me let me let me try and rephrase. So I think because this address. This is a question that I think is several of the Q&A Q&A in the Q&A chats. Yeah, is, you've talked about structures we need to build new structures, right. But there are existing structures, which I think are affecting all of these things you're talking about. So, you know, I may not be designing to my values, because I need money to eat because I live in a capitalist system. Right. Yeah. And because people in my field credentialize and value, you know, new technical performance or innovative technical and why is Elon Musk, like the cool like what is cool engineering what is aspirational engineering. These are all things that are like vested power structures. Yeah, in the status quo that if you're like oh well we should be working on environmental things. I, you know, I had a review recently on a paper where they were like well why would the company care about this right like you said the company is there to make money. And so how do you think about like if we want to build these new structures, you're not doing it on a blank slate. So how do you interact with if we want to change the system, but you're within a system that wants to maintain the status quo. What is the what is that tension what is the way forward what are actions you might take to try and build structures locally. Does that address your question? Okay, I get it. I get it. Okay, so I'll just say two things. One is going back to the question about futures there are some interesting things that are happening globally that I think we can learn from so for example, in Wales, they have a political representative who represents the future. Right, there are ways in which people in Japan have been thinking differently about how the values or the kinds of things that people might care about in the future need to be brought into decision making now. And if we think about universal design and like human centered design and you know there's evidence to show that it just leads to better design. Maybe thinking about the future and in folding that into how we think about design and universality could lead to better impact now, not just for the future, but for now. Okay, now to your question related to interaction with the new and the existing. There's no way to get around the fact that there people have been socialized in a particular way and we, we have certain norms and expectations. What we are trying to do is simply try to create some kind of alternative start somewhere and see who signs up and hopefully over time. That leads to, I feel like I'm being very vague right now. So okay I'm working with, I'm working with some retired engineers to see whether or not we can design an engineering firm and monetize its work in a way where people who lack access to those services in the United States can afford those services. I don't know whether it's possible or not. But we're trying to build it. And if we build it. It might take a few years to start up, right, but can we get to the point where people, somebody can go to a career fair and say, I can make $90,000 working for oil and gas company x with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. And I can make close to $90,000 working on human rights as an engineer. I don't think that like basically what I'm trying to say there is we're trying to build something that does not assume that people will be willing to sacrifice. to pay to do the work that they care about. And the goal I think that sort of the pie in the sky is to design a firm, or, you know, if hopefully by us doing it other people are going to experiment with it as well. Right. Design a firm where no we should people should be paid $100,000 to work on social justice it shouldn't be that, oh you have to like work at, you know, minimum wage to do this kind of work. So if we can create that, then you're presenting a viable choice for somebody. And I think that if we can create a viable choice, then we perhaps have accomplished something significant. That's all I can say. This is a great conversation Darshan, I have one last question and then or is it, you know, should I turn it over to you right now what do you think. No, no, no, please go ahead I think there's a very. There's a lot of questions here. There's so many questions in this Q&A. And we're going to send all of these to you Darshan in writing. And then when we post the recording of this seminar, we can have your written responses right next to it. So any of the questions I've tried to synthesize some of like the main ideas in these Q&A to get to these questions that we're talking about right now. But obviously that's my interpretation of them. So I want to make sure especially with the precision that you're bringing to this this language and the methods from sociology and etc that you have a chance to say okay like for this question this is how I would address it in my thoughts and we can get those right next to the recording of this seminar so that's the first thing and also for anyone who's who's written any of those questions. One of the things that that struck me listening to you talk is that you talked about engineers like we engineers engineers as a group of people. And I agree that engineers I think really engineering being an engineer is a central part of people's identity when they have these credentials within our current field. Yeah, right. And, you know, in other countries my experience has been in other systems that engine being an engineer means different things. Yes. And even in the US, I would argue that most academics are not professional engineers. Yes. And, and perhaps, you know, someone who graduates with the bachelors, they're an engineer, like what makes you an engineer. Right. And I also think that a lot of these questions when you talk about credentialing and network and knowledge and these barriers. Part of it is who is an engineer currently based on the structures that we currently have. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I don't know that if it's necessarily about how we're teaching students. But I think an interesting question is, what is the, and one of that one of my students worked on is, what is it what does it mean, what is the context of the engineer that that in addressing a particular problem and how does that change how they do that solve that problem. Right. So, in different companies, you might address the same problem, even with the same values differently. Yes. And it's not like this physics, a political thing that you're discussing I think that we already are doing those we're just not discussing them. Yes. Right. So I thought your thoughts on what it means to be an engineer and the qualities and how that might change as we move towards activist engineering. Gosh. How can I summarize it quickly. I mean, first of all, I do want to recognize what you said Jesse that the cultures of engineering are different, not only, you know, within different disciplines like mechanical engineers was the arrow versus electrical or whatever. But we know from cultural studies and engineering studies that what engineering is in Sweden is different than what it is in Japan is different what it is in love right so I understand that want to recognize that. I guess, let me let me pose this question. So if we just think about disciplines, right. Yes, and you talk about disciplines you think might have more of an environmental but let's say civil and environmental engineering. I would argue that the other identities of people within civil and environmental engineering, the demographics of those disciplines are quite different than ones that have different values. And then perhaps the values are leading to people to self select into different disciplines to stay or continue in that discipline. Or perhaps maybe a reinforcing so that's a structure that you were discussing. Yes, right. And so, um, you know, I was wondering like how you thought about the interaction between who you are. And then also engineering training because you were talking about engineers as a group. Yes, and I think that there's just different types of engineer. Yeah, no I completely agree I'm not sure if I can like actually answer your question because I feel like you're making a fairly axiomatic statement. And there's not like, it's hard to argue that right. And so, I will sort of maybe riff on it a little bit to simply say that what you are raising is about diversity equity inclusion in a very interesting kind of way, because there are particular kinds of issues that people want come to engineering to try to solve. Right. And the dominant paradigm or the structures that exist only solve particular sets of problems and we equip engineer the particular mentalities right. And what that means is that people leave engineering because they feel like it's better that they feel like being a lawyer is going to be better than them being an engineer. So, if you want to affect, you know, indigenous rights in the United States or whatever, right, like piece of some people might say you know I'm going to leave engineering because this just is so dominant in a particular worldview and set of ideas that maybe a legal training is going to be more beneficial. So, to be able to address these kinds of challenges environmental human rights challenges requires those people to be a part of what we're trying to do in engineering, which requires us to then design different kinds of structure so that they can see themselves in it. There's sort of this like reflexivity between the structures that we have the, the diversity, the intellectual diversity that is brought to engineering and the problems that engineering can adequately be involved in addressing. I'm not saying in the end the engineers, like engineers have all of the answers but I do feel like engineering mentality and thinking and training is widely applicable in a whole bunch of different social and political context that we need to have those structures in place, so that we expand the diversity to be able to solve the kinds of problems that need solving. That's, that's great. Thank you very much. I think the last thing I'll say here and I'm turning it over to Yana is not a question. I really appreciate really delving into discussing values that I'm a design researcher. And so I really think about value rather than performance, right so I think design is about value rather than about performance so what is this worth to the person that we're designing it for. And how do we think about that. And I think that as engineers I think what you're bringing up bringing some of these techniques and language from sociology and other other disciplines. Is this idea that we should be maybe thinking about the philosophy of engineering and the philosophy of science, a little bit more deeply and explicitly. How do we think about engineering, and we've made a lot of decisions as a discipline in that space but we don't discuss it. So even discussing it in this way and having the language to discuss it in the spaces to discuss it is really important so I really want to thank you for that contribution to start us having this discussion in this way. So, and the precision of the language. Can I turn it over to Yana now because I could talk for hours about this. Can I just quickly say that I welcome the conversation so I wasn't able to like directly interact with the people answering the asking the questions. So please email me happy to talk by zoom or email, like I feel like this just needs to be bigger discussions. I want to talk about it and question all the assumptions that I have and question the assumptions that you have and that we have about what we're trying to do. Thank you very much. I want to thank everyone for the questions and I'm going to turn it over to Yana. Yana, please. Thank you. Thank you Jesse and thank you Darshan, we are over time but I think it was time incredibly well spent. I can't echo enough how critical these conversations are and how much we appreciate the time we've taken to spend with us and frankly I see this as an opportunity for us to really arrive at some shared value. And I really first year are really eager to provide the platform for us to do that. Obviously you've crowded in and brought in a lot of really interested participants day the questions have been incredibly rich and I think from the detail, you can see that the folks that are attending today's seminar are thinking about these issues also from all parts of the world. So it's an indicator that perhaps the tide is shifting, and that it's time for us to collectively have this dialogue and challenge the traditional notions under under which the engineering has been governed. So, with that, I'm going to wrap it up I know nobody else wants to hear and more bombastic comments and the recording of the seminar will be available in our platform questions will be addressed directly next to that seminar and with that, I like to thank all of you for joining us, please do join us also for the conversation coming up on May 3, alongside the United Nations Science Technology Innovation Forum. And I wish you all a good afternoon, a good evening, a good morning even depending on where you're joining us from and stay tuned for the next seminar. Thank you everyone. Take care. Bye.