 Hello everyone. Welcome. Good evening or good morning, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. We're pleased to bring you the final installment of the 2020 E4C seminar series. This series aims to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. We host a new research institution monthly to learn about a new research webinar monthly to learn about their work advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Today's webinar is presented by Dr. Tanya Rossenquist and Dr. Nick Brown. My name is Mariela Machado and I'm program manager at E4C. I'll be one of your moderators for today's webinar alongside with Dr. Jesse Austin Breneman. Welcome. This series was launched by Dr. Jesse Austin Breneman who leads ACME's Engineering Global Development Research Committee. And Jesse has been a close collaborator of E4C for a long time. He's the assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. His PhD in mechanical engineering in 2014 from MIT. He also holds an SM in mechanical engineering and a bachelor's in ocean engineering from MIT. He currently is the director of the Global Design Laboratory. The group focuses on developing design processes and support tools to help multidisciplinary design teams think at a system level when performing complex system design tasks. This includes investigating the best way to incorporate system level interactions between stakeholders in emerging markets into the design decision making process. This seminar you're participating in today will be archived on our E4C site and our YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed on this slide. The presentation on ACME webinars is available on the E4C site. E4C members will receive invitations to upcoming seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments or recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact us at research at engineering4change.org as you're seeing on the slide. We also invite you to share your feedback at the end of the seminar series to inform our strategy, especially for 2021. So we really encourage you to be active participators and we'll share this form right after when Nick and Tanya started the webinar. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with the hashtag E4C seminar series. Before we move on to our presenters, I would like to tell you a bit about engineering4change. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform and a 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 undeserved communities. 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We're thrilled to have you. And we're very excited for you being a part of this webinar from all over the world. A couple of additional instructions before we get started, you can use the chat window, the one that you just used to share remarks during the session. And if you have technical questions or technical difficulties, just send a private chat to the engineer for change admin. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble try hitting stop and then start or reconnect once more and human or just trying to open the Zoom with a different browser. And during the seminar, please use the Q&A window because we will allocate 15 minutes of this of this session to Q&A. So be sure to type your questions to the presenter. Click the Q&A icon. If you cannot see it at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slides will gather these questions and ask the presenters at the end of the webinar. So be sure to send us your questions in advance. So without further to say, and I have taken too much time now, I just want to introduce our incredible presenters for today. Dr. Tanya, Rossenquist and Dr. Brown, both of these great speakers are lecturers in humanitarian engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia and co-leads of the RMIT's humanitarian engineering lab. I will first introduce Tanya. Dr. Tanya graduated, has a master's in engineering design and innovation from the Technical University of Denmark and her PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney. She has, she leads a highly transdisciplinary research that explores the relationship between people and technology and draws on participatory design, co-design and human-centered design. Tanya has conducted a qualitative research in low income communities in the Asia-Pacific region on topics related to the unsustainability of community and household-based water and sanitation services. Tanya is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Humanitarian Engineering. Welcome, Tanya. We also have Dr. Nick Brown that graduated with a master's of engineering, civil and environmental engineering and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Nick research work focuses on the application of design, technology and education for social social change. Nick is the domain leader of the humanitarian engineering community of practice, focusing on defining competencies on education practices for humanitarian engineering, which is what they're speaking, what we're here to hear today about. So without further to say, I just want to welcome and say thank you for joining us today to Dr. Nick Brown and Dr. Tanya Rosenquist. Thank you so much. Over to you. Thank you. Popping on some slides. Hopefully those should be visible now. Yes, they are. Great. Wonderful. Nick, over to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It's absolutely fantastic to be here and thank you for that fantastic introduction. It's amazing to see the number of people that joined us from around the world, especially to those people in Perth because that means you're getting up very early this morning. So thank you for joining us. And I know that there are some people I think in the in the East Coast of the US and even further further East. So thank you for staying up late at night. The marvels of the modern internet and world. But yesterday, myself and Tanya will take hopefully about half an hour to talk a little bit about teaching humanitarian engineering and providing an Australian perspective on that. And then hopefully there'll be plenty of time for questions. We're also going to be presenting some of our concepts around how we teach some of the frameworks and so on. And we'd also love to actually receive some feedback on that and get some additional perspectives. So yeah, that's that's kind of what we plan to do today. But I'm going to start by talking about us to just indicate that Australia's first peoples are actually the oldest continuous living culture on earth. Western science traces the culture to be at least 60,000 years old, but I've met plenty of Aboriginal people who tell me now it's much longer than that. There's actually no treaty currently between non-indigenous and Aboriginal people in Victoria, which is the state where me and Tanya live and work. And there and the land that we occupy is actually unceded. That means that myself and Tanya are essentially uninvited guests in someone else's home. And whilst we're here on Aboriginal land, we acknowledge the traditional owners and commit to preserving the land waterways and wildlife of the country we're on. Aboriginal Australians were actually the world's first engineers. There are countless examples of engineering creative problem solving around Victoria and around Australia. The Budjbim cultural landscape itself is located on the traditional country of the Gunja Jamara people. It was a set of waterways, a system of waterways and channels that have been maintained for over 6000 years. It was used to funnel and drive fish and eel stocks and maintained the sustainability of that to make sure that there was food every single season. That site, the Budjbim cultural landscape was recently recognized with World Heritage Listing by UNESCO. And I think that if we respond to the offer of knowledge by the Gunja Jamara people, then we might ask ourselves as engineers, how might we consider the design life cycle of the next product or system that we developed to be 6000 years? Or maybe even 600. I think that in our current engineering thinking too much of our stuff is on this very short term basis. What an amazing kind of drive and pressure to try and think about, okay, how could we make it longer? And so it's really important to understand that we work and teach on country all the time. And this is really important for engineering to have a genuine commitment to reconciliation, which is much needed. What you may have seen in making international news was the recent destruction of cultural sites by engineering companies at Juncan Gorge. And also there's been recent removal of the giraffe growing birthing trees along a highway expansion very close to Melbourne. It reminds us that all engineering project work takes place on country and we should be respectful of that. And it also reminds us that engineering is more than just the technical and that we need to be conscious and reflect culture, society and people. We ask you to consider whose country you're on, how was that land obtained, and if it was questionably obtained, are the indigenous population marginalized and what are you doing for reconciliation. I would like to start with knowing whose country you're on and acknowledging the traditional custodians of that country. So I'd like to start today by acknowledging the people of the warung and boring language groups of the Eastern Kula nations on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of RMIT University. We also respectfully acknowledge the ancestors and elders past, present and emerging, as well as acknowledging the traditional custodians and the ancestors of the land and waters across Australia, where we conduct our business. A little more recent history than 60,000 years ago, we come on to thinking about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that's right we're going for the big one. I'm sure I don't need to go into this in too much detail, but over 70 years ago in 1948, we have this set of human rights, everyone has the right here to these essential services. We've included our school 26 here as well because of course there's the engineering, it's the education provision as well. But yet over 70 years later there's still billions of people without access to these essential services. More recently, the need to provide these essential services in a timely manner has been summarized in the global goals for sustainable development, of course, engineering for change, being a key driver of some of their work. And we know that engineering has always had a role to play in national development and providing benefit benefits to societies. We think that we from our work we start to see in the 1960s, the engineering profession starting to engage in more longer term humanitarian and development work. And of course there are loads of engineering organizations and groups working towards sustainable futures in development contexts, including organizations of course like engineering for change engineers against poverty engineering world health engineers without borders, and so on and so on. There are also a number of for profit engineering companies that are starting to do more work in this space. And there are two organizations that I know based in Australia have do a lot of work in the development space for profit. Tetra Tech is a huge one now coffee I think is part of the same group. But this leads into this concept of engineering in a development space, working with marginalized communities, which brings us on to our definition, or our understanding of humanitarian engineering this thing that we call humanitarian engineering in Australia. So for us, humanitarian engineering is taken as the application of an engineering discipline, such as you know civil mechanical aerospace whatever to a specific humanitarian or development context a response. In this way, we consider it as more of an application area, but requiring additional dedicated knowledge skills attributes competencies, rather than necessarily a unique discipline by itself. We're aware that this is slightly broader understanding than in other countries. For example, we understand that in the US humanitarian engineering encapsulates predominantly non US development was in the UK humanitarian engineering tends to be related to disaster response and recovery. I really like here, the vision to to summarize with the vision that either be Australia proposes, which is, imagine a world where everyone has access to the engineering knowledge and resources required to live a life of opportunity free from poverty. For me that really summarizes the goal and the vision of humanitarian engineering. Specifically in Australia, we consider three contexts for humanitarian engineering application. The first is disaster response. So imagine that there was the Gorka earthquake in Nepal. And, you know, engineers were some of the first people from Australia through the organization radar which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with to get on the ground. We needed water engineers to get water systems back up and running we need telecommunications engineers to get the communication systems back on so we could actually talk to each other and the disaster response could be coordinated. Of course, we need to structure engineers to go there and say, yes, this building is stable this building is not stable, you know, and to make those rapid assessments. So engineers are critical in that first phase of response when lives are on the line. And also, then see, okay, there's not necessarily an immediate emergency response required, but there's longer term development. And that's where organizations like engineers or that borders and the like start to step in. So this is where we look at longer term capacity development and capacity building the classic statement of we don't build bridges we build people that idea of capacity building. And looking at more of those okay well people have the thing that they need right now but now we need to look at how we improve that over time access to those essential services. And then also in Australia, we also consider an additional space assistive technology or inclusive design, this idea that actually everyone should have access to those services that they need. A good example of this is actually the organization ability made. So they are a four purpose organization, not for profit and they're also not a not for profit they're allowed to make profit, but they're for purpose. They are based in Sydney and they support kids who need custom made orthotics and prosthetics, and they use all their engineering skills to do that. Now again that's a service that is greatly needed, but there's no money to be made in that space or certainly not a lot of money. But it's still in that space of working in these these these areas, I should just quickly note that the pictures here are just illustrative of these spaces. So, this then leads us into the education space. And I was personally inspired to gain more interest and move into the humanitarian field when I read parts of the engineering world engineering report by UNESCO. There was this statement in there in the opening blurb really, which was stated and it's different to the one on screen but I want to read it out. It says in the now and in the years to come, we need to ensure that motivated young women and men concerned about problems in the developing world continue to enter the field engineering insufficient numbers. And it is that that driver that okay well we need to make sure that there's motivated people coming into this space and we'll touch back on that a little bit later. But that's a really key framing of what we are trying to do in the education space. Don't forget that in Australia, as I'm believing very majority of the world, you need a tertiary education to really practice engineering. So therefore universities have a really major role to play in how we develop those, those students. So this leads us on to the rise of humanitarian engineering in Australia. There's so many organizations, as we talked about there, working for poverty alleviation and social justice that were actually established by students or academics. So there's always been a connection between these humanitarian engineering and humanitarian engineering education in Australia the growth of humanitarian engineering education really kicked off in 2006. When the first program started to emerge, although the, the actual term humanitarian engineering only really became commonplace. Since we held the year of humanitarian engineering which took place in 2011, and this was led by the peak body for engineering in Australia, engineers Australia. I think that something that really helps with how we build a culture of humanitarian engineering practice is the fact that we have quite supportive workplaces and education spaces as well. I have friends and family who are from the US, and I know that's a lot of you are from the US today. And I think that for some of you it might be quite surprising the concept that an engineer working in it for an engineering company could take a year out of their job and go and do a year placement with a development organization overseas. Working on humanitarian engineering projects and then come back a year later and be welcome back into the same role. So a lot of my US based friends tell me, yeah, they could come back but they wouldn't have the job, you know, that there seems to be a slightly, slightly tougher workplace environment there. Again, similarly, I know we've got some people on the call here who've even had placements with a radar, the idea that you could be working at an engineering in an engineering office and at the moment notice be called up on placement and be deployed overseas. Again, it's part of the culture I think of Australia where that's considered just part of what you do part of the engineering profession, and it's seen as strengthening your role in your main engineering position. But coming back to Australian education. Australia is a big place, and our universities are generally spread out. We have about 25 million and over 10 million of those people live in either Sydney or Melbourne's are just two cities. It's sort of comparable in size roughly to the USA but with about 10% of the population. We only have 37 universities that offer engineering degrees, and most of these universities are centered around the major multiple major metropolitan areas in larger cities such as Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne Adelaide and Perth. We had someone who was based in Perth on the call today. And just for context, if you're not quite if you're not too familiar with Australia then Perth is sort of roughly where San Diego is on this map of the US but along on the coast. And there's another city called Adelaide, which is another state capital which is sort of where Dallas is on the map there. And between those two cities in Australia, there's pretty much nothing. So you have this huge rural urban split. In fact, there's one road that goes between those two places through this place called the Nullarbor. And last summer, there was a bushfire. It takes 28 hours by the way to drive that route on the roads that we have. And last summer there was a bushfire, and it closed that road there was a fire, literally, you know, passing over that road fire service closed it down. Well, just to put it into perspective, the diversion that was put into place added an additional 49 hours to your drive to your original 28 hour drive because the diversion took you all the way around the coast up to Darwin down through Alice the very middle of Australia and down to Adelaide. So what I'm saying by that is, we're a big country, we're also quite spread out, and this creates a real strong urban rural divide so a lot of universities are in the urban centers, and a lot of students will live in urban centers that also means that for a lot of students who already lived there. They're actually attending university in their home city, and quite frequently live continue to live at home with their, their family, and their parents, rather than moving into a different space. I just think that's quite an interesting cultural point that that I wanted to share. Conversely, I think that I could see that there are at least almost 400 colleges in the US that offer engineering schools, engineering degrees, and I'm sure they're probably more I know that there are, you know, thousands of universities in that space, but I just wanted to provide a little bit of context as to the university space in here. So, moving on to humanitarian engineering programs, we can see that since 2006 as I mentioned before when we started to get these programs into play. We can see that there's an increased engagement with different programs, and these are ramping up what's really cool is these are national programs I've just taken data from a paper that we did with some colleagues a couple of years ago where we were looking at the changes and the trends. And you can see here that think programs like the EWB challenge which is a national first year engineering program, picked up a lot of initial numbers and initial drive and led a lot of the growth of humanitarian engineering. The cool thing about this is that for most university students, they will all get to do the challenge which we'll talk about later. We start to see other programs creeping in so towards 2014 the research programs really ramped up so this is for final year students who want to focus their final year piece of research on a humanitarian topic. And now we're starting to see since 2015, the growth of of these immersive courses where students actually spend few weeks overseas in an international context. So there's also a lot of universities which are now starting to introduce their own programs so since 2015, we know of at least 10 universities, which have launched humanitarian engineering courses or programs. The University of Sydney sort of really led the way with its, it has essentially what caused itself a major but in reality it's a set of four courses. And other universities like the University of Adelaide approved to commence degrees. The University of Canterbury in the in New Zealand has a diploma in global humanitarian engineering. University of New South Wales has courses commencing in humanitarian engineering and humanitarian focus so there's, there's more programs coming online, where it's quite dedicated. And this recently came up at a conference I attended with the fact that actually in Australia, one of the limitations of our engineering programs is how many core courses or how rigid the core structure is. My understanding of the US system is that you can almost choose your own adventure as long as you do some core engineering elements there's a lot more flexibility in some of the, some of the other courses that you can choose. And it's pretty much if you choose engineering, you're doing four years of solid engineering courses with maybe one or two free electives, but even them, those they try and get you to do something technical. There's a lot less space to start saying right actually do you know what I'm going to take a social science course, or I'm going to take languages or I'm going to take anthropology. So this means that we have to try and work within these frameworks to develop this space and see what we can do to bring in more education. So very quickly, I just want to run you through how we're conceptualizing going back to that UNESCO concept of we need more motivated young men and women joining the engineering profession concerned with issues in the developing world. So if we run through here we can start to see that we're thinking about how students are motivated. We see the next generation of students coming through who are very passionate about issues of climate change this was the school strike for climate action that took place in Melbourne last year. This is school students thousands of school students leaving school saying we demand better work better action on climate. These these students are coming through our doors next semester, and it's exciting the fact that there's clearly the motivation, however motivation by itself is potentially not everything. I've conceptualized this little concept here of saying like look, we need people who are motivated but they also need to hold the capability. There's an issue that potentially those people who are really motivated to make a difference but actually don't have the ability to can be quite dangerous. So actually to my colleague and friend Chris Berzer who I think is on the call today. His recent paper, Humanitarian Engineering Education Fieldwork and the risk of doing more harm than good is a nice place to start to understand this this concept of, you know, actually, you can do more harm than good if you don't have the capability. And there's plenty of examples of this. Moving forward, we can then see that we want to try and get people in this motivated, they're capable, but I would say that we need to add in this third element as well, which is diversity as well we need diverse people, people who come in with these different people who are able to different ways of working to combine into this space. So this is framing, I guess our overall thoughts for humanitarian engineering at Australia at MIT. How do we get people who are highly motivated who are highly capable and come from diverse backgrounds. And this is what we see as the role of our university. How do we move people in these different directions, and how we are attracting aligned students. I have probably gone a little bit over time. So I am going to quickly handball as we say in Australia on to Tanya to talk more about the actual initiatives that were All good Nick, thank you for that it was really interesting so it was worth the extra little bit of time. So I'm going to pivot a bit. I've provided a really wonderful context about what humanitarian engineering is in Australia and the broader context within which we work. And, and how we see our role as teachers of humanitarian engineering students is idea of, of moving increasing capability and increasing motivation as well. Now I'm going to talk about how we specifically do that through our courses. So, as was mentioned in the beginning, Nick and I recently launched what we call the humanitarian engineering lab. At the moment it's, it's more or less just a website, but essentially it what is going to be transformed into and it's slowly transforming into is a network of students and academics who are passionate about Humanitarian engineering. So we're trying to really galvanize bring together all the people at RMIT that are already there who are already working in this space and bring them together under the umbrella of humanitarian engineering. So how that looks is that there is Nick and I, we have a couple of PhD students and a growing number of both capstone students and master students and capstone students in Australia is essentially the final year engineering students. So the in Australia that is for fourth year engineering undergraduate students. So we kind of form the lab. And then we have a bunch of interested academics are already working in humanitarian settings. And then obviously a range of industry partners that provide projects that provides case studies for the students and for our research as well. And together, all these people at the humanitarian engineering lab we are trying to provide humanitarian education to both current students past students and also practitioners in the field. And building on what Nick says about the conceptualization of humanitarian engineering education and RMIT, I'd say what we really start with is trying to dismantle this common notion of what an engineer is. If you Google the word engineer you see a certain subset of the population say a certain gender, a certain skin color and also a certain age represented by those pictures and obviously everybody in hard hats yellow hard hats. Personally being an engineer I've never worn in hard hat, except for rock climbing so I'm not. I'm not sure what what you as engineers are there how often you wear hard hats but we definitely feel that this doesn't really represent the broader engineering field in various ways. So we really want to question this idea of what an engineer is trying to make it something different. So obviously, like every good engineer we do believe that engineering has to do with technology it's about designing technology improving technology. And there is probably a foundation of design you need some design skills you need to be able to lead a design process and you need to have the tools to go to go through that process as well to develop these technologies. But as I'm sure a lot of people on the call, at least I know a few people on the call that do agree with this engineering also has a big social dimension. Engineering is really a social technical discipline, the social and the technical need to go hand in hand. And as Nick was just mentioning engineering students in Australia or at least at RMIT, they cannot simply go and take a sociology class or an anthropology class. So for our humanitarian engineering classes, courses, it's really important that we provide that social lens that we teach them and demonstrate how they can better understand the social context within which they are working. But we also think that it's important that engineers understand the broader context within which they work, not just the social dimensions. Nick was just mentioning in the beginning of his talk, the importance of in Australia of working on country, the concept of working on country, and how it's really important that when we as engineers go out and work whether in Australia overseas in America, that we step very gently and that we consider what is already there, the long cultural traditions and histories of that land, and the people that occupy it. And, and take that into consideration in terms of context obviously could also be the political the institutional the governance context the ethical context, and so on. So we try and give our engineers this broader perception of what engineering is, and we really reconceptualize this as we are trying to make engineers, not specialists, but we're trying to turn them into GPs. With the concept of GP really what we mean is that when you go into a doctor's office and you meet with your GP they're not a specialist in anything, but they kind of know a little bit about everything. So they can sort of, they can diagnose your problem, and they can point you in the right direction. And that's what we are trying with our humanitarian engineering courses we're trying to teach our students. Not so much the technical skills, but how to go into a context to diagnose an issue and then figure out which kind of specialties do we need to involve so we can solve this, this, this problem. And this really features into the fact that we don't need 1000 humanitarian engineering graduates in Australia, we just don't there is just not a market for it they would not have any jobs. But what we really need is a lot of engineers who are really good at understanding the social dimensions, the broader context that they're working in, and can go out and diagnose problems, whether in Australia, whether overseas, whether in a very developed context or in a lower developed context. So we're trying to teach them humanitarian engineering, not necessarily to work as humanitarian engineers, but to have the those skills and expertise that humanitarian engineers working overseas need. So they can apply it in their mining job or in their energy job back in Australia. So, the way we do this the way we transform our existing specialized engineering students into these more GP engineers is that we kind of work with both humanitarian content in our courses and also with the humanitarian context. Kind of, I think a lot of people in in Australia has this idea that humanitarian engineering is simply the application of engineering in a different context in a low income marginalized vulnerable context. But we believe that there is also a lot of specialized content in this space, not just a different context. So we have a range of courses over our program so as I said before the undergraduate program at RMIT is four years and then afterwards you can do a post postgrad. If you have done an undergrad at RMIT you can just do one year of postgrad if you come in from outside well you have to do two years to get your master's degree. But from the very first year at RMIT we expose our students all engineering students at RMIT to humanitarian engineering contexts. So, at the very first year we have a course called Introduction to Professional Engineering Practice and I'll talk a bit more about that a bit later. Actually, I'll talk about all these courses a little bit later. And so at second and third year we kind of recommend that students that are interested in this space take an elective that's called humanitarian experiential learning project. They also have the opportunity to do capstone project and for master students doing environmental engineering, sorry, they can take a dedicated elective in humanitarian engineering. And then we also for people that are doing a master's degree with us, we recommend they do a thesis on humanitarian engineering. And as you can see there is introduction to professional engineering practice. Our IPEB is purely context. They don't get that much content about how to work as a humanitarian engineer, but they learn about the context. And for, for example, the humanitarian engineering master course, it's more about content. They don't actually get exposed that much to the context. But the rest of the courses in between we aim for them to both learn about the content and also not only learn about the context but also experience the context, ideally traveling to the context within which they are working. And all these courses or these offerings together kind of creates a neat pathway. RMIT is not one of those universities in Australia that has a dedicated program. We do not have a minor or major in humanitarian engineering. RMIT doesn't have that concept of minors and majors, so we can't simply, but we still have a full pathway of courses that can kind of give you the humanitarian engineering specialization if you so wish. So onto the specific courses. So introduction to professional engineering practice is a common course for all first year engineering students that make coordinates. And it has approximately 1000 engineering students entering this one course every single year, and they will all complete a humanitarian engineering project. This project is proposed by engineers without borders Australia. They have what they call the EWB challenge, which is a national competition where they provide a website with a lot of material that really introduces the students to a context. Last year it was an indigenous, the context of an indigenous communities in the far far north part of Australia in Cape York. And the website includes pictures quotes a lot of explanations of life in this community. It also includes like 3D walkthroughs of community so the student can really on a distance, get a insight into into life in this community so this is exposure to the context. This challenge EWB has run it for the past decade. And really what we see it as at RMIT is a way of really motivating our students to get interested in working in context that are different from their own context that are different culturally context that are different in terms of development level. So Nick's Nick square before really about increasing motivation of as many students as possible to explore this as a potential career opportunity. And the pictures you see here the big picture with the orange carpet is actually from the world engineering convention last year where some of the students got the chance to present their solutions to the convention delegates so it's quite a big deal here in Australia. I think is it today or yet yesterday and today engineers about borders were running a big event where the students get to showcase their solutions online this year. The second to third year course we have we call the humanitarian experiential learning project and this is really one of our core humanitarian engineering courses at RMIT. It's a course dedicated to humanitarian engineering and it's an elective for that all engineering students can take so far to date we have had about 300 students take take or go on experiences as part of this course or just before that course was started. And we have kind of gotten in about one and a half million Australian dollars of mobility funding to support this course. So really the course provides a set of workshops for the students some workshops before a experience and some workshops after an experience the pre experience workshops really set the scene. Introduce the students to humanitarian engineering content so really teaches them about interview techniques about ethical practice about cross cultural context and how to navigate that. Then they go on an experience which pre covered has been overseas to countries like Nepal in the Cambodia and Timor-Leste where they spent two weeks or three weeks four weeks sometimes overseas. We as RMIT do not do those or like organize those trips those are partner organizations that organize them partner organizations like engineers with borders on bound and pollinate energy. So that gives students a fantastic experience the student then come back. Having had a brilliant couple of weeks and then we have them at RMIT where we have a couple of extra workshops to really support the students and reflecting on that experience and figuring out how can they use what they've learned overseas in an engineering context in Australia again this idea of making them engineering DPs rather than humanitarian engineers they may never work in that context again but the skills that they've learned overseas can be applied in a domestic context as well. I have to mention that the students really love these experiences this is a very popular course and always gets tremendous feedback not surprisingly. Obviously with COVID this has been a bit challenging students cannot travel overseas. We are very lucky in Australia we hardly have any COVID cases anymore and life is more or less back to normal which I'm sure not many other parts of the world can say this at this point but we still can't travel overseas. Obviously the Australian borders are more or less to shots. So this coming semester we will be doing a virtual experience we will still be running this course but now with a virtual experience in the middle which will still be delivered by partner organizations specifically on bound and pollinate energy. So we'll run the course in January and stay tuned feel free to contact us to hear how that goes. We don't know yet but it will be really interesting to see. So it will still be a two to four week experience that the partners are in control of where they will teach them how to work in a humanitarian setting and specifically get them to work on specific projects. So they will still be doing design projects but virtually. So yeah at very different experience I'm sure. For the undergraduate we also as I mentioned have capstone projects and this is really where we don't even we don't just work on creating motivation or giving them the skills as the previous two courses but here we really focus on impact. So we want the students to have impact here they've already through the other two courses they've been motivated to do it they've gotten the skills to do it. Now it's time to to have real world impact. So we have have a few dozen of capstone projects final year engineering projects each year specializing or focused on humanitarian engineering. And this is a picture from actually one of mixed groups last year where they worked on a pickle bank pickling bank. So a bank of pickles essentially in Timor-Leste. So those issues with food preservations and pickling is quite an amazing way of preserving food. So this pickling bank kind of teaches people and supports people in pickling and also storing food so we can increase food preservation in this context. So just one example of real world impact that we're trying to have with these projects. Another big project ongoing program I would even call it that we have at RMIT is called self-sufficiency and sustainability in remote South Pacific Islands. We have gotten a lot of funding from the Australian government to have an ongoing educational program that's now run for the past three years where engineering students each year. Visit the same community in Fiji in a place called the Yasawa Islands and conduct projects. So we're specifically working with two community Moira and Kese and we're trying to develop projects that are continuing year by year by year. So we over the long term have a real practical impact for these communities. So just as an example, one project that we've been working on for the past three years is improving access to clean water within the community. So the first year the students conducted the survey drinking water sources and really tried to figure out what was the quality and quantity of water available. They both have water springs and rainwater tanks and groundwater. So really trying to understand the context of water. Also interviewing community members to try and figure out what are their priorities and interests, looking at different technical solutions, water filters, solar steel, what not. And really this last year a big focus for one group has been to develop a five year action plan to really enhance the access to safe drinking water in this community. And as you can see on that bottom picture to the right part of this has also been to train community members in actually conducting their own water quality testing. So when we like now happened with COVID we actually couldn't travel there. We still have local capacity that we can work with to actually continue this project. So this semester local collaborators and the local partners actually conducted quite comprehensive research for us, tested the water quality of all the water sources and provided that data. And we hope to continue similar work next year as well. Another example from that same project is colleagues that have actually worked with communities again to monitor microplastics. So they don't have necessarily much plastic in the Yassava Island themselves, but it comes through the ocean so it lands on the beaches. So this group have worked with local partners to actually have them map. You can see in the bottom picture here how they're mapping all the small tiny bits of microplastic. So yeah in a virtual world we kind of continue these projects and we think also actually working in a better ethical way with international development. We're actually shifting our focus rather than us traveling there and conducting the research. We are now working with local partners and building their capacity to conduct their own research. We are slowly running out of time so I'm going to probably skip a little bit of this, but just to mention we also have a dedicated humanitarian engineering master course. So just in summary, the entire program sort of have somewhere between a thousand and eleven hundred first year students. It's really about increasing motivation. We have the humanitarian experiential learning project. It's really about increasing their capability next model before. And then when we get to capstone and final thesis, it's really about having impact creating change out in the real world. Also just to mention that we recently were lucky enough to get a couple of PhD students on board and we actually got more than 30 applications for two positions. So we definitely think that there is a growing interest in not only undergraduate and master level introduction to humanitarian engineering, but also PhD level. So we're really excited to explore this further and hope to get more PhD students in the future. So just quickly our take on the future of humanitarian engineering in Australia and there are other humanitarian engineering educators from Australia on the call I've seen. So maybe they can pitch in in the chat box if they disagree with this with what I'm saying now just in case we all have different perspectives. But what we really see is that if we look at the cohort of students in Australia from the 17 to 18 year olds is about 50 50 men and women. And we also see humanitarian engineering interestingly is about 50 50 men and women. So there's a lot of females that take humanitarian engineering courses which we're really excited about and really happy about. However, it doesn't really correspond with with the distribution of gender within the engineering discipline overall. So if we look across the university, it's probably more female if we look within engineering is typically more male students. So when we when we sort of take the females and put them into humanitarian engineering some other disciplines might have less have less females there. So really in the future what we really want humanitarian engineering to do is not kind of just take the motivated students and that be a lot of female students. We really want to shift, as I said the notion of what engineering is we want more people more diverse cohort, not just gender but also other types of diversity, bring them into engineering. So we really want to shift the notion of what engineering is so maybe we can try and draw some students from other engineering disciplines. So we hope that is going to happen. Also in Australia, we're very excited to see that humanitarian engineering is not not just something happening within universities anymore. Last year the engineers Australia like the peak body for engineers in Australia launched the humanitarian engineering community of practice. So we're really seeing it not only becoming like an academic discipline but also really becoming out becoming a discipline out there in the practical world as Nick mentioned several consultancies are taking it on board as well. And IEEE has recently or is going to launch an interest group in human technology in Australia as well. Last but not least in Australia we this year got what we call a field of research code in humanitarian engineering which is massively important in Australia. This is how we track all our research and without this specific dedicated code humanitarian engineering engineering was engineering other, which basically means we don't know really know what it is. So now it is a dedicated research discipline which is going to change a lot for us. I'm going to finish there and just say thank you so much for having us and feel free to reach out if you're interested in in what we're doing if you're interested in collaborating. We didn't talk about our research but happy to talk about that as well look us up on LinkedIn wherever you can find us. Thank you. Thank you, Tonya and Nick for sharing all of all of these exciting program developments and your conceptualization of humanitarian engineering with us in this seminar I think it's massively useful and inspiring for those of us in the US are hoping to get to these. So we're also working on building these types of programs and you know it's really really impressive to see what you guys have achieved. We have some questions and the question and answer so I'm going to try and synthesize some of those in the few minutes that we have left. So one of the things that I wanted to get to maybe combine a couple of these questions together. Could you talk a little bit more about the difference between what is humanitarian engineering content. And what you might consider traditional engineering content right so you're saying we want to shift, or what I heard was that you want to shift sort of. Okay, like let's shift what engineering means like we think that we'll, you know, we are doing is engineering but humanitarian engineering we have different courses, we have the social component we have these other things that you've discussed. So maybe collaborate a little bit specifically maybe both in the type of project. So is it a, you know, relief, you know emergency disaster situation versus a more long term sustainable development you mentioned these different areas. I imagine the content is probably different or the approach might be different for those situations. I'm also looking at, you know, across organizations across sort of everyone who's working in this field of research code. What does that, what does that mean to you in terms of the content we're delivering to students like what's what's what separates it I guess. A big question. Maybe I'll have a first punt at it and then Tanya can work out the bits I missed. So, I think Jesse the way that I think about this is, I did an environmental engineering degree at university, and I was interested in sustainability and you think that sustainability was a big part of environmental engineering. We had a third year course called sustainability. And whenever I talked about sustainability, someone would say, Yeah, you do you do sustainability in the third year course, you know, don't don't talk to me you know we're here to learn about fluid dynamics don't talk to me about sustainability. Whereas I now see in our own education at RMIT, how sustainability is now entrenched across pretty much all courses and across all programs, which is obviously a fantastic thing. So I think that humanitarian engineering could be a similar thing in the sense that we're saying look this is this is its own set of some things for others. It's about for us, you know, it's about having those additional those heightened skills, things like design skills that I concept around participatory design, co design the understanding that actually problem defining is as important or more important than problem solving. And I think that a lot of standard engineering disciplines focus on the problem solving stuff. Here's your problem. Go away and solve it. Humanitarian engineering is half as much about, you know, half of it is about problem, problem defining and understanding and working with people understanding that actually, you know, people who you're working with often have the solution to the to the problem that you're coming up with. And as as Tanya would sort of mentioned in that element, the way that we see that or conceptualize in a way is just saying there are these additional skills and competencies that we think that you that you should learn to be able to function well in the humanitarian context. We think that all engineers should have those because not only do they help you in those work in those humanitarian context, but they also help you with your regular, regular non humanitarian engineering practice. So therefore it could be something a little bit like sustainability in that way where it's something that actually everyone needs to consider two ways to a certain degree. Of course we have people who, who specialize in sustainability and that's their main driver. But then it's also something that is is is a fluid like throughout the programs. I don't know if that maybe that's maybe Tanya can you help pick up those pieces that I've just thrown in the air. No, I think it was really good make I guess I will just bring bring my perspective. So for me it's really about the kind of mindset you bring to your engineering. As Nick mentioned as I also mentioned we work in Australia we're going up original land. We have to be mindful we have to step in gently any project and engineer does we should step gently we need to be very aware of the context we're working in the social dimensions that we might be influencing. We need to navigate that very carefully. Nick mentioned that there had been some cultural sites in Australia that recently had been destroyed because of mining activity or building roads, for example, as engineers we need to be mindful that we're if we are going to do things like that we need to consider it very effectively and we need to talk with the people who those cultural sites are important for before we start acting. So I think that's really the sort of ethical dimension the empathy they need to engage with people talk with people rather than taking top down technical engineering decisions that I at least think and I think Nick would agree. And that that's really what we're trying to teach. That's great so. And I'm just going to try and try and maybe maybe bring that back to see if I'm understanding it correctly. So I think, I think what I'm hearing is that if you think about sustainability right and you're talking about this emphasis sustainability. There's economic impact. There's the environmental impact and the sort of social impact right those would be sort of the three main areas that I think in the US we would say sustainability you would look at those three areas. Right. And I think one of what I'm hearing is that as engineers we need to be understanding and thinking about and having analysis of, you know, techniques that take into account, some of these other areas and we didn't use to necessarily really consider environmental impact and now we maybe we have a broader approach set of approaches to be able to do that and it's more embedded in our day to day engineering practice. And I think what I'm hearing you suggest is that the social piece of it potential social impacts, how the systems and artifacts that we're creating technologies we're developing are interacting within a social context is equal as equally as important and therefore should be in our engineering practice is that that sort of in line with what you're bringing up. Yeah, that's definitely in line with what I'm saying I think it's also for me it's also about literally the mindset the ethics that you bring into the project the kind of engineer you want to be the kind of impact you want to have so one thing is measuring the social impact. Another thing is really feeling it. You know, like, so, so be being mindful that that you want to go out there and you want to have positive impact whether that's environmental or social cultural whatever but but you're mindful that that you are not the only one to consider that there is a you're part of a bigger hole you're part of a complex. Like, you're part of social relations as well. And you are not the only one engineering everybody is engineering together. Great. That's a really important. I think we don't in engineering traditionally consider ourselves enough as part of the system. Right we're sort of interchangeable engineers we can just throw anybody in there, and they can do the physics or whatever and have the same answer. And I think you're suggesting no you're part of it. And like let's let's bring that mindset into it and realize that we are part of the system. I think we're going to say something I apologize. Well, no, no, no, good. I look, I was just going to potentially add on and then potentially answer some policy other another question as well which is, when we're talking about this GP concept. The idea here is that if we think that obviously we need people with deep specialist knowledge to be able to tackle some of these wicked problems. So we could either try and make sure that they get trained up, or that we, as we say we these additional competencies to be able to work in humanitarian contexts well, so that they are successful. But you then got a deep specialist who then has that that space, then there's this, there's this other concept which is well actually maybe you have this, this GP person who has this much broader understanding and is able to work in that space but doesn't have that technical and so needs to bring on that technical specialism as well. But you still need that person with that deep technical specialism to still have some of that that humanitarian context as well. Probably didn't actually probably made it more confusing so. What I'm hearing is is you're saying, look, we need to have people that are general that have a broad range of understandings. But also someone who is like doing fluid dynamics and it's like really in deep and fluid dynamics also needs to understand the humanitarian engineering context enough that when the generalist person is saying hey I want to bring you in to this fluid problem that involves that's in this larger context. They know they have enough competency to be able to engage across that team and be able to see. This is this is the benefit of having had a couple of coffees Jesse you know you're a bit later in the day and your brain is fired up. Thank you that's perfect. No that's great. So I just have one last question and I actually have many questions personal questions. I want to let the people know on the call on the seminar right now the participants. There's a lot of questions here this discussion obviously very engaging for everyone and we're getting a lot of questions, or obviously not going to have enough time to answer all of them so what we're going to do is we're going to give them to Tanya and Nick to answer in writing and when we post the recording of the seminar later the those answers will be there for you afterwards, but I just want to ask, you know, we have sort of a growing ecosystem of humanitarian engineering in Australia, and there are a bunch of questions related to. Okay what are the programs, you know, can we get some specifics on these things at the different places. They exist in Western Australia, but I just want to I want to, you know, maybe generalize this a bit more. What do you think is the next steps what are what are the next things to really take this, you know you're talking about okay. I triple E in Australia engineering Australia is having these communities of practice and practitioners. We're starting to see academic programs come together. How do we take this community if we really want to shift engineering right and build this sort of much bigger community where it becomes a norm to have this empathy to have this mindset and practice these competencies. In your guys view what what are some of the sort of maybe challenges or opportunities to take it to the next level right like so how do we go from okay we have some a few programs and a few universities to. What is the normal thing that is in every university or that everybody does well everyone recognizes. This is a mainstream thing, right discipline, if you will. Jesse I think that this really talks to some of the work that me and Tanya are doing, along with a number of other people in the, in the chat actually who have joined us, who are part of this community of practice the humanitarian engineering practice, because it was kind of okay whilst they were it was quite ground up, I would say the humanitarian engineering movement to date has been very ground up you know the academic who's really keen on this thing has started to now work in this space. Me and Tanya are some of the very first academics in Australia, who have the name humanitarian engineering in our job titles. So a lot of our predecessors, including some people on the call are, you know, professor in mechanical engineering, but they love humanitarian engineering, but their their job title is is is mechanical engineering. So it's always been very much personal interest and making small changes here or there. We're starting to see a point where we're getting this mass movement across Australia where a number of number of programs are starting to spring up. Now we talked about this before about this idea of having motivation without capability. And ironically, we're actually starting to see this a little bit in the educators themselves and there's a few programs coming out which I won't personally will which I read some of the things that they're doing and I'm like, Oh God, like this is you know I'm not sure this is the this is the right this certainly wouldn't be the let's just put it this way. It's not the approach that I would take if I was delivering the same course content. And so it does now mean that there is a bit more of an onus and a bit more of a drive for doing something at that national level and getting a more nationalized framework together. So actually the community of practice is taking a really strong lead on this and and trying to step up around a concept that we're calling professionalizing humanitarian engineering. We think that there are six areas that we really need to work on as the next steps. The first is actually working on a definition is that do we need first off do we need a definition doing or do we need a fixed definition. We need our EWB other organizations have their own definition of humanitarian engineering and that's fine maybe it's okay that a lot of organizations have their own definition, but maybe we need just some kind of umbrella something to space space there. The other thing is do we need national frameworks. How do we actually define humanitarian engineering amongst the national frameworks. Is it an area of practice is it a discipline. We need to actually look like when we're trying to talk about it with other people who are, you know we can't just say oh it's this, we actually need to sort of be able to have the language which exists within our initial frameworks, which for us is in engineers Australia. The other thing we need to look at is the competencies. So we talked about these things these additional competency elements. All right, we need to actually get them nailed down. So how are they demonstrated. So don't forget that as educators we don't need to just have students work on competencies we need to have to demonstrate them evaluate them and so on. And we also need to be able to work on those best practices for how we teach those competencies. What is the best practice for doing this. Let's make sure that we're not actually setting students up in a quite a negative way. We also need to support our, our profession and we need to support those engineers who aren't just coming to university, but actually have maybe got years of experience as humanitarian engineers working in the field. We're starting to see more people engineers who've got this, this real world humanitarian experience, looking for a charter ship. You know that professional standing as what we call stage two engineer, a chartered engineer, and they're bringing their humanitarian experiences in. But ironically it's the assessors of those charter ship applications that have no idea what it means to be a humanitarian engineer so they're struggling to understand how this person's experience can actually relate back to the framework. And we think that we have a role there to help those more experienced people as well. And again, as more universities are starting to deliver projects, they're going to need to be accredited. So, so we again we need to make sure that they're meeting this standard of engineering education. So those are the big six areas that we're working to professionalize humanitarian engineering across Australia. Wow. That was the best answer that I could ever expect so it's amazing. Well done. I was taking notes on that so I'm going to have a meeting with you later. I'll send you an email. We'll discuss that because we're working on very similar things here with ASME and how do we develop those types of standards and processes both for education and for for practice, right. So with that, I think unfortunately we are well over time I want to thank both you, Nick and Tanya note it's not. I'm asking a lot of questions and I wanted to get this. So this is on me. I want to thank both of you for for sharing with us your expertise and insights and your experiences. I think it was wonderful. I'm certainly inspired and walk away from this every month but especially this month thinking okay how do we take it to the next level here you know Australia is showing us what we need to do we need to step up our game. And to the questions that didn't we didn't get to I apologize but we will be answering those in written form hopefully and you'll see those posted along with the recording of this seminar. Mariela do you want to just take a minute to wrap it up. And again, Nick and Tanya thank you very much for your time and everyone else for staying at this unusual time we will see you in January Mariela could you please take us out. Thank you Jesse and thank you, Nick and Tanya it was incredible. I'm also a fan of what Australia has been doing in humanitarian engineering so it's a pleasure to have you with us and you know so that you guys can share what you are doing in Australia for the rest of the world and for us here in the US. Thank you Jesse for moderating it. I want to emphasize what Jesse is saying we'll be answering the questions that we have many in the chat. Very interesting ones and we'll be doing that in a written form. Our next webinar and for the seminar series that will start in January for 2021. I was going to say it was going to be as good. And this will be done by Jesse on January 13 so I would really invite you all to join us for that first webinar of the year. So yeah I really encourage you to take a look at that sign up if you haven't an engineer for change so that you receive that notification when we open up the registrations. I just want to be sure to announce this deadline and from UC Berkeley Master of Development Engineering. I want to say thank you to those partners with us and I we just want to emphasize, you know this opportunity for the people that are connecting. This is the master of development engineering in UC Berkeley which is the first professional opportunity to solving complex global challenges across the corporate nonprofit and government sectors from UC Berkeley so this is UC Berkeley's take on this and we really encourage you to learn more and this is in our opportunities portal. And just to thank you for attending and for saying a little longer. If you have any questions suggestions, please email us be sure to become a member and have a great day for the ones listening in Australia for Nick and Tanya, a great great end of day for us here and on this time zone. So thank you everyone for joining us and until the next time. Thanks everyone. We'll see you in January.