Why
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- Category: Sustainability and Resilience
It's hard to shake the feeling that our engineering profession has missed something about "sustainability". Something fundamental in our society that interferes with understanding how it fits our code of ethics. I wondered if I could find our profession truly integrating "sustainability" into our engineering.
Read Leena Iyengar's piece in The community resilience reader and you get stark perspective.
We often use our individual perspectives and gut understandings to get closer to sustainability. We often green our offices. Yet are we only now, after more than forty years, beginning to apply rigorous methods to integrate "sustainability" into our actual engineering practices? Let's explore.
Simple Sustainability
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- Category: Sustainability and Resilience
Let's recap a good foundation for understanding sustainability.
Alex Magnin summarizes sustainability best in his short Youtube videos [1] [2] and crash course [3]. He covers the three pillars of the Brundtland Report definition and how to see the relationship between life (the biosphere) and the earth (lithosphere) through thermodynamics, including the funnel between carrying capacity and societal pressure -- the Natural Step Framework [4] (28 years ago).
We live in the biosphere... a cycle that is well balanced... Very slow geological cycles bring matter from the lithosphere... to the biosphere... these cycles are also well balanced... Sustainability is the capacity of our human society to continue indefinitely within these natural cycles.
20 years ago
John B. Robinson, George Francis, Sally Lerner, and Russel Legge, provided an excellent summary of sustainability in "Defining a Sustainable Society" [5].
Sustainability is the persistence over an apparently indefinite future of certain necessary and desired characteristics of the sociopolitical system and its natural environment.
Hints towards practice
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- Category: Sustainability and Resilience
Bill Wallace wrote an excellent overview (circa 2005) of sustainable development which can still help engineers begin to form ideas about how to integrate sustainability and resilience into direct engineering practice. Becoming part of the solution [1] directly mentions the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and Agenda 21, which have evolved into the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. Wallace updated my 1998 perspective to see 2005 state of the art and raised my curiosity. Wallace also helped FIDIC develop a sustainability framework engineers in international practice still use: Project Sustainability Management.
Listen to a short interview with Bill [2], find some key insights in less than 15 minutes from 2010.
Engineering Work Flow
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- Category: Organizations and Disaster Preparedness
Can design engineers benefit from empirical process control methods? Some have suggested we use pull planning. I thought for a time that we might figure out the kanban flow for the design workflow or employ the scrum framework.
- Kanban
- Scrum
- Engineering Project Management
- engineering consulting - civil engineering
 WorkflowDiagram | [PDF of full diagram -- not paged] | 112 kB |
Who gets to use fuel
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- Category: Sustainability and Resilience
What if industry can't function without hydrocarbon fossil fuels? What if we can't harvest renewable energy sources without fossil fuels?
Let's compare a society that carefully and thoughtfully uses its most dangerous, most damaging fuels.
Empirical Process Control
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- Category: Organizations and Disaster Preparedness
Empirical Process Control: "steering" a project that involves volatility, uncertainty, complexity and adaptability.
Practice always
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- Category: Organizations and Disaster Preparedness
When I joined VECTOR, I could only imagine helping my community by preparing for using my radio to send messages for our Emergency Social Services (ESS). To help my community react and recover. After a few years as a director on the VECTOR board, I started extending my imagination into working with our city staff to prepare our organization to send messages for ESS and City staff. I was wrong.
Empathy and Leadership
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- Category: Organizations and Disaster Preparedness
At SIGGRAPH 2018 Vancouver, [Claudia Davis][1] hosted a Birds of a Feather session which suggested that team leaders needed to use emotionally intelligent methods on collaborative pipeline-based projects. Working through her reading recommendations is helping me see more.
In Emphasizing Empathy in the Pipeline Process, a packed room talked about the issues and solutions that revolve around a project manager's empathy and communication. Claudia shared a fascinating model of key abilities a good project manager needs to succeed, which I tried to capture in my rather cryptic notes.
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