2009 Unit coordinator: Prof. James Trevelyan

Unit Outline 2009

This course aims to introduce you to engineering practice, in particular how you can aim to keep your clients (and yourself) satisfied and your community happy with the engineering projects you help to build.

The details of technical solutions are often the least important decision you will have to make. To date the majority of your course work you have done has prepared you to answer some narrow technical questions of engineering. For excellence in engineering it is essential you incorporate people constraints, economics and environmental issues into design and other engineering decisions. This course will introduce you to the aspects that you will have to address in your careers as engineers. Sustainable engineering means taking these aspects into account in a systematic manner and we will show you some of the tools you will need to do this effectively.

This course will introduce you to the issues that will dominate your careers as engineers. The course is based on UWA's world leading research on what engineers do in several different countries. UWA is building a coalition of researchers world-wide including Stanford University (active since 1999), Arlborg University in Denmark, Michigan State University, Edinburgh University and others in France and Germany. You will gain a unique perspective on how engineers determine the world's future and you can learn how to be a more effective engineer by taking this course.

Many of you will need to move outside your personal comfort zone: you cannot calculate the answers in this course. Nor can they be predicted by logical analysis and scientific thinking. You will need to learn about human behaviour because this is the central issue in sustainability. Around that you will learn how markets and economics interact with politics to position the constraints within which engineers have to work.

This unit will cover the following tools:

• Communication, both formal and interpersonal
• Negotiation
• Management Systems (ISO 14001, 18000 and 9000)
• Risk management
• Project management

These tools will be put into practise through tutorial assignments and two study projects. Through these projects and the lecture series you will also be introduced to the types of people who decide the directions for typical engineering projects.

Some of these people belong to the following key organizations:

• Corporations (board of Directors, shareholders)
• Employees (operators/maintainers, engineers, management, legal, finance)
• Government (State - DEC DoIR, Commonwealth, multinational institutions)
• Community (action groups, individuals, other industry, NGOs and government as a representative of the people)

Welcome aboard. Incidentally, Cambridge University started a similar course (though at Masters Level) in late 2007. Since then a few other universities are also moving to teach in similar ways. For the time being, though, you can rest assured you are at the leading edge of international understanding of these issues. It's not an easy course, but we think you will be satisfied in what you can learn.

Note: Students who are not enrolled in a combined degree with commerce who need an introduction to finance and accounting are advised to take an elective in the business school for that purpose.

Text

A useful text for this course is "The Natural Advantage of Nations" by Karlson 'Charlie' Hargroves and Michael Smith (Editors), published by Earthscan. ISBN 1-84407-340-8, (ISBN-13 978-1-84407-340-5). You can find much of the material on line at the Natural Edge Project. Look under 'curriculum and course notes for 'Principles and Practices in Sustainable Development'. We will give you more directions later.

Here is another web site that you might find has useful technical ideas and information. It is an MIT course on sustainability, but has a predominantly technical focus. I know some of you might prefer a purely technical course, but if you don't know how to get people to accept sustainable solutions for which the up-front cost is often higher, you will end up a very frustrated engineer. I have met a few of them - you don't want to end up like them.

News Articles
Use the program Factiva to search for news articles relevant to the course. Some sample articles are given here on this protected web site (you will need a user name "esd" and password "margot" to access).

Lectures: 3 per week; tutorials: 2 per week; Practicals: 2 per semester. Unit Co-ordinators: James Trevelyan