Intellectual Development for Sustainability in Design and Manufacturing

Engineers have a crucial role to play in today’s world. The future directions are based on the decisions and actions that we make today. The penalties of making the wrong decision may be serious for the future generations. Sustainability is an important issue for any organization in the twenty first century and has become an integral part of the engineering practices and policies. Engineers have a critical role to achieve this with sustainable development. Engineers should not ignore the challenges and opportunities that arise from the needing sustainability development, and sustainability is a key driver for new directions in engineering all the way from design to manufacturing. Systems thinking, problem-finding, visualizing, improving, creative problemsolving and adaptability are the six types of cognitive abilities that engineering students need to develop as identified by the Royal Academy of Engineering [1]. All the above mentioned requires an understanding of multiple views and the application of knowledge in relation to sustainability. Most engineering students in the Middle East start their first year undergraduate studies believing that the right answer is either at the back of the book or what the teacher expects for an oral or written in a test. This kind of thinking is dualistic and was already identified as the starting point for most undergraduates in the 1970s by Perry’s [2] in model of intellectual development. It also parallels with the revised Bloom’s taxonomy [3]. In order to investigate whether the students’ sustainability thinking skills change over time a survey based on epistemic beliefs inventory is created and deployed to Freshman students on an introductory course to engineering and to Sophomore students studying the basics of engineering design. The authors in this paper would discuss the results of the survey and recommended actions based on the survey.