Department of Civil Engineering » University of Toronto

Research Areas

The Roots of Our Economic, Social and Environmental Problems

• Confronting an Economy in Reverse
• Protecting the Public Interest?
• The Need for University Reform
• Applications to Engineering
• Sustainable Development as Secular Magic
• Engineering Desgin

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The economies of industrially advanced nations went into reverse during the 1970s and 1980s as a result of becoming wealth extractors as opposed to wealth producers. The reasons for this economic reversal stem from the steadily increasing costs incurred in the production of wealth, to the point of causing net wealth production to level off and then decline. These effects were somewhat masked through the creation of a gigantic speculative bubble associated with financial services that earn money with money, without any intermediate economic activities producing goods and services. It is estimated that by the 1990s, only 3% of daily financial flows around the world corresponded to economic activities producing goods and services. The remainder simply increased the claims on these goods and services.

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Research at the Centre for Technology and Social Development has shown that the above economic reversal can be traced to the kind of intellectual and professional division of labour by which technological and economic growth is produced. Beginning with a comprehensive, quantitative study of undergraduate engineering education and faculty publications, it was shown that present and future practitioners have little or no idea of the consequences of their design and decision-making for human life, society and the biosphere. Design or decision alternatives must be adjudicated by means of the highly specialized knowledge of the practitioners. As a result, the “values” that guide design and decision-making are mostly output-input ratios that measure how much desired output can be obtained from the inputs of materials, energy, labour, capital and highly-specialized knowledge. This kind of guidance by output-input ratios provides no indication of whether any gains are partly or wholly achieved by undermining human life, society and the biosphere. The costs externalized by this intellectual and professional division of labour have helped to put our economies in reverse.

Worse, since most of the undesired consequences of engineering design and decision-making fall beyond the domains of expertise of the practitioners, they are unable to adjust their design and decision-making to prevent or greatly minimize harmful effects. These can only be dealt with by other specialists in whose domains of competence they fall, thus institutionalizing an end-of-pipe approach, causing the system to feed on its own mistakes. It has become top-heavy as a result of layers and layers of compensating technologies, rather than dealing with these problems at their roots. This structural problem has turned our economies into anti-economies.

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In response to the situation, research at the Centre for Technology and Social Development has created the concept of preventive approaches. These are achieved by restructuring our intellectual and professional division of labour. Simply put: preventive approaches are based on identifying the typical negative consequences that tend to flow from a particular area of practice, learning about these consequences from the disciplines that examine them, and internalizing some of this knowledge into the area of practice to create negative feedback that will improve the ratio of desired to undesired effects of design and decision-making. This prescription for curriculum reform may be encouraged by parallel reforms within departments, faculties and the university as a whole by recognizing that we need to rebalance breadth with depth in a manner that is different from the current intellectual and professional division of labour. Such reforms can be made in an evolutionary manner in parallel with current efforts, which will gradually be transformed by this synergy. All this has little in common with earlier attempts at creating multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary or interdisciplinary studies.

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Future engineers are learning little or nothing about how their design and decision-making affects human life, society and the biosphere, and even less about how to use this knowledge in a negative feedback mode to prevent or reduce harmful effects. Hence, none of the prerequisites currently exist to play an active role in creating more economically viable, socially responsible and environmentally sustainable ways of life. Today’s curricula simply lack the foundation for genuine environmental engineering, more sustainable energy practices, more informed public policies, or for synergistic international cooperation. All these efforts are essentially end-of-pipe approaches attempting to deal with current practices without getting to the root of the problem. The Centre for Technology and Social Development has pioneered a certificate program in Preventive Engineering and Social Development, which can function as a blueprint for similar reforms in the management and regulation of technology. This could create more synergistic relations between the professions and the social sciences.

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There is no point in talking about sustainable development unless specialist practitioners are taught what the undesired consequences of their design and decision-making are, and how to deal with these consequences, with the result that they are able to steadily improve the ratio of desired to undesired effects of their professional practice. Anything short of this amounts to a kind of secular magic that hopes that by calling something sustainable, the core practices underneath will somehow be transformed. The Centre has developed a quantitative scoring system by which the progress toward more sustainable practices can be tracked. It operationalizes sustainable development as an approach that, year by year, achieves the desired results while steadily diminishing the harmful effects to human life, society and the biosphere.

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For many decades, the engineering profession has had minimal success at teaching engineering design. The late John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that we have ended up serving the system that we created to serve us. At that time, there was little hard evidence for this conclusion. We now have a great deal of evidence. The almost complete failure at teaching engineering design is just another manifestation of the above problem. The Centre’s research has shown that engineering design depends on two parallel interdependent modes of knowing and doing. Just as physicists do not rely on their school physics to ride their bikes, so also engineers should not almost exclusively rely on the analytical exemplars that their disciplines and specialties use in order to optimize a given design. As shown by the muddle created by engineering design texts, there is no effective approach for teaching creative design. It will require the rehabilitation of the process of symbolization by means of which humanity became a symbolic species. In the past, technological and economic evolution was based on the process of symbolization based on experience and culture, which mostly assured appropriate technologies and sustainable ways of life. It was the desymbolization of cultures that caused the present problems. Concepts such as appropriate technology and sustainable development had to be invented precisely because these characteristics of technology and the economy could no longer be taken for granted as a result of desymbolization. By means of an analysis of the processes of symbolization and desymbolization in contemporary societies, the Centre has developed an approach to resymbolizing the design exemplars developed by the many engineering disciplines and specialties. This could strengthen the design process.