2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in progress: Integrating sustainability assessment at the planning phase in capstone design projects

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) - Emerging and Sustainable Design Practices

This work-in-progress paper will discuss an initiative to better integrate concepts of sustainability in upper-year engineering design courses, including 4th-year capstone design course. Sustainability encompasses diverse concepts such as environmental, social, and economic sustainability dimensions, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), and circularity principles. The range of sustainability representations adds complexity for educators wishing to define sustainability knowledge and values. Programs often face challenges in selecting appropriate content and approaches to integrate sustainability in programs that are already content heavy and subject to strict accreditation requirements. Moreover, instructors may not feel adequately prepared with knowledge and tools to discuss and assess the factual and value-based dimensions of sustainability in their teaching. In the context of engineering design, sustainability should be an integral part of the entire design cycle and anchored as one of the main objectives of the product – from its planning phase up to and including the end of life of the product. To understand how sustainability is currently included (or not) across capstone design courses, the authors have conducted semi-structured interviews with instructors to obtain an environmental scan of sustainability concepts taught in capstone design courses across programs. Based on the results of these interviews, the authors have identified and adapted two existing tools that can be easily integrated in the existing course delivery for the analysis of sustainability in the design cycle. Both tools provide ways to semi-quantitatively assess the initial design based on a list of criteria describing sustainability. This paper will provide an overview of the results from the instructor interviews, discuss why these two tools were selected, and how the two tools were adapted and integrated in third and fourth year design courses in two Engineering programs at the University of Waterloo.

Authors

Dr. Ada Hurst http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-2481-8566 University of Waterloo [biography]

Ada Hurst is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream and Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at the University of Waterloo, where she teaches engineering design to management engineering students. She is a passionate design educator and researcher, with interests in engineering and software design cognition, management, and education. She is a co-founder of the Canadian Design Workshop, a biennial conference series to promote design education research in Canada. She also serves as Associate Editor for the Studies in Engineering Education journal, and co-chair of the Design Society’s Special Interest Group on Cognitive Design Science.
Prof. Christine Moresoli University of Waterloo [biography]

Christine Moresoli is a Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She obtained a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Chemical Engineering from McGill University (Montreal, Canada), and a PhD from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Lausanne, Switzerland).
Her research and teaching expertise are in chemical, biological and food processes and products and sustainability. Current research activities focus on the integration of sustainability in engineering undergraduate and co-operative education programs and in the assessment of environmental impacts by life cycle analysis of food products.
She was Associate Dean Co-op Education & Professional Affairs in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo where she coordinated the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) accreditation activities of engineering undergraduate programs and supported the development of processes for the assessment of graduate attributes in the Faculty of Engineering. She participated in the creation of the Waterloo Experience Accelerate (WEA) program to assist first work term undergraduate students with the development of their job search and transferable skills.
She has developed online resources to support experiential learning of leadership skills for the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges, a set of six Grand Challenges built on the UN SDGs for the Canadian context.
She has received the University of Waterloo Outstanding Performance Award and the University of Waterloo Faculty of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award. She is a member of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) and has served on numerous NSERC grant selection committees.
Mr. Christopher Rennick http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1682-3311 University of Waterloo [biography]

Chris Rennick, PhD P.Eng. received his B.A.Sc., Honours Electrical Engineering in 2007 and his M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in 2009, both from the University of Windsor, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Chris' PhD from the University of Waterloo investigated how knowledge and personal epistemology of novice designers relate to their design behaviours. Chris is currently an Engineering Educational Developer with the Pearl Sullivan Engineering Ideas Clinic at the University of Waterloo. Chris is a fellow of the Canadian Engineering Education Association.
Reem Roufail University of Waterloo [biography]

Reem Roufail is a materials engineer that is interested in engineering teaching and applying new technologies to engage students in class. Reem believes that learning is a continuous process that does not end with earning a degree. This explains her willingness to explore different fields of engineering as opportunities to learn. She explored mechanical engineering, environmental engineering, petroleum engineering, systems design, and biomedical engineering in her career paths from an academic perspective.
Recently she has successfully led and supported Biomedical engineering and Systems Design engineering programs at the University of Waterloo to apply the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) graduate attribute and continuous improvement approach to the programs. That intrigued her to dig deeper into teaching-learning pedagogy. The abrupt changes that the pandemic brought to the education system, were a trigger for her to realize that change is coming to how we do things. However, before we jump into applying a change, we should understand the impact of the change from all stakeholders' perspectives.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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