2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Sustainability is an important goal across disciplines within the university and within society, but its definition often varies greatly. This is not necessarily a bad thing—there is not an agreed-upon definition of sustainability, and it has been argued that a universal definition of the term does not make sense, due to its deeply contextual nature (Ramsey, 2015). In the context of engineering education, the definition and operationalization of sustainability is often reduced to quantifiable domains, which aligns with engineers’ traditionally accepted roles in society (Allenby et al., 2009). Two relevant literature reviews (a scoping and a systematic review, respectively) have been conducted to assess the landscape of sustainability within engineering education (Gutierrez-Bucheli et al., 2022; Sundman et al., 2025). Both found that experiential and project-based learning are common approaches to this initiative. However, each review also found that these attempts at integration often come up short, lacking broad interdisciplinarity or failing to inspire deep and transformative learning within students.
A key piece that may help produce transformative learning in students and a deeper understanding of sustainability beyond that which is quantifiable is an integration of sociotechnical systems within the engineering classroom. This paper reviews three sociotechnical lenses that can be used to strengthen sustainability engineering education: the social construction of technology (Pinch and Bijker, 1984), the sociotechnical transitions theory (Geels and Schot, 2007; Geels, 2019), and actor-network theory (Latour, 2005). It also reviews examples of sociotechnical integration within existing engineering classrooms. Finally, it provides an argument that sociotechnical thinking can improve sustainability-focused engineering education. By more explicitly tying the strands of sustainability research and sociotechnical integration together, the goal of this paper is to identify where sociotechnical lenses can be used to create deeper understandings of sustainability within engineering students, even, and perhaps especially, in the absence of a single, quantitatively measurable definition of sustainability.