EAGER: Social Impact Modeling for Engineered Products

每个制造出来的产品都有三个方面的影响：经济、环境和社会影响。在所有这三个领域的积极影响导致可持续工程，使当前的需求得到满足，而不损害子孙后代满足自己需求的能力。不幸的是，工程决策的社会因素——即它们如何影响人们的日常生活质量——尚未成为重大工程设计研究的重点。因此，帮助工程师评估工程决策的社会影响的模型还不存在。这个早期概念探索性研究（EAGER）奖支持一项跨学科研究（工程学和社会学），以探索如何为工程产品创建社会影响模型，如何将与社会问题相关的不确定性纳入这些模型，以及如何在产品开发环境中判断这些模型的质量。成功完成这项研究的目标将使美国工程师离可持续设计和工程更近一步。社会影响的概念是广泛的，笨拙的，目前未定义的，因为它涉及到工程产品。这项研究将开始定义社会影响的边界，因为它受到工程决策的影响。研究小组将执行一些旨在实现这一目标的任务，包括：(i)通过与工业合作伙伴及其现有产品的互动，在文献中确定社会影响和社会影响（即社会问题可能影响产品的采用和影响的方式）；（ii）将这些社会影响和影响因素整合并分类为与工程设计相关的广泛维度或问题领域；（iii）确定衡量每项社会影响的民族志工具或行政数据；（iv）进行实证研究，以了解评估产品社会影响的建模形式。这项研究的智力价值在于理解可持续设计中最不为人知、最不具特征的分支——社会维度。这项研究的动机是，直到工程产品的社会影响可以建模，完全可持续的设计是遥不可及的工程社区。此外，随着工程师越来越有能力模拟产品的社会影响，经济、环境和社会可持续性之间的复杂权衡将开始主导讨论。该团队的成功研究将使特定产品在经济、环境和社会可持续性之间的权衡能够利用传统的贸易空间探索方法进行数字探索。

Every manufactured product has three areas of impact: economic, environmental, and social impact. Positive impact in all three of these areas leads to sustainable engineering, such that the needs of the present are met, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Unfortunately, the social elements of engineering decisions -- meaning how they affect the day-to-day quality of life of persons -- have not yet been the focus of significant engineering design research. As a result, models to help engineers evaluate the social impact of engineering decisions do not yet exist. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award supports an interdisciplinary study (engineering and sociology) to explore how social impact models can be created for engineered products, how the uncertainty associated with social issues can be included in those models, and how the quality of those models can be judged in a product development setting. Successfully completing the goals of this research will bring US engineers one step closer to sustainable design and engineering.The concept of social impact is broad, unwieldy, and currently undefined as it relates to engineered products. This research will begin to define the boundaries of social impact as it is influenced by engineering decisions. The research team will perform a number of tasks aimed at accomplishing this, including: (i) identifying social impacts and social influences (i.e., ways social issues can affect the adoption and impact of a product) in the literature and through interactions with industrial partners and their existing products; (ii) integrating and classifying these social impacts and influencers into broad dimensions or issue-areas that are relevant for engineering design; (iii) identifying ethnographic instruments or administrative data for measuring each social impact; and (iv) executing empirical studies to understand modeling formalisms for evaluating the social impact of products. The intellectual merit of the research is to understand the most unknown, uncharacterized, branch of sustainable design -- the social dimension. This research is motivated by the reality that until the social impact of engineered products can be modeled, fully sustainable design is out of reach for the engineering community. Additionally, as engineers become more capable of modeling the social impact of products, the complex tradeoffs between economic, environmental, and social sustainability will begin to dominate the discussion. Successful research by the team will enable product-specific tradeoffs between economic, environmental, and social sustainability to be explored numerically using traditional trade-space exploration methods.