Creating and Using Social Impact Models for Engineered Products

每件产品都会对生产和使用它的人产生经济、环境和社会影响。虽然环境和经济影响是众所周知的，并且已经确定并实施了适当的措施，但在指导工程师理解社会影响方面所做的工作却很少。因此，这个项目的重点是创造方法来衡量和评估工程产品的社会影响。因此，本项目所追求的研究问题是：(i)产品的社会影响如何受到工程决策的影响，（ii）可以进行哪些研究来评估现有产品的社会影响？（iii）在现有产品中可以观察到的与工程决策相关的社会影响是什么？（iv）什么是一个合适的框架来指导工程师“理解他们正在设计的产品的预期社会影响”这项研究承诺通过使工程师能够解释社会因素来提高工业竞争力，这些因素通常决定了工程产品的成功，但目前工程师很难正式考虑。它还将促进一种可持续设计和工程的愿景，在这种愿景中，满足当代人的需要而不损害后代人满足其需要的能力。因此，本研究旨在通过改变如何在工程产品的设计和优化中理解、预测和考虑工程产品的社会影响，对工业和社会产生广泛的影响。本研究将首先界定社会影响的界限。这部分研究驯服了社会影响这一笨拙的概念，并将其与工程决策联系起来，使其对工程师来说切实可行，并为未来的可持续设计和工程研究奠定了基础。其次，本研究将进行实证研究，对现有产品的社会影响进行建模。这个重点领域包括与世界各地的工业合作伙伴一起检查各种产品/项目，这些合作伙伴同意向我们提供现有产品和项目数据。这些合作者带来了从医疗产品到消费品再到人道主义项目的见解，他们将提供来自北美、南美、欧洲、非洲和亚洲的数据和见解。第三，本研究将从实证研究中提取原则，作为开发工程师改善其产品社会影响框架的基础。在观察实证研究中的社会影响建模模式后，将提取并阐述关键原则。这些原则将作为建模框架创建的基础。第四，该研究将创建一个基于原则的框架，以指导工程师开发社会影响模型——确定性和非确定性。这部分研究旨在开发一个通用的框架来识别产品。S社会影响，集中于产品的一个或多个社会可持续性措施，并将这些措施与工程师控制的设计参数联系起来。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Every product has economic, environmental, and social impacts on those who produce and use it. While environmental and economic impacts are relatively well known and appropriate measures have been identified and implemented, very little work has been done to help guide engineers, understanding of social impacts. Therefore, this project focuses on creating ways to measure and evaluate the social impacts of engineered products. Accordingly, the research questions pursued in this project are: (i) How are social impacts of products influenced by engineering decisions, (ii) What studies can be carried out to evaluate the social impact of existing products? (iii) What are social impacts as they relate to engineering decisions that can be observed in existing products? (iv) What is an appropriate framework to guide engineers "understanding of anticipated social impacts of products they're designing" This research promises to improve industrial competitiveness by enabling engineers to account for social factors that oftentimes dictate the success of engineered products, but currently are difficult for engineers to consider formally. It also will promote a vision of sustainable design and engineering in which needs of the present are met without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Thus, this research intends to have a broad impact on industry and society by transforming how the social impact of engineered products can be understood, predicted and considered in the design and optimization of engineered products. This research will be carried out by, first, defining the boundaries of social impact. This part of the research tames the unwieldy concept of social impact and frames it in a way that links it to engineering decisions, making it tangible to engineers and laying the foundation for future research in sustainable design and engineering. Second, this research will execute empirical studies to model the social impact of existing products. This area of focus involves examining a variety of products/projects with industrial collaborators all over the world who have agreed to provide us with access to existing product and project data. These collaborators bring insight ranging from medical products to consumer products to humanitarian projects and they will provide data and insight from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Third, this research will extract principles from the empirical studies that act as a foundation for developing a framework for engineers to improve social impacts of their products. Key principles will be extracted and articulated after observing the social impact modeling patterns in the empirical studies. These principles will be at the foundation of the modeling framework created. Fourth, the research will create a principles-based framework to guide engineers in developing social impact models--deterministic and non-deterministic. This portion of the research seeks to develop a generic framework for identifying a product?s social impacts, converging on one or more social sustainability measures for the product, and linking those measures to the engineer-controlled parameters of the design.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.