Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING: ISSUES CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEVELOPMENTEmerging issues, challenges and opportunities for engineeringrelate to internal and external factors. Internally, the declineof interest and enrolment of young people, especially womenin engineering is a major concern for future capacity. Externally,in the development context, emerging issues, challengesand opportunities relate to the Millennium DevelopmentGoals, especially poverty reduction and sustainability, andincreasingly to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Thischapter has a focus on external issues, challenges and opportunities,with enrolment issues covered later in the chapter onengineering education. The chapter begins with a section onforesight and forecasts of the future, providing a backgroundin foresight of science and technology and innovation, anddrawing on the many foresight exercises that have been conductedaround the world. A section on emerging and futureareas of engineering emphasizes the increasing importance ofengineering and sustainability, urbanization and globalization,and increasingly important domains of engineering relating tomaterials, energy, information and systems, and bioengineering.The theme of sustainability is developed in the section onthe changing climate and increasing need for engineers andengineering of the future – beginning in the present – to focuson areas relating to climate change mitigation and adaptation.The following section examines the issues of information andadvocacy, public and policy awareness and influence, and howto get the engineering message across from a professional communicationsviewpoint. The chapter concludes with a view ofengineering and technology in the third millennium.3.1 Engineering, foresight and forecasts of the futureIan Miles Ariane 4 rocket.© UNESCOFutures studies have been with us for a long time, but the term‘ foresight’ has only come into wide use in recent years. A strikingdevelopment in the last decade of the twentieth century was thegrowing prominence of large-scale foresight exercises conductedat national and international levels. This trend was amplified inthe new millennium. These exercises, usually funded by governmentsand intended to provide insights for innovation policy,priorities for research and development funding, and the like, 1frequently went by the name ‘Technology Foresight’. The Japaneseexperience from the 1970s onwards (using technology forecastingto help build shared understandings of how science andtechnology might better meet social needs and market opportunities)was the initial inspiration for early efforts in Europe. Theselarge-scale European experiences were widely diffused in turn.Common to foresight, as opposed to many other futures studies, isthe link of long-term analysis (beyond the usual business time horizon)to policy-making (often to specific pending decisions aboutresearch or innovation policies) and the emphasis on wide participation(involving stakeholders who may be sources of knowledgenot available to the ‘great and good’, whose engagement may providethe exercise with more legitimacy and whose actions may benecessary complements to those taken by government).Several factors converged to foreground foresight. First wasthe need to prioritize research budgets – choices needed to bemade as to where to invest, as governments were not able to1 For documentation of a large number of foresight activities, see the European ForesightMonitoring Network at http://www.efmn.eu – the overview report is particularly helpfulfor statistical analysis. R. Popper et al., 2007. Global Foresight Outlook 2007 at http://www. foresight-network.eu/files/reports/efmn_mapping_2007.pdf (Accessed: 5 May2010).continue increasing funding across the whole spectrum. Thelegitimacy of huge funding decisions being made effectively bythe very scientists and engineers that benefitted from them wasalso in doubt, not least because some emerging areas seemedto be neglected (the Japanese ‘Fifth Generation’ programme inthe 1980s was a wake-up call, 2 triggering a wave of large publicresearch and development programmes in information technologythroughout the industrial world). Foresight, and othertools like evaluation studies, was seen as providing ways of makingmore knowledge-based and transparent decisions.Second, there were growing concerns about the implications ofscience and technology and how to shape development so thatnew technologies could prove more socially and environmentallybeneficial. A succession of environmental concerns (pesticides,nuclear accidents, ozone depletion and climate change), foodpanics (in the UK alone there were, in quick succession, scaresaround salmonella and listeria, BSE, foot-and-mouth disease,and avian flu – all of them implicating modern farming and foodprocessing techniques, and with huge economic costs even whenhuman mortality was low), and social and ethical concerns, mainlyaround biomedical issues in human reproduction and the use oftissues and stem cells, with emerging problems over decisionsabout death, applications of new neuroscience and technology,enhancement of human capabilities, and the prospect of artificialintelligence in the not-so-distant future. Nanotechnologies,or their treatment in the media, are also contributing to uneaseabout how technology decisions are made and where they maybe taking us. Foresight can contribute to creating visions of future2 Feigenbaum, A. and McCorduck, P. 1983. The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence andJapan’s Computer Challenge to the World London, Michael Joseph. This book had anelectrifying impact here.54