Abstract
According to the United Nations (UN) the sustainability dimensions (economic, environmental and social) and their intersections constitute the high-quality criteria that should be considered when assessing improvement in our quality of life. However, the impact of these criteria has not yet been fully established in a comprehensive engineering research agenda. What has been done seems to be the reaction to the way things have evolved. This paper exemplifies the difficulty of developing this agenda by looking at one specific discipline, Industrial Engineering (IE).
IE professionals certainly have a ‘multidisciplinary’ agenda, as they study the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, information, equipment, and energy. Accordingly, there are many IE-related activities that show the active presence of its professionals in the sustainability facets: economic, environmental and social. Economic evaluations have been fundamental part of the profession since its conception. Environmental aspects have also been included and coded -e.g. ISO 14000-, following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, in Rio de Janeiro 1992. Social concerns are considered in current engineering research agenda, although there seems to be the need for additional research to incorporate communities’ engagement into engineering design -e.g. participatory design. There are also other possible dimensions of sustainability that may worth to be considered, for instance the maintenance of cultural diversity. Even though these and other are instances of sustainable actions that can be traced through IE professional activities, a comprehensive approach to identify IE future contributions to the sustainability research agenda is in its genesis. The problem continues being to recognise which are the different sustainability ‘problems’ that IE professionals will deal in the future. This paper proposes a framework to identify where the IE body of knowledge can contribute more effectively and it is used for an initial exploration that points at some of these “hot topics”.
Keywords: Management of Science and Technology, Sustainability agenda, Social sustainability, Economic sustainability, Environmental sustainability, Industrial Engineering