TY - GEN
T1 - Development of the Consumption Journey Tool to Improve Awareness and Critical Thinking on Sustainability in Engineering Students
AU - Mesa, Jaime A.
AU - Ruiz-Pastor, Laura
AU - Esparragoza, Ivan E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - This innovation to practice full paper presents the Consumption Journey Tool for sustainability awareness. Sustainability and environmental issues are current topics that industries, governments, and academia have studied and embraced. It is known that depletion, scarcity, pollution, and global warming are latent threats to human activities as we know them. As a challenge, academic institutions have been including sustainability topics in their curricula through elective courses, project-based activities, and course modules. Commonly, these approaches aim to create more conscious thinking about and efficient use of resources, savings, environmental impact, lifecycle analysis, and the design and re-design of products or services with reduced resource consumption and higher sustainability performance. The existing approaches considering sustainability focus primarily on the external perspective through the lifecycle of the products, ignoring the internal habits of the consumers. They do not include an analysis of individual consumption. However, it is critical to understand individual behaviors and how those behaviors influence the decision-making process of the designers. This paper describes a practical tool developed to improve engineering students' sensitivity and critical thinking about their environmental impact in daily activities. The instrument is named the Consumption Journey Tool, and it is based on the Design Thinking framework. The tool was introduced in an elective course of Industrial Ecology for four-year engineering students. The authors developed and used an assessment instrument to evaluate the students' perceptions of sustainability issues before and after the Consumption Journey Tool implementation. The initial assessment shows students demonstrated higher engagement and self-consciousness about their impact on resources after using the tool.
AB - This innovation to practice full paper presents the Consumption Journey Tool for sustainability awareness. Sustainability and environmental issues are current topics that industries, governments, and academia have studied and embraced. It is known that depletion, scarcity, pollution, and global warming are latent threats to human activities as we know them. As a challenge, academic institutions have been including sustainability topics in their curricula through elective courses, project-based activities, and course modules. Commonly, these approaches aim to create more conscious thinking about and efficient use of resources, savings, environmental impact, lifecycle analysis, and the design and re-design of products or services with reduced resource consumption and higher sustainability performance. The existing approaches considering sustainability focus primarily on the external perspective through the lifecycle of the products, ignoring the internal habits of the consumers. They do not include an analysis of individual consumption. However, it is critical to understand individual behaviors and how those behaviors influence the decision-making process of the designers. This paper describes a practical tool developed to improve engineering students' sensitivity and critical thinking about their environmental impact in daily activities. The instrument is named the Consumption Journey Tool, and it is based on the Design Thinking framework. The tool was introduced in an elective course of Industrial Ecology for four-year engineering students. The authors developed and used an assessment instrument to evaluate the students' perceptions of sustainability issues before and after the Consumption Journey Tool implementation. The initial assessment shows students demonstrated higher engagement and self-consciousness about their impact on resources after using the tool.
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U2 - 10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962562
DO - 10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962562
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85143767078
T3 - Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE
BT - 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE 2022
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE 2022
Y2 - 8 October 2022 through 11 October 2022
ER -