Next STEPs

Something important happened in 2018 - the WFEO “engineering a better future” strategic policy called on engineers everywhere to take the initiative in response to the 2015 COP21 Paris Agreement. My research, education and transition engineering work is part of this ecosystem – the foundational research for the ways engineers, acting on social responsibility, becomes natural, normal and compliant workflow.

I am at this moment embarking on a ground-breaking initiative, which Wicked Problem Investigation is one of the breakthroughs. The first text book came out just as the COVID crisis was overtaking all other thinking. Reviews of the book have been great – seeing the proposition of Transition Engineering as a breakthrough.

Transition Engineering is the story of how the history of engineering, nature, enterprise and society have bumped and bounced along together, and how the interplay is now in a stage of a “corrective discipline” that is both transdisciplinary and specifically engineering experts in the legacy unsustainable systems upskilling, re-developing and delivering technology and operations in a new way. The new way has been needed for some time. The new way has been emerging in pieces in different parts of our knowledge ecosystems. The new way will be normal in the future. And, critically, the new way is the pivot to manifest our collective survival instinct for the thriving future we feel responsible for gifting to our decedents.

The correction of hazardous industrial practice or commercially profitable products always seems unimaginable before it happens.

At Heriot-Watt University we are stepping up to create the first Systems Transition Engineering Programme of applied research and training. The new way of carrying out techno-social enterprise implements the fundamentals we understand as key to survival (e.g. nature positive, doughnutty, circular, equitable, frugal, sober…).

The new way is through STEPs ?- Systems Transition Engineering Processes, Philosophies, Practices, Planning, Policies, People, Projects…)

The first aspect of understanding the STEPs for a company, organisation or community is identifying, investigating and tackling wicked problems. We call this stage the Discovery Stage. There are three more stages in each STEP – which are always ground-up in a top-down context – and which generate the ingenuity and learnings to build the next STEP.

That is the high-level pitch. There is a lot of work in the next several months to create the case for support and raise the funding to carry out the first STEP internal to HWU, then the next STEP with different stakeholders to build the HWU programme and embark on a range of cases. Luckily we have the Transition Engineering Lab cases already started through our Islands Centre for Net Zero partners. The new convergent action research is aimed at operationalising the stability and reliability of real-time knowledge-activity-technology-energy-market ecosystems through new cyber infrastructure, even and especially through the shift projects which are the key to the transformations in each STEP.

I have spent the past week in a seminar retreat in France with top thinkers in this area from a range of disciplines. The things I have learned and discussions had confirm that the high level STEPs approach seems to be able to carry all of the learnings accumulated since the “Limits to Growth” era, and to provide the framework for a one-chance-in-a-million surge in convergence action research. If we are right, the STEPs integrated discipline and the facility that we co-design and build at HWU will rapidly become the model for other STEPs around the country and around the world.

The fundamental principle of the STEP initiative is the argument that these steps have occurred over the past 150 years when the deployment of a new technology in enterprise or public utility has repercussions, unintended consequences and hazards that cost lives and wellbeing. There are so many examples that we could even say this blundering into progress is 'normal'.

• DDT, Leaded Gasoline, Thalidomide for Morning Sickness
• Gas Lights and Gas Heat
• High Pressure Boilers, Automobiles, Ammonia Refrigerants
• Power Lines, Electric Devices
• Food Canning Factories, Toxic Waste Dumps

It is always much harder to correct the hazardous aspects of profitable enterprises and products than it was to get them to market. But correction does happen, and that process always follows a pattern as shown in the figure. The STEP proposal is a surge of convergent, combinatorial research to bring together all of the ways that have been developed to develop, design and deploy corrective strategies to the point where the acceptable levels of risk are ensured through the new normal practices.

A key to the story is the role of engineering. For every example from history that you can find where new technology also caused disasters, you can now find a field of transdisciplinary, corrective engineering in place and keeping you safe.

• Chemical Safety Engineering
• Fire Safety Engineering
• Mechanical Safety Engineering
• Electrical Safety Engineering
• Food Safety Engineering

Why shouldn't we be able to look at the profligate deployment of fossil fuel throughout transport, buildings, and agriculture as the enterprise hazardous overshoot of a good thing? Why shouldn't we be able to accelerate the development of the corrective engineering, designs, operations, standards and regulations that downshift the dangers from this overshoot?

Why not get on with it?