Conference Workshops

The following workshops will be offered during the EESD’15 conference in parallel with technical sessions.  Workshops are available to delegates at no additional cost, but delgates are asked to indicate your interest in attending workshop sessions at the time of registration.

WORKSHOP 1:  Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Development: Exploring Opportunities in Engineering Education

DESCRIPTION:

This workshop invites participants to explore corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an avenue for integrating sustainability into engineering education. The organizers, both anthropologists who study extractive industries and teach CSR at an engineering university, will begin by offering a brief critical overview of current debates over the links between CSR, sustainability, and engineering. The majority of the workshop will be dedicated to the collaborative development of classroom learning activities (from small case studies to group projects) that bring together CSR and sustainability in engineering courses, and a concluding discussion of the broader structural opportunities and challenges for CSR as a vehicle for sustainability education.

FACILITATORS:

Nicole Smith (Colorado School of Mines) and Jessica Smith (Colorado School of Mines)

WORKSHOP 2:  Sustainable Development and Environmental Ethics

DESCRIPTION:

The workshop is an introduction to key ethical issues that guide decision making related to sustainable development and the environment. Professional engineers are often  confronted with ethical dilemmas. At its core, ethics is about human action: it asks the question what you ought to do. Ethics is about conflict of values. What value do you choose, in the end? When engineers engage with human action involving nature and environment or sustainable development, even more dilemmas present themselves. So engineers are in need of competences to act both professionally and ethically.

FACILITATORS:

Kees Vromans (Department of Environmental Studies, HAS Den Bosch University)

WORKSHOP 3:   Social Life Cycle Assessment within the Context of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

DESCRIPTION:

The full assessment of goods and services within the context of sustainable development is done through life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), a combined use of three techniques: environmental LCA (E-LCA), life cycle costing (LCC) and social LCA (S-LCA). While there is a substantive knowledge of E-LCA (and to some extend LCC), S-LCA is quite new. This session aims at introducing S-LCA.

FACILITATORS:

Bernard Mazijn (Institute for Sustainable Development, Bruges)

WORKSHOP 4:  Life Cycle Costing in Sustainable Public Procurement

DESCRIPTION:

This workshop will be of interested will be of interested to Ph D students within a variety of disciplines, who are interested is sustainable supply chains. After an introduction to ‘life cycle sustainability assessment’ (LCSA), participants are introduced to Life Cycle Costing in SPP and a hands-on training (incl. two exercises), using software.

FACILITATORS:

Bernard Mazijn (Institute for Sustainable Development, Bruges)

WORKSHOP 5:  Teaching Sustainability to Engineers – 5-Step Methodology, supported with CES EduPack – a software for teaching engineers, designers and scientists about materials.

DESCRIPTION:

This workshop offers hands-on experience on how to apply the 5-steps methodology to support the teaching of sustainability to engineers, with an aim to guide in a simple way the complexity of sustainability reflections.

Participants are involved in group activities during the workshop and are introduced to the 5-steps methodology, using Sustainable Development Edition of CES EduPack teaching software, its fact-finding functionality, environmental and selection tools.

FACILITATORS:

Tatiana Vakhitova and Claes Fredriksson (Granta Design, Cambridge, UK)

WORKSHOP 6:  Backcasting in EESD

DESCRIPTION:

This 2-part workshop offers a review and discussions regarding the use of backcasting in EESD.  Part 1 is a presentation outline the backcasting approaches applied at KTH, Chalmers (with the Natural Step), and Delft (with sustainable technology development).  Part 2 is an open discussion with panelists about the suitability of different backcasting approaches for EESD.

FACILITATORS:

Jordi Segalas (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech), Magdalena Svanstrom (Chalmers University), Olga Kordas (KTH), Karel Mulder (Delft University)

 

In addition to the Conference workshops described above, an independent EPICS Workshop, entitled

Integrating Design and Service-Learning within the Curriculum,

will be held at UBC on June 7,8, and 9.  For more information, including how to register for this event, please go to:  http://epicsworkshop.apsc.ubc.ca