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