Technological Innovations for Sustainability in Manufacturing Industrial Technology Education
摘要
Sustainable value attainment entails delivering benefit to all stakeholders by balancing economic, environmental, and social goals. In manufacturing, this means rethinking design strategies at the product, process, and systems levels to fit into closed-loop material flows across different life stages. It also requires a deep comprehension of complex interrelations between socio-technical systems and the natural environment for sustainable value production in an ongoing and successful way. Prevailing models of education, as contained in conventional academic silos, lack the interdisciplinary foundation necessary to effectively address sustainability issues. Integration of knowledge across a number of disciplines has, therefore, become a necessity for addressing the complexity of sustainability problems. The prevailing model of industrial technology education has to be revamped to create sustainable value in manufacturing. This transformation must be prospective and innovative, based on a paradigm shift in education that prepares future engineers, technologists, scientists, and managers with the required expertise, hands-on experience, and necessary competencies. In this report, current trends in developing modern technical education programs are discussed.