Letter from a Humanitarian Engineering Scholar
Professor Juan Lucena
Dear engineering students:
Congratulations on your willingness to explore more socially responsible alternatives for how to make engineering relevant and useful. While humanitarian engineering (HE) is a relatively new field of education and practice, it represents a unique opportunity to connect engineering with problems and people historically neglected by our profession. However, to be part of this movement, you will need more than good intentions and technical skills. You need to be willing to question many of the assumptions and practices that we now take for granted in engineering. You will need to question “what is engineering for?” and “who is engineering for?” Embarking on this critical exploration, you will find that, historically, engineering has neglected problems and people that do not bring high returns on investments or create high profits for companies. Just take a look at your engineering textbooks and see that most problems and applications rarely address the needs of the homeless, or the indigenous groups whose lands have been affected by industrial pollution, or the single mothers who do not have health insurance for their children and have to make a living recycling trash out of landfills. The list goes on.
During your exploration, you will also find that the technologies engineers design, build, and operate are never neutral, as they shape the distribution of resources and opportunities among the groups affected by them. Think, for example, how highways and other civil construction projects often create “infrastructure apartheid” between the haves and have-nots that live around them. Or think about how most user products, from cellphones to home appliances to cars, discriminate against people who have physical disabilities.
Another important lesson that you will discover is the importance of co-defining problems with the people that you want to serve. In engineering education, we learn to solve many problems, mostly relying on math and science, yet we rarely learn to define problems with others. To do good HE, we need to understand, value, and learn from non-engineers. And to do this, we need to rely on the humanities and social sciences as forms of knowledge that can help us understand people and their contexts, needs and desires in ways that engineering does not.
If you continue this exploration into the actual practice of HE, first as a novice in your first project or job and hopefully later as a career, you might also experience significant questioning and even criticism of your professional pathway by actors in the status quo who are used to engineers working for high profits in the corporate and military sectors. With the help of fellow HE peers, professors, networks, and organisations, you can prepare yourself to counteract this questioning, remain true to your convictions, and actually have a successful and fulfilling career.
Congratulations on your courage to join us in redefining what engineering is for and for wanting to put your profession at the service of groups of people who need it.
About the author
name: Professor Juan Lucena
institution: Colorado School of Mines
Professor Juan Lucena is Director of the Humanitarian Engineering Undergraduate Program and Professor of Engineering, Design and Society at the Colorado School of Mines, in The United States of America (USA). He holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech and dual Bachelor’s degrees in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA). His work focuses on transforming engineering education and practice to advance social justice, sustainability, and community wellbeing.
Professor Lucena is internationally recognised for his scholarship at the intersection of engineering, culture, ethics, and humanitarian practice. His books include Defending the Nation: U.S. Policymaking to Create Scientists and Engineers (2005), Engineering and Sustainable Community Development (2010), Engineering Education for Social Justice (2013), and Engineering Justice: Transforming Engineering Education and Practice (2017). At the Colorado School of Mines, Professor Lucena’s research has been supported by multiple NSF-funded projects examining globalisation, humanitarian ethics, and the cultural dimensions of engineering education and practice. Drawing on ethnographic and historical approaches, his work explores how engineering identities, progress metrics, and national priorities shape both technical outcomes and social justice.
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