Incorporating Futures Thinking in a Civil Engineering Cornerstone Course
The importance of the capacity of civil engineering students to design for the future should go without saying. Civil engineering structures are meant to stand for decades, if not hundreds or even thousands of years, and are to be utilized by future generations. How do civil engineers of the present envision the wants and needs of future generations, especially in this fast-changing world where values often shift rapidly? How do civil engineers safeguard the rights of future generations while fulfilling the wants and needs of the present? How do civil engineering designs of today meet the different needs of the stakeholders in the future? How do we prioritize the current needs of the natural environment while designing construction projects? We contend that these are key questions related to the future that ought to be addressed in a civil engineering curriculum. This paper describes the ongoing efforts and preliminary results of incorporating futures thinking into a cornerstone course at the Department of Civil Engineering at National Taiwan University in Taiwan. The experiment was conducted as one of the two parts of a freshman course, Civil Engineering Concept Design Studio, for one of the three classes. The paper will briefly describe the progress of trial teaching in the Fall semester of 2014 as well as that of the pilot curriculum in the Fall of 2015. Major elements of futures thinking and fundamental civil engineering design concepts extracted during the process of incorporation will be presented along with an assessment of student learning. Suggestions for future curricular implementation will also be made.