The Position of Humanitarian Engineering in Australia
Wednesday 8 June 2022
An Online Workshop hosted by the Engineers Australia
Humanitarian Engineering Community of Practice
Humanitarian Engineering Community of Practice
About
Written in a simplified way, Humanitarian Engineering is a field that addresses poverty, marginalisation, and disadvantage, using design thinking and approaches, to develop innovations appropriate to the context. There is a need to professionalise the Humanitarian Engineering field in Australia to ensure quality practice and education and align with activities and frameworks with the humanitarian and engineering sectors. By "professionalise” we mean to bring the same level of rigour, review, and recognition to Humanitarian Engineering as for any field, area of practice or discipline of engineering.
The position of an engineering field, such as a discipline, specialisation or area of practice, reflects the body of knowledge, skills and specialisation required to practice. For example, within the Engineers Australia discipline framework, ‘Amusement Rides and Devices’ is a general area of practice and ‘Fire Safety ’ has its own technical society, not because these fields have large memberships but because they are sufficiently specialised and ‘high risk’ to justify levels of scrutiny.
Humanitarian engineers work with marginalised or disadvantaged communities where there are inherent power imbalances, and they make decisions or take actions that affect livelihoods and wellbeing. There is sufficient risk to warrant enhanced scrutiny of Humanitarian Engineering practitioners and educators.
Through a Delphi method we invite workshop participants to openly discuss and debate the position of Humanitarian Engineering in Australia and draw a recommendation for next steps in professionalising Humanitarian Engineering.
Activities
All participants will be asked to submit their initial ideas and thoughts on the position of humanitarian engineering via a pre-workshop survey.
During the 2 hour workshop groups will discuss the main insights that arise from this pre-workshop survey
After the workshop a summary of the discussion and recommendations will be prepared and circulated, participants can provide further comments and vote on approving the recommendation.
The activities are being coordinated by Nick Brown, Jeremy Smith and Scott Daniel, all committee members of the Engineers Australia Humanitarian Engineering Community of Practice. Ethics approval for the conducting and disseminating the workshop findings is currently under action.