Research to meet social demand

Research on education of engineers

In tandem with the advancement of globalization of the society, a range of the social responsibilities to be borne by engineers is rapidly growing.

Since the duties and decision making process of engineers are varied dependent upon the country and cultural sphere, such variation could cause a serious problem in reality.

Reliability and quality of Japanese manufacturing are globally recognized, and it is argued that one of the pillars underpinning such reliability and quality is ethics education of engineers.

However, since under the current conditions it is difficult to say that the education and research of ethics for scientists and engineers are conducted with sufficient international perspectives, especially from the perspective of traditional values and philosophies of the Southeast Asian nations, KIT is determined to pursue the research in such field.

Most engineers display their skills as a member of an organization, and there is a risk that where business ethics and engineers ethics are not well aligned in their value concept, engineers ethics are suppressed and that they are led into a wrong direction due to a lack of ethical understanding on the part of management. In order to avoid such incidence, it is essential to nurture the organizational climate by the collaborations of the management and engineers where the management and engineers share the same set of values.

Our research project will establish a study group together with local companies and aim to shape and practice such ideal as described above in the Hokuriku business community.

By such efforts, KIT endeavours to encourage regional companies in the Hokuriku area to work on and absorb the issue of ethics, and to create an opportunity for enhancing the management capabilities of such companies as well as promoting academic-industry partnership.

KIT has tried to incorporate the ethics education for scientists and engineers into engineering education in the past. By incorporating the element of ethics education in the specialized course such as Project Design, it becomes possible to carry out ethics education throughout overall curriculum.

However, since it is necessary to continuously investigate the effective implementation manners and measurement method of effectiveness concerned with such teaching, we will work on identifying 1) effective way of teaching and 2) measurement method of effectiveness of such teaching.

In addition, in conjunction with our project design curriculum, introduction of ¡°Design Thinking¡± which is recently getting a lot of attention should be one of the research agenda in future. We will appeal to the stakeholders that this research project allows us to combine engineering education including a project design teaching, pillar of the KIT¡¯s curriculum, with the ethics education for scientists and engineers and that we are providing more practical teaching closely aligned to the real world.

Major reason for wrongdoing against the scientists¡¯ and engineers¡¯ ethics is a lack of fundamental understanding of science and technology: namely what is science or technology and what is important.

Although the introduction and development of the ethics education for scientists and engineers in Japan has started in late 1990¡¯s, insufficient historical understanding tends to lead to the ethics education for scientists and engineers that is based on an individual belief or arbitrary idea in accordance with a fashionable thinking of the time, and such education can be ineffective in the real world.

With an awareness of such issue, KIT has so far conducted a historical analysis on the science and engineering ethics and identified the influencing factors. KIT¡¯s archive collection ¡°Dawn of Engineering (Kogaku-no Akebono Bunko)¡± owns the first editions of source books that are precious in the history of science and engineering, while the Research Institute for Architectural Archives possesses the collection of reference materials on the modern architecture. It is important for scientists and engineers to learn the changes of ethical values from the past to the present, applying these reference materials to understanding the essence of scientific technology.

Fruits of our research activities, research outcomes in the specific field, will be presented at the relevant academic conference and published while STEM teaching materials as well as teaching materials of the ethics for scientists and engineers will be developed applying the source materials in our archives.