Conference Agenda

The transdisciplinary approach is revolutionising engineering by re-framing its work to include stakeholders' needs and requirements to solve complex problems. Solution teams often benefit from quantitative and non-quantitative disciplines in the process. They face challenges, including different thinking processes, notation, and professional culture. International businesspeople are used to dealing with other political systems, laws, cultures, and languages. This paper describes how such practitioners deal with these challenges and compares their practice with the needs of transdisciplinary engineering work. The contribution of this paper is twofold: a) a literature review of international business executive skills proven necessary for successful practitioners, and b) a transdisciplinary framework to aid engineers in identifying skills required to carry out successful transdisciplinary projects. This research aims to focus transdisciplinary engineering teams on the executive skills required to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their work.

Future energy scenarios usually show pathways to green energy futures are possible. However, since the COP21 Paris Agreement, scientific scenarios show human activity is accelerating toward catastrophic failures and loss. A group of transdisciplinary thinkers met and discussed the history of sustainability and contemplated how a disruptive shift could occur in time for energy decarbonisation and climate stabilisation. We were motivated to examine how transitions have occurred in the past, particularly those that involved corrective transdisciplines like fire safety, emergency management, food safety, or waste management. Corrective transdisciplines fundamentally change the engineering and operations through duty of care. Corrective shifts in economic, policy and cultural paradigms seem to follow the evolution of engineering practice. Over time, the prevention of harm and loss is manifested in technological enterprise, infrastructures, energies, and behaviour. The only way the whole-system transition changes the trajectory from danger of catastrophic failure to survivable and thrive-able future is that a corrective trans- discipline evolves now. We followed a simple logic process, framing an argument, developing a supporting theory, and brainstorming the methods involved. The argument is that since 1970 millions of people have gained awareness of future risks, and at least 10,000 have focused their working careers on sustainability. The sustainability-active people are not having sufficient impact to cause a corrective transition, because they have become a diaspora. Our reasoning follows that just transition will eventuate when the diaspora converges to a corrective transdiscipline which is valued by industry and policy and supported by training and research programmes.

The purpose of the research presented in this paper was to identify tools with the potential to assist project teams to work in a transdisciplinary (TD) manner. Much research into transdisciplinary working, tended to focus on theoretical and descriptive activities. However, due to the social challenges being faced today, such as the climate emergency, TD working is gaining more traction. However, there is limited guidance to assist teams in working in a TD manner. This paper contributes to providing practical and useable insights to assist TD working. Our research consisted of three stages, literature review, project team interviews and clustering of results. Stage 1: we identified through literature the attributes required by tools to have the potential to assist working in a TD manner, and identified tools that met these attributes. Seven attributes (shared purpose; stakeholders' collaboration inside and outside academia; reflection on disciplinary assumptions, biases, and perspectives; knowledge synthesis; integration of knowledge, perspectives, and methods; systems thinking; and co-creation of knowledge/solutions) and three tools were identified. Stage 2: a five-member project team to determine whether they were aware/considered the seven attributes, 60% of the team members were aware of five attributes, none of the tools were used. In stage 3, we undertook thematic analysis to cluster the literature findings and the interview results. In conclusion, we found that multidisciplinary project teams may not be explicitly aware of TD attributes (although displayed TD attributes) and unaware of existing tools. Our next steps will be identifying how to utilise tools effectively.

Behavioural interventions are often used to tackle social issues that seem solvable with some form of behaviour change. However, increasing research points to behaviour change as a fundamentally internal process, raising questions on the limitations of current technologies to produce enduring changes. The gap between existential views of behaviour and existing technocentric solutions prompts us to review the dominant model of intervention and explore new directions to design technical intervention systems. In this paper, we utilise a sociotechnical systems approach to model and reframe the role of behavioural intervention systems. Our model integrates internal aspects of behaviour change into the operational concept of technological systems to discuss how technology could be better designed to adapt to the idiosyncratic needs of individuals and support their behaviour change processes. The resulting model represents a paradigm shift away from operational rigidity in technology development towards architectures that account for higher-order human needs.