Development Engineering

DEVELOPMENT ENGINEERING
WHAT?
WHY?
WHERE?
FUTURE
PREPARED BY : PROF. D.V.PATEL

• Development engineering is an emerging field that brings together
communities, businesses, students, faculty, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), and governments, as well as for- and non-profit organizations, with
the intention of working collaboratively to solve global challenges.
• It is, by design, a multidisciplinary field that bridges engineering and social
sciences such as economics, public health, and gender studies and places
them alongside business and entrepreneurship for societal benefit.
• Development engineering has the potential to address massively complex
challenges our world grapples with today, and by understanding its history
and trajectory, we examine how development engineering can contribute to
social change.
Whatdevelopmentengineeringisandhowit’sdifferent

• Also known as “humanitarian engineering”, “engineering for change”,
or “engineering for impact”, development engineering is a field of
research and practice that combines the principles of engineering with
economics, entrepreneurship, design, business, and policy—among
others—to create technological interventions in accordance with the
needs and wants of individuals living in complex, low-resource settings.
• While most may associate these settings with “developing” or “third world”
countries, development engineering equips practitioners to work on social
problems wherever they exist, whether that is California or Bangladesh.
• A variety of technologies have been created for diverse contexts, such
as modular greenhouse for use in Kenya, a device for cervical cancer
screening education in Ghana, and a filter to remove arsenic from
groundwater in the United States.

• Development engineering isn’t entirely new. Engineers have long been engaged
in public service. The first canon of the Code of Ethics for Engineers states that
“engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.”
• Development engineering aims to build on the profession’s service-oriented roots
by integrating both social and technical considerations into design work to
ensure that proposed solutions sustain intended benefits over time.
• In this spirit, development engineering interventions may take the form of
solutions that address systemic problems. One systemic problem addressed by
development engineers is the lack of contextual consideration.
• For example, medical devices donated to developing countries often fail because
the equipment does not match community need, no system for maintenance
exists, or the user manual becomes lost. One potential development engineering
project would aim to create medical devices suitable for use in a developing
country, taking into account relevant factors such as required durability, power
supply, and availability of spare parts.

• Historically, engineering training is often deeply technical (e.g., learning fluid
mechanics, thermodynamics, and advanced calculus) and places less emphasis
on communication and contextual understanding.
• This position is generally reinforced by engineering programs and faculty that
call the ability to write or give a presentation a “soft” skill.
• However, engineers are well-equipped to examine problems holistically—
traditionally, they learn to simultaneously understand the details of a situation
as well as the broader problem context.
But in practice,
• for example, how the flow rates in a wastewater treatment system relate to total
sediment removal, and not how a telemedicine system can change national
health policy.
• Engineering was created as an applied science; development engineering
takes it one step further by broadening the potential applications of
engineering to address real-world, poverty-driven challenges.

• Development engineering hinges on the understanding that creating sustainable
systems around a technological intervention requires more than just engineering
prowess—it requires knowledge of aspects like local economics and business to
understand financial viability as well as ethnography (i.e., systematic study of
people and their behaviors and culture) and interviewing practices to understand
the community.
• While the traditional focus on “hard” skills is changing as engineering programs
evolve, emphasizing the need for students to develop communication and
entrepreneurial competencies is core to development engineering.
• To be clear, this is not a belief that engineers should be expected to be experts
in ethnography, geography, economics, and engineering. Instead, the hope is
that engineers will become able to translate concepts across disciplines and
understand there are many “unknown” unknowns, or factors not yet
considered that must be uncovered if a technological intervention is to be
successfully implemented over time.

Why development engineering is necessary
• Today’s complex, globalized world is filled with problems that are messy with
no clear solutions. Problems such as securing access to food in an era of
climate change, providing universal housing amidst rapid urbanization, and
determining ways to provide consumers with low-carbon energy sources all
require innovative thinking and action if progress is to be made.
• As Paul Polak a leader in the social entrepreneurship movement—states, over
90 percent of the world’s design efforts are aimed at 10 percent of the
population. The people who need game-changing solutions are not engaged in
the innovation process while, at the same time, significant resources are being
spent on solving the wrong problems, or more precisely, developing products
and processes that make money but only improve the world for a small number
of people.

• Unlike an engineering homework set where all the necessary information can
be found in a textbook, “wicked” problems are those that are ill-defined and
complex. “Wicked” problems are indeterminate and there aren’t rules for how
to generate and implement solutions to them.
• Solving “wicked” problems requires intimate knowledge of the problem
context, a point that is too often overlooked and causes initiatives that aim to
implement technology within development projects to fail.
• If we, as a global society, are going to gain traction on solving compelling and
immediate problems with complex societal and ecological dimensions, we
need programs like development engineering to train the next generation of
engineers to become critical thinkers and doers.
• Without sufficient training, students and practitioners with good intentions
run the risk of failing to achieve their goals or, worse, doing more harm than
good.

• for example, a well-funded and publicly optimistic venture to install “PlayPumps” in
Southern Africa to attempt to solve the regional water crisis. The PlayPump connects a
merry-go-round contraption to a water pump that allows playing children to power a device
to extract and store groundwater. However, after all the hype and tens of millions of dollars
fundraised, the PlayPump installations in Mozambique and South Africa were soon
inoperable.
• Yet in order to meet donor demands and live up to the marketing hype, PlayPumps were
installed in thousands of locations, replacing the traditional water pumps already there,
effectively transforming PlayPumps into a not only a failed venture, but also one that
became useless and exploitative by forcing children to keep turning the merry-go-round
nonstop in order to pump out enough water to meet village demand.
• Instead of solving a dire water crisis, PlayPumps actually contributed to water inequities in
Southern Africa by replacing the workable traditional water pumps with an exciting, but
ultimately deeply flawed, water pump design. PlayPumps succinctly illustrate that global
issues don’t come with quick fixes and that

Engineers can’t just casually step in to help with
a community’s needs. Instead, global
development requires a rigorous approach for
which technically trained engineers need to have a
better understanding of problem contexts, either
through collaboration or a more rounded education.

• In this vein, development engineering can add significant value to global development
1. by providing a space for diverse parties with the same goal to connect,
2. find collaboration opportunities
3. share best practices as well as mistakes and failures.
• Although many practitioners may be working on the same types of projects in different
settings—or working on different projects in the same setting—they aren’t always talking to
one another.
• This communication breakdown results in mistakes frequently being repeated and
redundancy of efforts. Development engineering, however, builds a more cohesive
community by bringing faculty from different disciplines (e.g., business and engineering)
together to co-teach core development courses and by requiring engineers to learn about
public health and economics.
• Connection among people happens through dedicated conferences, an open-access journal,
and academic centers such as the Blum Center, which serve as hubs for meet-ups, classes,
and conversations.

• The roots of development engineering can be traced back to the time of colonialism and
imperialism. The era preceding World War II saw Western powers in the world occupying
and exploiting non-Western countries with less economic power.
• In the 1940s the United States instituted the Marshall Plan to provide material aid for
Western European nations affected by the destruction wrought in the war, which
represented the first instance of the US giving aid internationally.
• President Harry Truman’s inaugural address in 1949 outlined a plan to “embark on a bold
new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress
available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas,” which
development critic Gustavo Esteva regards as the invention of development.
• With the belief that underdeveloped nations needed to be “modernized”, the 1960s saw a
period of Western nations giving technologies to formerly colonized non-Western nations,
assuming such technology transfer would yield fast success. After failing to see progress
in the way of economic or technological “development” in the modernization era, the
1970s saw an alternative approach to aid.
Wheredevelopmentengineeringstarted

• The rise of “appropriate” technology coincided with the growing recognition that for
technology to be accepted, it needed to be designed for the intended use context. Simply
transferring a technology designed for Western nations to a developing country would not
yield desired progress.
• This new approach, which emphasized the importance of integrating contextual
considerations in development, was formalized at the first Design for Development congress
in 1979. The congress itself, hosted by the International Council of Societies of Industrial
Design (ICSID) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO),
represented a crucial moment in recognizing design—a close cousin to engineering—as a
tool for global development, useful in creating products and services to meet social needs.
The congress also signed the Ahmedabad Declaration, formalizing a new “design for
development” field.
• In the 1980s and 1990s, as design and engineering became increasingly employed in
socially conscious settings, the tech boom connected the world on an unprecedented scale.
However, these connections created a “spiky” (unequal) world in which the urban and
wealthy regions rapidly outpaced the rural and poorer areas in economic development,
innovation, and general well-being.

• During the same time, both those working in development and intended beneficiaries
became disillusioned by the power of multilateral institutions (large organizations funded
by multiple nations) like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to
promote international development and, consequently, that allowed engineers and
designers to imbue small-scale and localized projects with their technical expertise.
• Attempting to gain back the generally lost trust of large multinational organizations, in
September 2000, the United Nations suggested eight goals “to reverse the grinding
poverty, hunger, and disease affecting billions of people”: the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs).
• These served as a catalyst to further encourage the involvement of engineers and
designers in addressing global challenges by engaging in smaller, more localized
projects.
• More and more funding opportunities began to arise for development-oriented
projects in the wake of the growing international commitment to the MDGs, and
what emerged was an ecosystem that provided support to ventures, projects, and
programs at the intersection of engineering and impact.

Thefutureofdevelopmentengineering
• Throughout its proliferation, the development engineering field has seen successes including
a growing number of academic programs, increased buy-in from funding sources, and a
growing base of practitioners. However, there is still much to be done as the field matures
and shapes the broader development agenda.
• Growing pains are common in any new field or movement, but rather than ignoring them, it’s
important that they’re called out in order to spur thoughtful conversations and spark action to
move the field forward.
• Some of the central challenges facing development engineering currently include balancing
academic incentives with real-world impact, fitting community-driven work into institution-
driven programs, and blending techno-centric and human-centric approaches.
• First, a lack of alignment often exists between academic incentives and the factors that drive
real-world impact. At the faculty level, this is seen in the publication system and tenure
committees. As Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards recently wrote in Environmental
Engineering Science, “The goal of measuring scientific productivity has given rise to
quantitative performance metrics, including publication count, citations, combined citation-
publication counts.

• For students, the disconnect between academia and real-world impacts manifest when examining what qualifies
as “worthy” research. Often, development work is perceived as less rigorous compared to other forms of
technical work. This can translate to students treating development engineering as an extra thing they’re doing
rather than the main objective of their studies. Further, the traditional goal of graduate research is to become an
expert in a narrow field, while development practice, on the other hand, requires a working knowledge of a
broad range of fields including politics, economics, and psychology in addition to deeply technical engineering
topics.
• Similar to the “publish or perish” crisis, a second challenge is that many academics are encouraged to engage
with others internally, with little incentive to form meaningful partnerships with organizations unaffiliated with a
university. The path of least resistance in academia is often to turn inward, to engage with others of a similarly
academic mind, and to avoid bringing the highly abstract and theoretical conversations down to a level of
actionable progress.
• The other side of this challenge is the amount of time it takes to develop meaningful partnerships, understand the
full extent of a situation, test ideas, revise, and implement solutions. The long gestation period of community-
driven development projects can be at odds with the intensely concentrated university setting in which these
programs exist. Students traditionally spend only four years in their undergraduate education and less than six
years in their graduate education and, with the ever-present demands of rigorous higher education, students are
not encouraged to prioritize the needs of the communities they work with above their own needs to build a
resume, graduate, and find a job.

Development Engineering

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