Learning to deal with social factors as a goal in the education of engineers

One of the challenges engineers face is how to deal with the combination of scientific-technological and social factors in the development and implementation of new technologies. To prepare student engineers for this there are two options: (a) train a special type of engineer, who has had a combination of engineering and social science courses; and (b) teach the 'normal' engineers to get a good feeling for the relevance of social factors to their work. Both types of training are offered at the Eindhoven University of Technology. In this article, we describe the results of a study into the way student engineers in their master's thesis struggle with the integration of social factors in their engineering work. A programme of guidelines for doing this in a more sophisticated way has been developed on the basis of these experiences and of literature in the field of technology assessment and design methodology.