About TE
Transdisciplinary engineering is focused on understanding effective forms of collaboration to get great outcomes via design, manufacture, decision-making, and intergrating systems. For the UK, engineering has recently been at the centre of major challenges and sometimes tragic issues such as the Grenfell Tower disaster or the more recent major disruptive issues with Raac - reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, all point to challenges in the way engineers have and do work with different communities across and within engineering.
Tackling this challenge requires co-operation, collaboration, working outside our comfort zones with different disciplines. Central to the work in transdisciplinary engineering are these kinds of concepts:
collaboration with others from outside our direct networks - this can mean academics with business, with government or with communities
integrating ideas from other academic disciplines - this can mean working with social scientist of a range of different stripes to understand how people and communities can interact with designs, benefit or be marginalised by engineering; but also with those from environmental science or management and finance - essentially any other expertise that might help make engineering work better for society
using systems thinking to connect between different ideas and between processes, people, platforms and so on.
using critical and reflexive thinking - that is thinking about who benefits from a project and whether more people can and what your role is in the project. It's about ethical engineering practice and understanding what doing good for society might mean.
Transdisciplinary engineering is about being a different kind of engineer - one that can use the deep skills of engineering across and between different engineering disciplines but also about what that means do so with other, non-engineers and for non-engineers.
What makes for a good TE paper?
TE2024 is a space to explore engineering ideas and innovation that don't fit neatly into other conference contexts - what's good for an IEEE conference is unlikely to be ideal for TE. But importantly you can take that idea or paper you wanted to submit to an IEEE symposium and use it as a platform for a TE paper. Doing so might take you outside your comfort zone if you are new to the TE community, but that's why we are here to help.
Taking your standard engineering analysis or modelling and asking certain questions about it can provide the basis for a good, interesting paper, and potentially set you on the road to new kinds of innovation that might have been closed to you before.
what is the point of the approach you've taken? Who benefits from it and who won't?
how could this approach help address major global societal and environmental challenges - like climate crisis, pandemics, material and ecosystem depletion, waste and pollution etc?
what have you learnt doing this project where collaboration was involved - especially those who were not engineers?
Or you can take your current line of work and discuss it with someone from right outside your field - like a social scientist. This could be someone close to engineering like management science or - for those really wanting to challenge themselves - someone working in engineering studies, science and technology studies or sociology more generally. Reporting back on these discussions - how you understood it, what was challenging what was helpful for you - these are also good papers for TE.