Understanding Scale in Wicked Problems of Sustainable Development: Who Needs Dedicated Courses in Higher Education?

Many universities have developed and established systems to teach engineers about societal aspects of their work. Such approaches should be mandated as it enables engineers to contribute to any transdisciplinary challenge faced by humanity. These major problems human society faces can be addressed by using the frame of the Sustainable Development Goals. Achieving these goals depends on humanity’s ability to manage our self-inflicted interconnected climate- and biodiversity-loss-crisis. Public discourse, discussions at university, or student’s work-assignments often lack an understanding of the scale of specific tasks and technical approaches needed. Scale is understood as any physical dimension involved in a human activity, or the implementation of a technical solution for aforementioned problems regionally or globally; examples of such physical dimensions are mass of resources used, amount of energy invested, or Ricardian land covered. This dearth of understanding usually results in a disregard for the environmental impact or an overestimation of benefits, it hinders realistic approaches, and can lead to irresponsible discounting of the human future. This paper addresses the interrelated questions of how to teach relevant competences and methods at university, specifically: What are the major hindrances to grasping scale in a meaningful way? Are there significant differences between students of technical and non-technical studies in understanding scale? Who would gain from learning such skills? What could be the content of a meaningful course? The paper draws on student’s assignments from engineering and from interdisciplinary courses addressing SDGs. All these courses tend to demand from the students the inclusion of comparable concepts with respect to scale. The paper will include actual arguments and considerations from Hochschule Darmstadt on implementing dedicated technology and natural-science courses for the social sciences.