Board 35: Essentials of the Nurse + Engineer: Defining Public Value for Civil Engineers

Abstract

Increasingly civil engineers are being asked to incorporate a more inclusive meaning of "public" (i.e., who) and "public value" (i.e., inherently moral concepts) when planning, designing, and supervising the construction and maintenance of building and infrastructure projects. One way to improve the meaning of public and value is to borrow from the adjacent profession of nursing. Nurses are well-known patient-centered care, whether the patient is an individual, a population, or the public. Unlike civil engineers, who access public views by interacting with representative stakeholders, the nurse "builds up" a view of the public by collecting information on individuals, which are grouped into populations, and ultimately assembled into a sum that provides an aggregate measure of public views. To provide civil engineers with exposure to a nursing approach to building up a public view from interactions with individuals, a teaching module was designed to explain the concepts of "risk" and "sustainability". This module was incorporated into a department-wide required course entitled, "Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering." This course is required of undergraduate students of civil engineering, architectural engineering, and environmental engineers. This article includes details of the module. In particular, students are invited to answer an open ended questions, "how much would you pay to watch a perfect sunset?", and the results of student responses are used as part of teaching. The results of student response before and after a lecture module show a clear trend away from extreme answers of "everything" (i.e., a sunset is priceless) and "nothing" (i.e., a sunset is free), and towards a better understanding of public value and an answer that reflects "some dollar amount," which is created from the sum of the values expressed by each individual. A subsequent lecture module introduces students to the concept of full-cost accounting as a way to integrate individual values into a net aggregate public value. We discuss an important limitation of this approach, namely that assessing the "value of a sunset" may be biased for those who are visually impaired, colorblind, or photosensitive. This work highlights the convergent approach known as the nurse+engineer, where transdisciplinary integration across two diverse professions is used to solve a pressing societal challenge, in this case a more inclusive meaning of public value constructed from a collection of individual values expressed by individual people in response to the question, "what is the value of a sunset".

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2153-5965

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 American Society for Engineering Education, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

23 Jun 2024

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