Disruption and design through ‘aesthetic co-production’ in Engineering Entrepreneurship Education

• Engineering Entrepreneurship Education has increasingly engaged in the social and environmental effects of Technology-Based Entrepreneurship (TBE), with demands to make society more participative in worldmaking seen as a responsible aesthetic choice related to design. We wish to delve deeper into the teaching and learning needed to understand participative processes in such choices, by pedagogic development of a TBE course called ‘Aesthetics, design and sustainability’, embedded in the curricula of Uppsala School of Entrepreneurship. Pedagogically guided by a focus on aesthetic co-production, we suggest teachers can better foster engineering students’ awareness of their own abilities to engage in disruptive configurations, which is fundamental to entrepreneurship, and worldmaking, which is fundamental to socio-technological progress. The aim is to advance and mobilize the concept of ‘aesthetic co-production’ in the classroom and beyond, with particular focus on how customers/users can be enabled to interact with the environment, designers, business developers and technology, to configure new knowledge through directed entanglements, materialized in the form of more sustainable technological solutions. We elaborate on this strategic process of participation by drawing on the experience of an engineering student from the School of Entrepreneurship, (co-author Arwin Zendehrokh), who currently is enabling an industrial partner to merge Additive Manufacturing with design and aesthetics to secure custom-made sustainable solutions. Since engineering students are particularly prone to base their worldmaking in expertise on technology, we suggest this pedagogic approach on aesthetic co-production is crucial for the creation of a shift in their understanding of the social and environmental effects of TBE.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Annan teknik -- Övrig annan teknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Other Engineering and Technologies -- Other Engineering and Technologies not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Engineering Science with specialization in industrial engineering and management

Teknisk fysik med inriktning mot industriell teknik

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)