“Technodiversity” for Analysing Sustainability Transitions perceived by Students in Engineering

Engineers as the whole population need to integrate sustainability issues in their activities, thus, involving the need of dedicated training in engineering schools. The inclusion of these issues in engineering curriculum in the most appropriate teaching configurations is a work in progress and a stringent question for teachers and the institutions. One major difficulty is that there is no single path for achieving sustainability: how to teach sustainability to students without being too dogmatic? In this paper, we make the hypothesis that the concept of “technodiversity” originated from the philosophy of technology is suited for tackling this issue. We aim to demonstrate that it is an operational concept that allows for highlighting a diversity of visions of sustainability and understanding of technology among engineering students. We study an initiative during which the concept of technodiversity was introduced to engineering students and illustrated by prospective scenarios of sustainable transitions. We finally discuss the usefulness of the philosophy of technology for integrating sustainability issues in engineering training.