Social Sustainability in Engineering Curriculum with Social Impact Audit Tool

Workshop Recommended citation: Vakhitova, T. V., Martin, N., & Ireland, P. (2025). Social Sustainability in Engineering Curriculum with Social Impact Audit Tool. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631604. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY IN ENGINEERING CURRICULUM WITH SOCIAL IMPACT AUDIT TOOL Vakhitova Tatiana Vadimovna a, 1 , Nicolas Martin b, Piers Ireland c, a b c Ansys Ltd. Conference Key Areas: Digital tools and AI in engineering education; Sustainability and society in engineering Keywords: Social-LCA, digital tool, sustainability, social hotspots ABSTRACT This workshop will introduce participants to Social Impact Audit Tool App (SIAT App), an advanced application derived from an Excel-based Tool developed by Granta Design team (Ashby et al, 2019). The SIAT App is designed to enhance engineering students' understanding of Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) concepts in relation to products’ life cycle thinking. The SIAT App is based on ISO-supported methodology of Social Life Cycle Performance Assessment (S-LCPA), utilising “threshold concept” – a reference scale approach. The App was tested with several academics during the second half of 2024. The SIAT App supports with analysis of social hotspots across product’s life cycle, provide visualisations of changing hotspots heatmap globally, based on a given threshold, and helps to compare potential social impact of two products. From the feedback received to-date, students have an increased awareness about social impacts across product’s life, for instance, leading to reconsideration of material 1 Corresponding Author T.V. Vakhitova [email protected] choices and production locations (Fernandes P. et al, 2025). Overall, with the help of SIAT App and by introducing social sustainability in engineering context, educators help to equip students as change agents in decision-making for sustainable development. 1 BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2015) with its targets are reflected in an Environmental Social Governance framework (ESG) with companies now obliged to report on their operations from a sustainability-perspective. Example of a regulated approach is Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in force since Dec 2022. Companies are increasingly looking for data, methods and tools to assess sustainability impact. Life Cycle Sustainability assessment is becoming a new paradigm with methods and tools being increasingly developed and tested (Valdivia & Sonneman eds. 2024). There are established methods for analysing Environmental Impact (e.g. Environmental Life Cycle Assessment with its ISO 14050), with Guidelines for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) now existing for more than 30 years. Life Cycle Costing approach is used for economic assessment. While Social Sustainability and guidelines on SLCA were first introduced in 2009 and subsequently updated in 2020. The most recent ISO standard 14075 dedicated to S-LCA was published in December 2024. In terms of its maturity and data availability it is the weakest from among the LCAs (Valdivia, 2024). SLCA largely shares ISO framework, yet has distinctive features, among those, stakeholders’ definition and consideration of their concerns is essential, the use of quantitative and qualitative data, inventories can relate to the whole organisation, there are positive and negative impacts to consider, as well as an iterative assessment process is promoted to validate results (Valdivia, 2024). 1.1 Social Sustainability in engineering education For a quarter of a century, universities have been offering courses focusing specifically on sustainability in an engineering context, Life Cycle Assessment method is usually included in its curricula (such as the MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge). The UN SDGs reinforced the importance of sustainability education and provided a common language around actionable goals, deployable in an engineering education context. Engineering education now includes sustainability knowledge and skills in the curriculum as standard at varying degrees, and these are reflected in their learning outcomes – often driven by accreditation bodies and implemented either top-down or/and bottom-up within a university (e.g. ABET accreditation, CDIO syllabus etc). However, when introducing the social side of sustainability, most frequently traditional health and safety and environmental consideration prevail (Vakhitova et al., 2015). Integration of social science methods and tools into traditional engineering curriculum e.g. such as methodologies of social impact assessment, S-LCA, and stakeholder engagement are still being explored and unevenly applied. At the same time, engineering ethics topics and recognition of soft or transversal skills as critical skills, has been increasingly evident (e.g. EESD conference 2020, SEFI conference 2023, 2024). In-person discussions with academic community at the International Materials Education Symposium (2024, 2025) suggest that students show their greatest engagement in discussion of social sustainability topics. 1.2 Social Impact Audit Tool In 2019 we have introduced Social Impact Audit Tool (SIAT) Excel-based (Ashby et all, 2019) to increase awareness of engineering students of socio-economic consequences of product-related decisions. The methodology is based on the widely accepted UNEP/SETAC "Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment of Products" (2009 and 2020). The tool enables students to explore scenarios that illustrate the SLCA concepts. The main audience are students of Materials Science, Engineering and Design courses. The SIAT fits well with the use of Ansys Granta EduPack software, in particular its Eco Audit Tool for a streamlined Life Cycle Assessment with its costing function and socio-economic data from Nations of the World Sustainability Database for a holistic sustainability analysis. The SIAT has now been transformed into a Python based application. With the new digital App additional functionality has been included to enhance the quality of its results, user experience and, therefore, learning outcomes. This includes more varied and multi-level data visualisations and additional functionality to explore potential social impact on key stakeholders’ groups. The data comes from the same Sustainability Database and comes from open sources, e.g. World Bank reports among others. The App is similarly aligned with the UN Social-LCA guidelines 2009, 2020 as well as the ISO 14075 SLCA, methodologically following Social Life Cycle Performance assessment. App development was performed in close collaboration with academics from three universities, University of Patras, Chalmers University and Norwegian University of Science and Technology. They have provided feedback on the App itself, its usability and user-friendliness, as well as its contextual outputs, and learning outcomes. Following such interaction, we have developed a visualization of social hotspots on a world map, which changes based on the selected threshold level (Figure 1). A case from Chalmers University of Technology describes a teaching experience, when students were asked to analyse scenarios with different social impact of their production chains using SIAT (Excel-based) (Fernandes P. et al, 2025). The conclusion suggests that the SIAT provides “systematic analysis of social impacts in product design while fostering critical understanding of social sustainability metrics” (Ibid.). Fundamentally the SIAT App helps with exploring potential social impact in terms of number of hotspots and, coupled with data from Sustainability Database, the depth of the issue, visualizing data to compare between stakeholders’ groups and life stages of a product, as well as social impacts between the products on a level of nations. The SIAT App provides additional visual and analytical ability to explore social hotspots, enabled due to enhanced capabilities of the platformed App. A simple workflow for teaching sustainable product design was tested at the International Materials Education Symposium (2025). The starting point was a case study, describing company’s stakeholders from their materiality brief; following by materials selection part; streamlined LCA and social risk analysis with a discussion at the end. There were 10 academics with engineering and or materials backgrounds present. Participants have indicated their interest in integrating the SIAT in teaching. A follow-up survey will be shared to collect data about their teaching experiences. A concluding ToolKit based on the workflow developed will be shared with the participants of SEFI’s workshop. Figure 1. Atlas view SIAT App. Figure 2. Workflow SIAT App. 2 WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES 2.1 Target audience The goal of this workshop is to collect feedback from engineering educators and encourage discussion, inspired using the Tool’s outputs. The data will support our feedback collection from engineering educators around the world, who are interested in introducing social sustainability in their teaching and will be cross-referenced with the results section of this workshop paper. 2.2 Learning Outcomes 1. Learn how to read social hotspots’ heatmap and potential social impact related to different stakeholder groups, guided by sustainability materiality matrix. 2. Discuss your experiences and get insight from fellow academics. 3. Learn about experiences from academia and industry. 4. Provide input into future development of the SIAT application to support international community of educators. 3 WORKSHOP DESIGN 3.1 Time plan Order Activity Time (min) 1 Introductions – expectations 5 2 Brief overview of the SIAT App within a context of a simple sustainable product design workflow 10 3 Prompts for discussion in-pairs with guiding questions 15 4 Experience from educators tested the SIAT with engineering students 5 5 Group discussion 15 6 Conclusions 5 3.2 Interactivity The workshop encourages active participation and debate with designed prompts and questions. We welcome engineering educators with an interest in social sustainability and experience in teaching these concepts to students. We are designing: • Work in-pairs: explore and compare social impact during life of a product based on prepared scenarios, come-up with your argumentation, take perspectives, discuss a preferred option and answer why. • Group Discussion: discuss findings and share insights on social sustainability in engineering education context. • Prompts to support these discussions. 4 WORKSHOP RESULTS Overall, the workshop’s flow was well-received. The educators would like to try SIAT App with students, connecting it to product life cycle topics on pair with teaching environmental LCA. The prompts worked as intended, enabling discussion regarding potential social impact across product life cycle (Fig.3). It might be beneficial to spend more time defining stakeholder groups and detailing relevant data for people, who are new to this topic. To introduce the subject of Social-LCA, the SIAT App and to go through an example, using the SIAT App, minimum of 1.5 - 2 hours would be preferable. This extra time enables a short exercise and a discussion. This timing works the best for those already familiar with LCA topic per se. At this workshop we have provided one double-sided A4 prompt with copies of visuals from the SIAT App and the questions below to discuss in pairs: •Explore number of hotspots per life stage of each scenario/which is the most critical? •Look at the number of hotspots per stakeholder group, compare with severity of hotspots with the help of a heatmap? •What questions about data you might have? •How would you prioritise stakeholder groups to make decisions about supply chain? •What discussion points you could think around this topic, using SIAT outputs? We also found that the term social sustainability itself has many associations. This can be more related to participants of SEFI conference, who would be aware of subjects, such as social inclusion, stakeholder engagement, multidisciplinary collaboration, accessibility, climate fairness, and other ethics-related considerations. Thus, framing this workshop closer to considerations of social impact in product design could have made it more clear from the start. Figure 3. example of an extract from prompts to investigate potential social impact. REFERENCES Ashby, M. F., Brechbühl, E., Vakhitova, T. V., & Vallejo-Olivares, A. (2019). Social Life-Cycle Assessment and Social Impact Audit Tool - A White Paper. Paper: Social Life-Cycle Assessment and Social Impact Audit Tool | Ansys Ashby, M.F. (2016), Materials and Sustainable Development. Elsevier Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1016/C2014-0-01670-X Directive (EU) 2022/2464 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 December 2022 amending Regulation (EU) No 537/2014, Directive 2004/109/EC, Directive 2006/43/EC and Directive 2013/34/EU, as regards corporate sustainability reporting (Text with EEA relevance) PE/35/2022/REV/1, ELI: http://data.europa.eu/eli/dir/2022/2464/oj Fernandes P. et al abstract and slides at IMES 2025 “unpublished” Materials Education Symposia, “Empowering Future Students: Evaluating the Role of the Social Impact Audit Tool in Developing Critical Thinking on Social Sustainability” ISO 14075:2024(en) Environmental management — Principles and framework for social life cycle assessment ISO 14075:2024 - Environmental management — Principles and framework for social life cycle assessment UNEP-SETAC (United Nations Environmental Program) (2009). 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