The World of “Engineering for Good”: Towards A Mapping of Research, Teaching, and Practice of Engineers Doing Good

Who are engineers for good? Where and how do these engineers do good? And what does it mean to be a successful one? Engineers have provided normative visions for societal change since the profession's conception (Wisnioski, 2012). A minority of engineers have gone one step further, reimagining and reworking their "desire to help" to form the institutions and norms that define "engineering for good" today (Riley, 2008; Schneider, et al. 2009). Engineering for good—or the practice of prioritizing good over more traditional engineering urgencies such as cost, efficiency, and innovation—has steadily grown in popularity in the United States since the early 2000s. Engineers for good use a variety of language to describe their practice including humanitarian engineering, engineering for development, engineering and social justice, peace engineering, and engineering service-learning. In addition to providing historical context for the growth of this movement, this paper provides an overview of the current academic, nonprofit, and corporate settings in which engineers are explicitly working to do good. This paper reimagines the community as the engineers, scholars, practitioners, and networks that are actively involved in defining what engineering for good is by participating in the enterprise. Analyzing practitioner-oriented artifacts, scholarship, and their geographies, this paper concludes with the call and a preliminary sketch for a broad, community-guided mapping of engineering for good's past, present, and potential visions for its futures.