Designs on development: engineering, globalization, and social justice

This article critically appraises "engineering for development initiatives that are currently receiving a lot of attention within engineering communities in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. The authors discuss how many of these programs share problematic assumptions about technology's role in community development and fail to grapple with the economic and cultural structures that influence most development interventions. The authors use a case study approach to highlight these assumptions, first by looking at a project involving a collaboration between universities in Nicaragua working on educational capacity building for product design with an eye to local economic empowerment, and the second involving the work of a non-governmental organization working in Sri Lanka and its approach to community development using renewable technologies.