Abstract:

This talk explores how sociotechnical systems analytics can be a bridge between engineering education and energy infrastructure systems. Drawing on classroom research and ethnographic study of US offshore wind projects, I examine two levels of sociotechnical understanding: how disciplinary training shapes what engineering students perceive as “technical” versus “social” in energy systems, and how industry and government actors grapple with contradictory risk typologies–financial, environmental, political–as infrastructure becomes contested. Energy systems are not merely technical problems of design and optimization, but are entangled with political contestation, regulatory shifts, and community concerns. When developers, regulators, and even educators frame the central problem as financial viability or cost minimization, the solutions that emerge—centralizing risk onto industry, competing at state level, piecemeal development—follow in that frame. By contrast, explicitly redefining the problem as one of shared risk, trust-building, and long-term regional coordination opens different possibilities for whose futures matter. Making problem definition itself a subject of engineering decision-making, asking not just “how do we solve this problem?” but “who gets to define the problem?” (Downey, 2015; Kleine et al., 2024), is essential for imagining more just and sustainable sociotechnical futures. This framing reveals energy systems as a rich pedagogical arena for teaching engineers how to navigate and unsettle dualisms between technical and social domains in engineering. By examining how education and practice reinforce one another, I suggest possibilities for cultivating sociotechnical engineering judgment that is grounded in the competing framings and power dynamics of our local/global energy transitions.