Making Sociotechnical Engineering Ordinary | 2026 Bovay Lecture | Steven Skerlos (University of Michigan)

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Engineering education has a persistent gap. Students are trained to optimize technical performance while context, stakeholders, and distributional consequences are treated as topics that can be removed from "real" engineering without losing it. The result is a profession that often produces well-engineered solutions to problems no one owns, and that is sometimes surprised when good ideas fail in the world for reasons that were visible from the start.

This Bovay Lecture follows one path through that problem. It opens with a manufacturing case in which a technically sound and environmentally beneficial cutting-fluid recycling technology failed in industry for organizational, incentive-driven, and human reasons. From that diagnosis the talk moves to a decade of curricular response at the University of Michigan: the Socially Engaged Design process model, the Socially Engaged Engineering Toolkit, and the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering and Design (C-SED), which now partners with roughly one hundred instructors across every department in Michigan Engineering and reaches more than unique three thousand students annually through repeated, in-course encounters chosen by faculty rather than mandated by the college.

The lecture then turns from sociotechnical integration to engineering ethics proper. Drawing on the design ethics, responsible innovation, design justice, and values-in-design literatures, it offers a working synthesis of engineering design ethics organized around six necessary conditions, and asks whether those conditions can be taught inside ordinary technical courses, using approaches familiar to C-SED, without a parallel ethics curriculum. The thought experiment continues to visualize what a real-world classroom application could look like in practice, with exclusion criteria, redesign triggers, and values-to-specification traces written into the engineering decision itself rather than added afterward.

The talk closes with an invitation. What should count as evidence that engineering ethics education is actually changing engineering practice, and what shared infrastructure might let universities work on that question together?

About the Speaker

Steven Skerlos is the J. Reid and Polly Anderson Professor of Manufacturing and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan.  He co-founded and serves as Faculty Director of the Center for Socially Engaged Engineering and Design (C-SED). He teaches the college's senior mechanical engineering capstone and graduate courses on sustainable design and manufacturing, and advises doctoral students working on water, resource recovery, and sustainable production systems.

His research spans sustainable manufacturing, anaerobic bioprocessing for wastewater treatment and resource recovery, supercritical CO2 machining, and life cycle and technoeconomic assessment of emerging technologies. A consistent throughline has been the question of whether technically sound sustainability ideas can survive contact with the organizations, incentives, and people who would have to adopt them. As a serial entrepreneur, he is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Fusion Coolant Systems, which received the EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, and previously co-founded Accuri Cytometers, later acquired by BD Biosciences.

C-SED partners with instructors across every department in Michigan Engineering to make stakeholder engagement, contextual analysis, and sociotechnical judgment ordinary parts of technical coursework. Through Design Skill Sessions, microhistorical case studies, and curricular partnerships, the center now reaches more than three thousand unique students each year. C-SED's resources are being released for free public use, and Skerlos's current work extends the center's approach toward new sociotechnical domains and developing a national-level infrastructure to support the sociotechnical mindsets and skills of engineering students.

About the Event

The Bovay Lecture in the History and Ethics of Engineering is an annual public event bringing high-profile speakers to Cornell to stimulate discussion of social and ethical issues in engineering. This year's lecture will be delivered by Prof. Steven Skerlos of the University of Michigan. This event is organized by the Sue G. and Harry E. Bovay, Jr. '36 Program in the History and Ethics of Professional Engineering.