Faculty Search: College as a Living Lab

Olin College as a Living Laboratory

Olin provides students with meaningful, impact-centered learning experiences that develop engineers who appreciate and respect perspectives other than their own, collaborate to solve problems by understanding people’s needs, and are inclined to serve society and the planet.

Olin’s College as a Living Laboratory (CaLL) is how we will use Olin as an experimental testbed to envision, design, evolve, and implement solutions to address our most pressing problems. We will use the lens of sustainability to reimagine how we teach, learn, live, and work together, catalyzing transformation within and outside Olin.

A distinctive feature of Olin’s CaLL initiative is that it is a College as a Living Lab. This has two embedded meanings. First, Olin’s CaLL is not restricted to the campus. It may include off-campus activities, for example in collaboration with community partners or study away programs. It may also include activities related to the College’s operations that are not directly related to the physical campus, such as the Spring 2024 course on Shareholder Engagement Through Olin’s Endowment. Second, Olin’s CaLL initiative will incorporate the entire college; all students, staff, faculty, alumni, offices, and programs. As a result, we fully expect that Olin’s CaLL initiative will span the four primary domains of living labs at higher education institutions: governance, education, research, and knowledge and technology transfer.

The initial foci of Olin’s Living Lab will be as follows:

Achieve Campus Net Zero by 2029

We plan to redesign Olin’s campus as a model of a net-zero emissions working, living, and learning community, through sustainable infrastructure and operations measures. The largest component of this plan, inspired by Olin’s Climate Action Plan, is to upgrade the physical infrastructure by electrifying our campus and moving away from our reliance on fossil fuels. In doing so, we will convert Scope 1 emissions (direct greenhouse gas emissions from sources owned and/or controlled by Olin such as fuel combustion in boilers, water heaters, and vehicles) to Scope 2 emissions (purchased electricity). As we make these upgrades, we hope to open our campus as a testbed for innovative climate tech companies developing sustainable solutions.

Integrate College Operations and Curriculum

We also plan to utilize the campus and operations transformation to Net Zero to create meaningful, impact-centered learning opportunities for students, staff, and faculty in alignment with Olin’s values and learning goals. Past curricular offerings that incorporated the College’s operations have provided students with real-world skills and helped to develop engineers who are inclined to serve society and the planet, solve problems by understanding people’s needs, and appreciate and understand perspectives other than their own.

Develop Sustainability Changemakers

We will enable the development of Olin students as collaborators for change, including by practicing relational models of human-centered design and by deepening and centering sustainability in the curriculum, including core engineering classes. In undertaking this work, we also hope that Olin can model how the U.S. higher education system can improve its reputation for serving the public through meaningful collaborations with community partners.

Preliminary paths identified by a large group of faculty holding conversations in Spring 2024 include (i) enabling development of engineers’ identities as sustainability practitioners (changemaker mindset, civic mindedness, intrinsic motivation), and (ii) changing the framing of engineering from a tool for amassing power to a way of caring for the wellbeing of people and the planet, through curricula, communities, and practices that progressively develop humility, curiosity, and self-awareness.

Improve Equity, Access, and Inclusion

Olin’s mission and ethos make us uniquely positioned to model inclusivity without compromise. We will help make engineering more sustainable by creating pathways for talent through outreach, partnerships, recruitment, and an intentional culture where everyone can thrive. Both as a community and individually, we will cultivate a campus environment where – through their voices and contributions – all students, faculty, and staff thrive and feel a sense of belonging.

Envision the Next Wave of Engineering Education

We will (1) propose new, bold, and innovative approaches to engineering education, (2) enable meaningful teaching and learning on Olin’s campus, and (3) contribute to the financial sustainability of Olin’s engineering education. To do so, we will investigate and experiment with:

How we learn: developing pedagogical best practices for educating in rapidly changing fields, and strategically integrating emerging technology tools for education, including artificial intelligence (AI) and extended reality (XR).

Where we learn: designing campus spaces for innovative, holistic engineering education that integrate cutting-edge technology and sustainable guidelines.

What we learn: developing processes for ongoing large-scale curricular change and leveraging them to keep the Olin curriculum aligned with our evolving strategic goals.