Initiative: College as a Living Lab

Olin College of Engineering has catalyzed innovation and transformation in engineering education for 28 years, establishing itself as one of the top undergraduate engineering colleges in the country.  

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

College as a Living Lab (CaLL) is the next iteration of Olin’s commitment to reinventing engineering education. 

Olin’s living lab is an immersive teaching, learning, living and working environment. We will draw on our resources—physical plant, curriculum and pedagogy, campus community, external partners and collaborators—to reimagine how we meet the needs of our campus, our society and our planet. 

Olin’s CaLL initiative has two distinctions: 

First, CaLL 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 primary domains of living labs at higher education institutions: education, research, and knowledge and technology transfer. 

Second, CaLL is not restricted to the Olin campus. Because our curriculum already focuses on real-world engineering and collaboration with external partners, CaLL will include a range of off-campus activities. 

The initial foci of Olin’s Living Lab (2022-2024) were as follows: 

• The Future of Engineering Education: preparing for, and innovating to serve tomorrow’s learners, and exploring how new technologies can make engineering education more dynamic, effective, and accessible. 

• Engineering for Everyone: creating pathways for talent through outreach, partnerships, recruitment, and by cultivating an intentional campus culture where everyone can thrive. 

• Planetary and Human Health & Campus Carbon Neutrality: developing a curriculum that centers sustainability in every dimension and redesigning Olin’s campus to serve as a model of a carbon neutral working, living, and learning community. 

The current areas of focus for Olin’s Living Lab (2024-present) are: 

1. 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 over time to gradually move 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. 

2. Integrate College Operations and Curriculum 

We also plan to utilize the campus 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. 

3. 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 in 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. 

4. 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. 

5. 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 innovating, holistic engineering education that integrates 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. 

Now, through fearless experimentation, and evolution in technical and humanistic education, we will test, translate, and share what we learn through CaLL with partners and peers to make our planet and people healthier.