Engineering Roles in Building with Nature Interdisciplinary Design Educational Experiences

R I U S 7 : B U I L D I N G W I T H N A T U R E P E R S P E C T I V E S Abstract Building with Nature (BwN) infrastructure designs are characterised by disciplinary integration, non-linearity, diverse and fluid design requirements, and long-term time frames that balance the limitations of earth’s natural systems and the socio-technical systems created by humans. Differentiating roles in the engineering design process may offer strategies for better solutions. Four complementary engineering design roles were distinguished, namely: Specialists, System Integrators, Front-end Innovators, and Contextual Engineers. The key research question addressed in this paper asks, how can the introduction of engineering roles enhance interdisciplinary processes for BwN design? Three Building with Nature design workshops with international groups of students from multiple disciplines and various education levels provided the ideal context for investigating whether engineering roles enhance such interdisciplinary ways of working. Results indicate that the application of engineering roles in each of the three workshops indeed supported interdisciplinary design. A number of conditions for successful implementation within an authentic learning environment could be identified. The engineering roles sustain an early, divergent way of looking at the design problem and support the search for common ground across the diverse perspectives of the team members, each bringing different disciplinary backgrounds to the design table. The chapter closes with a discussion on the value of engineering design roles and their significance for the Building with Nature approach.


Introduction
The future of engineering in society is changing dramatically as the 4th industrial revolution sets the pace for artificial intelligence that will be embedded in every aspect of our lives (Jescke, 2016) and we are confronted with increasingly complex societal problems associated with environmental challenges, such as climate change (Schwab, 2017;Kamp, 2016). In this emerging future, complex decision-making processes can no longer be realised in isolation. Instead, extensive collaboration with diverse stakeholders, a pro-active attitude, multidisciplinary expertise and technology-based and innovative solutions, are required. Building with Nature is an ecosystem-based approach to hydraulic engineering that seeks to design innovative multidisciplinary solutions rather than conventional hydraulic infrastructures (Slinger et. al., 2015;. Building with Nature strives to use natural materials, ecological processes and interactions, in designing effective and sustainable hydraulic infrastructures for areas threatened by environmental and climate change (Waterman, 2010). It requires multifunctional engineering design competence and draws on knowledge of ecological systems, governance systems, and understanding of the physical and social environmental context within which the infrastructures are placed. Additionally, it requires the management of complex decision-making processes (see Bontje, 2017;Oudenhoven et al., 2018), posing challenges to the existing disciplinary and sectoral boundaries and the time frames of conventional coastal governance (Raymond et al., 2017).
Such a multifunctional, ecosystem-based approach is much needed as about eighty percent of the world population will be living in urban lowland areas by 2050 (De Vriend & Van Koningsveld, 2012), areas which will be under threat of flooding due to to sea level rise and the increased occurrence of storms. Building with Nature projects require the involvement of specialists in ecology, economics, civil engineering and the social sciences. Additionally, local stakeholder involvement is crucial to the success of Building with Nature projects (Bontje et al., 2017). Therefore, Building with Nature requires a different way of interdisciplinary thinking and acting than most engineering fields, to arrive at a better design result (De Vriend et al., 2015). This paper explores and evaluates the application of a training method to enhance interdisciplinary thinking. Three Building with Nature workshops form the contextual design setting in which international student teams and senior experts from diverse disciplinary backgrounds as well as a broad group of local stakeholders undertake authentic design challenges. Although Building with Nature designs require the integration of disciplinary content knowledge (a.o. civil engineering, ecology, governance, spatial design), the training is targeted at skills related to collaboration within design teams -by means of introducing so-called 'engineering roles' (see below). The key research question addressed in this paper therefore reads:

How can the introduction of engineering roles enhance interdisciplinary processes for BwN design?
The concept of engineering roles was first created by the Free Spirits Think Tank at Delft University of Technology in 2015 in response to the question "What do future engineers need to know?" (Kamp & Klaassen, 2016).
Four complementary roles were distinguished, namely: Specialists, System Integrators, Front-end Innovators, and Contextual Engineers. The Think Tank members considered that the increasing complexity of societal and environmental problems meant that monodisciplinary approaches would be inadequate and that simply collecting multiple disciplinary experts together in a design team would also be insufficient. Instead, a multidisciplinary team of experts skilled in adopting different engineering roles appropriate to the design context, while still honouring their disciplinary knowledge, was required.
Team members need first and foremost to use their disciplinary knowledge to synthesize and integrate across different knowledge bases, but also need to be able to shift their personal (engineering) role within the design team so as to enable innovative solutions and new ways of working together (Kamp & Klaassen, 2016).
The three one-day, place-based Building with Nature design workshops served as thematic hubs in which to test the relevance of the engineering de- After first theoretically grounding the character of the Building with Nature design process and solution space, the necessity for engineering roles within interdisciplinary design is examined (Section 2). This serves to establish Building with Nature design settings as suitable environments for learn-ing interdisciplinary skills. Next, the configuration of the Building with Nature design sessions is described in terms of the participant selection (Section 3.1), the three design assignments (Section 3.2), their nesting within a game structuring approach in the workshops (Section 3.3), and how the evaluation of the effects of the engineering roles on the Building with Nature design processes will be undertaken (Section 3.4). In Section 4, the 2016 pilot workshop is presented in which the Building with Nature design approach is tested and the effects of the engineering roles are explored. Finally, the ways in which the engineering design roles influenced the workshop outcomes -the Building with Nature designs -and the learning of participants in 2017 and 2018 are presented and analysed in Section 5. The chapter closes with a concluding discussion on the value of engineering design roles and their significance for the Building with Nature approach in Section 6.

The Building with Nature design process and solution space
Building with Nature (BwN) is an emerging field, which requires integration across social, environmental and engineering disciplines (Slinger et al., 2016). Solutions need to be multifunctional and integrated (Kothuis, 2017).
Inter-and transdisciplinary approaches offer integration processes whereby design teams can arrive at solutions that fall within a feasible boundary space.
This boundary space can be envisaged similarly to the doughnut economic model (Raworth, 2017), as squeezed between societal needs and the earth system boundaries that need to be taken into account in any BwN design. The BwN solution space therefore represents a complex multidimensional space balancing the limitations of earth systems (outer blue shapes) and the socio-technical systems created by humans (inner green shapes).
The solutions space is typically multifaceted, a dynamic space changing per location and yielding different and separate insights at the case issue level, compared with the self-organising complex patterns at the overall system level (Newing, 2009). Therefore, Building with Nature solutions are characterised by disciplinary integration, non-linearity, fluid design requirements, and long-term time frames. This requires an interdisciplinary approach, merging multiple stakeholder insights. According to Fortuin (2015), educational activities which may stimulate an integrative interdisciplinary approach (particularly in the environmental sciences) should involve a real-life complex environmental problem, close collaboration in a team, changing perspectives, transcendence of disciplinary knowledge to experience complex reality, interaction with external stakeholders to encounter the norms and values held in society, and a reflection on the design/research process in the light of societal norms and values. A Building with Nature design process intrinsically satisfies these conditions as integration across the ecological and engineering knowledge fields is necessary, at a minimum. Additionally, the situation of the design in a particular place means that the values of local actors and the fit with the social, cultural heritage have to be taken into account. An engineering roles approach, which we will introduce below, proved to support students in adopting different perspectives as they design integrated solutions within the multifaceted, environmentally and socially dynamic Building with Nature solution space.  needs (in green) and earth system boundaries (in blue) (adapted from Raworth, 2017). The depicted earth system boundaries and the activities such as recreation are not exhaustive or fixed, additional green and blue shapes can be added as required by the specific location.

Engineering roles and interdisciplinary design
The engineering roles of Specialist, System Integrator, Front-end Innovator and Contextual Engineer are defined as complementary roles applicable across diverse engineering fields from environmental engineering to aeronautical engineering, each addressing a different heuristic question, and guiding the investigation of the problem to come to a solution (Kamp & Klaassen, 2016). While the Specialist focuses on phenomena, System Integrators emphasize the integration of different components within the overall system, Front-end Innovators address the user experience and try to bridge the gap between technology and society by designing consumer-oriented products, and the Contextual Engineer addresses the conditions under which the technology can ethically, legally and culturally be used by creating rules, regulations, or cultures of acceptance in society (Box 1). The engineering roles are intentionally not specified in terms that are characteristic of a particular environmental engineering discipline and thus are more abstract. They are part and parcel of the process of negotiating meaning (Beers, 2005) and this makes them potentially applicable across a broad spectrum of design problems. Ideally, the roles avoid a situation where different perspectives are merely aligned, but instead help in achieving integration rather than just aligning across diverse problem and solution perspectives. More importantly, each of these roles is essential in realizing an integrated design solution. As such, they are conceived as stimulating the integration of different disciplines and concomitant interdisciplinary ways of working.
Interdisciplinarity can be understood as combining two or more disciplines at the level of theory, methods, or solution space, to form a transcendent and innovative understanding or solution, that in turn can possibly transform the mono-discipline(s) (Repko, 2007;Menken & Keestra, 2016;Fortuin, 2015). Two interdisciplinary ways of working can be distinguished, namely: within a team of experts with different disciplinary backgrounds, or an individual using the theory, methods and solutions from disciplines other than their area of expertise in seeking an answer to their research or design questions. Here, we are primarily interested in interdisciplinarity in teams.
Interdisciplinarity in a team means that each participant's disciplinary constructs, concepts, and procedures are brought into question, are criticized and debated, as similar terminology often holds different meanings within different disciplines. The factual knowledge of participants and their reflective and problem-solving skills across tasks and solutions, constitute elements of the interdisciplinary learning process (Stentoft, 2017). This prompts them to challenge their prior beliefs and requires participants to remain open to review and even redefine their understanding and ideas (Boix Mansilla, 2010). Redefinition involves clarifying or modifying the concepts and assumptions used by relevant disciplines in order to reach a common meaning (Repko, 2007). According to Beers (2005), engaging people's thinking in interdisciplinary teams is a demonstrated precondition for richer solutions to complex problems. Creating common ground, in which meaning is aligned through negotiation with all the team members, is thus necessary for the construction of shared knowledge (Beers, 2005;Van den Bossche et al., 2006). Whereas Beers (2005) distinguishes four steps as necessary to move from unshared to constructed knowledge in multidisciplinary teams, Kothuis (2017) adds an extra step to arrive at integrated knowledge and design. She affirms that an additional step in which the shared knowledge is translated into recognizable knowledge for the disciplines involved in the design process, is essential in moving to truly integrated knowledge. Moreover, Kothuis (2017) has shown that this conceptual model of knowledge construction through negotiation is a valuable tool, particularly in Building with Nature research teams.
Team members will hold different assumptions and values on how to conduct an interdisciplinary effort. Being open to ways of doing outside of a participant's own discipline is challenging. Accordingly, differences in value sets and assumptions regarding outcomes need to be identified and negotiated in meaning making discussions (Jay et al., 2017). The idea is that engineering roles may assist in engaging in such "negotiation of meaning" (Beers, 2005). has monodisciplinary knowledge that is then provided to a System Integrator who builds larger objects, systems or services, or to a Front-end Innovator who designs products, systems or services needed by industry or the public.

The Contextual Engineer facilitates the technological innovations and may
have the role of, or support, a client, a government authority, a legal or cultural change agent.
The claim is that engineering roles stimulate an interdisciplinary approach to the realisation of common ground within a design team, including discussions about norms and values across disciplines and an appreciation of diverse stakeholder perspectives. They help in shifting perspectives, finding and recognizing common ground, and in the development of more innovative and integrated solutions, so that they fall within the Building with Nature solution space doughnut.

Participant Selection
As an innovative design concept, the Building with Nature workshops were intended to extend the participants beyond their comfort zone. Each workshop was attended by between 20 and 30 carefully selected participants with different disciplinary backgrounds, nationalities and levels of education.
In 2016, there were 10 students from educational organisations in the Neth-

Design Assignments
The design assignments given to the participants in the workshops represent real-world, societal challenges in which innovative solutions are required for long-term flood defence. Each of the assignments required the integration of knowledge on the dynamics of the bio-geophysical system into the engineering design process. Further, each assignment required the integration of the local knowledge of stakeholders regarding values, norms and social and ecological system functioning to arrive at a feasible Building with Nature solution to the local long-term flood defence problem. The design assignments for each of the workshops are listed in Box 2.
Each design team was required to (

A game structuring approach
The game structuring method was first applied successfully in South Africa  before being implemented in Houston in Texas Step 4 is the integrated design step in which the design teams develop different potential solutions and outcomes. In each of the three Building with Nature design workshops this step was nested within Steps 2 to 5, which are deemed necessary for obtaining sufficient contextual information to be able to design.
Step 6 was omitted as this is most relevant for workshops in which local residents and authorities commit to engaging in complex decision making processes for their area. Experts provided information via presentations in Step 3, and Step 2 was sometimes preceded by a presentation by a local stakeholder or water authority representative to provide information on local interests, concerns, and regulations. In a game structuring workshop, participants are encouraged to consider negative, as well as positive, future outcomes (i.e. utopian and dystopian design outcomes) so as to extend the solu-tion space by considering a broad range of options. Dystopian futures often provide sharp insights into the values held by stakeholders.
In 2017 and 2018, following the evaluation of the pilot design workshop (see section 3.4), Steps 2 and 3 were explicitly integrated with the engineering design roles and a final evaluation/reflection step was added.

Evaluation of the effects of the engineering roles
The   Table 1. Aspects and sub-aspects of the design process as mentioned on the Reflection journey map in   Step 4 of the game structuring process where the stakeholders and challenges were clustered from the perspectives of the four engineering roles. The engineering roles were also used in the final phase to reflect back on the extent to which the design criteria were considered and met in the final designs, and to make sure the different stakes originating from the role's perspectives were covered. Additionally a substantive content-based evaluation was undertaken at the end of the 3 rd workshop, while the evaluation was administered via a questionnaire in the bus on the return journey.   The stakeholder consultations were divided into the identification of stakeholders for the design versus the consultation of experts who were present at the workshop. Participants indicated that they valued the experts' input: "Experts were awesome!!". Consultations helped in deepening an understanding of the dynamics of the problem situation regarding the "Razende Bol" at Texel.
The feedback on the adoption of the engineering roles was diverse. Some participants claimed that their design team used all the engineering roles.
Others stated that they were better helped by the disciplinary background information provided by experts in presentations.
Some queried whether the roles actually added to the design assignment at all. Still others remarked that the roles helped in deciding "what to talk about", and there were three people who identified completely with their engineering roles. Most of the participants who failed to enact their role indicated that they did not understand their roles, felt pressured, or had an equal score on different roles, or simply had a "good" group process without adopting the engineering roles. All in all, there was a diverse experience amongst the participants in regard to engineering role adoption.
The design process [19 post-its: 15 positive, 2 neutral, 2 negative] Positive "This was my "natural" role, although I had a tie between specialist, system integrator and contextual engineer. I found this role best fitting to my personality and working strategy." Neutral "Everyone in the group contributed to the design process. I did very well in defining the problems, however the diversity in the group roles didn't match with one approach." Negative "Having a given role made me feel like I had to be in that role and the other roles I couldn't participate in and felt pressured to be only in that role."

Stakeholder consultations [10 post-its: 5 positive, 1 neutral, 4 negative]
Positive "Think about pros/cons doing whole process." Negative "Morning brainstorming on stakeholders/challenges took too long." (3x) Roles [21 post-its: 7 positive, 5 neutral, 9 negative] Positive "Working with students from other disciplines and filing different roles made me think out of (my) the box!! " Neutral "Need more information on specific roles and some orientation on roles might help." Negative "I was an expert/specialist based on the survey. But, I personally do not know anything about the subject. So, that did not help with the design procedure." Crossdisciplinary perspectives [8 post-its: 6 positive, 1 neutral, 1 negative] Positive "I like being in this role b/c I had to look @ many aspects of these issues, not just one specific one."

Coaching needs [7 post-its, 3 neutral, 4 negative]
Neutral "I would need more coaching in what my role really means to profit from it, other than I just do what I always do. Also I took the role of specialist a bit, not really working with the roles." While the value for education was not rated highly, the relevance of the engineering roles for interdisciplinary design largely received positive feedback. Most participants emphasised the usefulness of different perspectives in identifying strengths and weaknesses in the designs. The roles helped in keeping the overall design objective as the focus instead of the expertise of individuals, and supported learning from people with other disciplinary backgrounds.
Clearly, future design assignments need to include structured guidance from a role perspective for participants to benefit optimally from the engineering roles. The provision of specific information on the engineering roles in advance and during the workshop could support enacting the roles more effectively. Based on this insight and the successful application of the game structuring approach in aiding students to develop Building with Nature designs in this pilot application, the 2017 workshop design was adapted to explicitly link the presenting experts and their preferred roles and to provide a worksheet to guide the participants in the design process from a role perspective. No changes were made to the game structuring approach.

Engineering roles in the interdisciplinary design processes
In 2017 and 2018, the integrated Building with Nature designs produced by the participants ranged widely across the potential solution space. All designs included biophysical and social elements and adopted a long-term time frame. In the Hondsbossche Pettemer case study, participants placed more emphasis on the design requirements in relation to stakeholder values and engineering perspectives, whereas in 2018, the participants paid more attention to the problem definition, taking the local constraints to the solution space into account. This led to slightly less diverse designs for the tidal river area of the Ablasserdam-Kinderdijk.
The distribution of engineering role preferences across the workshop participants in 2017 and 2018 are depicted in Figure 7. In 2017 the majority of participants preferred the specialist role or multiple roles, and there were few system integrators. By contrast, in 2018 nearly half the participants preferred a Contextual Engineering role, with 33% exhibiting a System Integrator profile and 17% preferring the Specialist role. Noteworthy is that the Front-end Innovator role is completely absent in 2018. All four roles were assigned to the design teams, which meant that some participants, and teams, had to leave their comfort zone(s) and adopt a new way of thinking supported by the engineering role.  Table 3 and analysed thereafter.  In the 2017 workshop, a dedicated approach to working with the engineering roles was instituted. The engineering roles were positively received (   Table 2).
In 2017, 77% made use of their engineering roles, whereas in 2018 half of the participants did not work with the engineering roles (Question 3, Table   2), although they recognised their relevance (Question 12). In 2018, 45% con- However, the experienced usefulness of the engineering roles seems also to reflect how seriously participants work with the roles and how much guidance they receive on applying the role prior to the workshop and within the design assignment. Overall both in 2017/2018, the roles were perceived to create added value for education (Question 13), the work environment (question 14), and students state they would recommend others to use the engineering roles in the design process (

Concluding discussion
Building with Nature infrastructure designs are characterised by disciplinary integration, non-linearity, diverse and fluid design requirements, and long-term time frames that balance the limitations of Earth's systems and the socio-technical systems created by humans. Three Building with Nature design workshops therefore provided the ideal context for investigating whether engineering roles enhance such interdisciplinary ways of working.
In to the analysis of a complex real problem situation. However, reflecting on the design process from the engineering role perspective sustained integrative thinking in the early design process, and it sharpened the specification of design criteria and the evaluation at the end of the design process. These contributions are particularly relevant to Building with Nature design assignments, which require working across disciplines, coping with complex and fluid design requirements and accommodating non-linearity and dynamic environmental and social contexts. The inclusion of multiple perspectives in the definition of the design requirements, specifically those of local residents and authorities, served to broaden the solution space and the diversity of the final designs. Shifting the focus from "stakeholder requirements" to "a constraint-focused problem definition", led participants to value the use of engineering roles and helped them to be better equipped for interdisciplinary design challenges.
Further, it is likely that the engineering design roles would be more valuable for education at undergraduate and early postgraduate levels, rather than for PhD candidates who are familiar with the design cycle. The Building with Nature elements might be better identified when students already have strong training in this field or there is a marked identification with experts in the field and their engineering design roles. However, although experts are highly competent, they may be unaware of how they enact their engineering roles in their research or implementation practice. This can make it difficult for student participants to acquire deeper learning on engineering roles through interaction with the experts.
The engineering roles have been tested three times in small workshops.
Each time the intervention was adapted to fit with the demands of the NSF-PIRE program within which it was nested. This makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions that can be generalized. Nonetheless, we expect that the engineering design roles can support interdisciplinary learning processes in diverse environmental and engineering projects, and call upon researchers to add to the knowledge base on interdisciplinary design by evaluating applications of the engineering roles in diverse settings. We are particularly intrigued whether others will obtain similar results and are interested to learn whether the innovative character of Building with Nature solutions produced in the workshops are replicated. The interdisciplinary and contextual challenges of designing Building with Nature solutions provided a fertile testing ground.
We urge others to apply the principles that we have provided above to create suitable educational settings and instructional processes as the next testing ground for interdisciplinary, environmental engineering design processes.