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Open Call Invitation

Through stories, essays, and videos, Engineering Change Lab – USA (ECL), in association with the US Water Alliance, seeks to inspire and empower members of the engineering community to evolve and deepen their commitment to a new “water ethic” for the 21^st Century, underpinning their role as stewards of water on behalf of society.

The springboard for this creative effort is an initial set of values, beliefs, and mindsets drawn from a deep dive into this theme at ECL’s Spring 2025 Envisioning a New Water Ethic Summit. Modeling the writings of Aldo Leopold and his classic work, The Sand County Almanac, we hope these collected narratives will illustrate how this emerging ethic can contribute to positive futures for water in our communities, ecosystems, and society.

The full report from this summit is available on the ECL website at this link. A summary of the ethical themes that emerged at the summit is included with the Open Call Invitation and Submission Guidelines.

ECL and the US Water Alliance together are seeking a diverse set of leaders, practitioners, and stakeholders within the engineering community to contribute their perspectives and stories to help shape and communicate this emergent water ethic.

Through this open call invitation, we hope to combine engineering community perspectives with those drawn from an invited set of researchers, writers, artists, and advocates.

So far, our outreach to invited contributors has resulted in commitments from a cross section of water sector experts from universities, public sector agencies, and private sector practitioners.

Our intended outcome for this effort will be an open-access digital book containing both sets of narratives (invited and open-call). We intend to widely publicize the book throughout the engineering community, including through our partnership with the US Water Alliance.

If you are interested in submitting your narrative for consideration for inclusion in the project, please reach out to Mike McMeekin, ECL’s Executive Director ([email protected]). More information regarding the project can be found in the Open Call Invitation and Submission Guidelines. All submissions are due by August 31, 2026.

ECL’s recent Beyond Disruption summit featured an exploration of the disruptions being experienced by the engineering community, the impact of these disruptions, and the responses needed from the engineering community. This “Voices from ECL” series will feature interviews with several of the attendees at the summit.

Part 5

Gary Bertoline is Emeritus Dean and Distinguished Professor at Purdue University and leader of ASEE’s Engineering Mindset report. Key points highlighted by Gary include the following.

• Higher education, including engineering education, needs to be disrupted. Incremental changes are not keeping up with the pace of change in technology and society. This disruption will bring opportunities.
• The engineering community faces the risk of irrelevance if we are seen as favoring the status quo in the face of changes.
• Engineering has more potential for creating positive changes in the world than any other profession. This is not understood in society, and we need to be more effective at communicating our positive impact.
• While struggling with technological change, such as AI, and social media distractions, today’s college students still display energy, enthusiasm, and optimism especially when presented with opportunities.
• ECL’s approach to learning challenges ingrained ways of thinking, and the diverse participants in the summit have demonstrated an energy for change.
• ECL’s summit has demonstrated the need for one voice from the engineering community. We need to create a movement for positive change.

The full interview with Gary is available at this link.

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Engineering Change Lab – USA seeks to develop strategic-thinking, future-focused leaders across the engineering community. At our recent Beyond Disruption summit, several of our speakers and participants were interviewed regarding their perspectives on the discussions at the summit and on the work of ECL.

• Rochelle Grayson, Mosaic Accelerator, discussed the importance of AI integration in engineering organizations.
• Melyssa Hartzell, Martin & Martin described her view that the engineering community needs to take on leadership in driving policy and funding decisions.
• Jenna Carpenter, Campbell University, discussed dealing with constraints during this time of disruption.
• Jerry Buckwalter, Atlas Initiative for Critical Infrastructure, stated his view that ECL supplies a thought process absent in the engineering community.
• Gary Bertoline, Purdue University, described the potential of engineering to create positive change in the world.

You can see a video summary of these interviews at this link. In the future, we hope to publish extended versions of these interviews.

Join us as we seek to elevate the contributions of the engineering community to the challenges we face in the world.

Summit Wrap-Up, Part 3

In 1965 Alvin Toffler coined the term “Future Shock” to describe the shattering stress and disorientation induced in individuals, organizations, and communities by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time. Our observation, leading into the Engineering Change Lab – USA (ECL) Beyond Disruption Summit, is that 2025 has been a year of accelerating, disruptive change leaving people and institutions unmoored, at risk, and clearly suffering from Future Shock “Squared”.

75 years ago, the behavioral scientist Kurt Lewin articulated a simple, but powerful theory of change for social systems. He theorized that to change a social system you must go through three stages: Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze. Unfreezing involves preparing people for the transition by breaking down existing mindsets and behaviors that normally act as barriers to change (think bootcamp experiences in the military). The change stage introduces new processes, mindsets, and behaviors. Finally, during refreezing the system stabilizes and the change is embedded into the culture of the social system.

The Future Shock of 2025, brought about by governmental actions and the explosive growth of AI, represents an unfreezing moment for the engineering community. New possibilities as well as desired changes that have been inhibited by the frozen conditions and the inertia of the existing social system may now be possible — provided we act strategically and with urgency before the situation freezes once again.

Clearly, this is a time for imagining a new vision, transcending goals, and robust strategies that could allow the engineering community to take a leadership role in society and become, once again, the fundamental driver of economic growth and prosperity for the country.

ECL’s summit, convened in Austin, Texas in November 2025 gathered a group of engineering leaders, students, and associated stakeholders to engage in this type of strategic thinking effort on behalf of the engineering community. The primary objectives of this summit were to demonstrate both the potential value of and urgent need for engaging in this type of strategy work across the engineering community at this critical juncture in time.

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Summit Wrap-Up, Part 2

For this summit, we asked six thought leaders to play the role of “evocateur,” to help call forth and breathe life into our collective imagining of a future vision, goals, and strategies for the engineering community. A summary of those evocations as well as perspectives shared by the five members of our student panel are provided below.

Ed Finn, Director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University

Ed Finn evoked the power of storytelling, image-based worldbuilding, and speculative fiction to inspire collective imagination. Drawing on a recent article, “Step Into the Free and Infinite Laboratory of the Mind,” (https://issues.org/science-fiction-policy-tool-finn/), Finn observed that collaborative narratives, such as good science fiction, can play a primary role in helping science and society reach beyond current configurations toward positive transformational futures.

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Summit Wrap-Up, Part 1

Imagine waking up on a Spring morning in 2046. Over the last two decades, the U.S. has experienced a sustained period of technological progress, rapid economic growth, social prosperity, and environmental stewardship.

Central to the achievement of this abundant future has been the engineering community. Through their commitments, actions, and achievements the engineering community has emerged as the pre-eminent driver of economic growth and abundance in the 21^st Century.

Looking back to 2025, the disruptive change and “future shock” experienced across the country due to governmental actions and the explosive growth of AI that year constituted, in the words of social scientist Kurt Lewin, an “unfreezing” moment. Previously frozen systems, policies, ways of doing things, and attitudes were suddenly tractable and new possibilities for positive futures emerged.

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