Engineering education has traditionally emphasised technical expertise and objective knowledge. While essential, this focus alone is insufficient to equip students to address the relational, ethical, and societal complexities of modern challenges. By integrating humanising pedagogies, including transdisciplinary approaches and Joan Tronto's Ethics of Care, engineering education can foster critical thinking, empathy, and ethical awareness necessary to address complex, interconnected societal issues requiring nuanced, collaborative solutions. This study aims to evaluate how integrating care ethics into transdisciplinary education can foster critical thinking, ethical awareness, and relational understanding among students. It focuses on a design-thinking hackathon challenge, Innovation Days (i-Days), supported by EIT Health. The event brought together students from diverse disciplines to address health literacy and access to clean water in Entebbe, Uganda. Employing design-thinking workshops and reflective practices, students collaboratively developed innovative solutions. Using Rolfe et al.'s “What? So What? Now What?” reflective model, the study analysed student experiences, revealing growth in collaboration, communication, and critical reflection. However, the findings also highlight the challenges of fostering deeper contextual sensitivity, meaningful stakeholder engagement, and care-based approaches necessary to realise the potential for local and global impact. By situating engineering education within a transdisciplinary framework, this study explores how care ethics equips students to address societal complexities. Applying Tronto's Ethics of Care framework, the study examines key ethical elements-attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and caring with-while acknowledging gaps in responsiveness and stakeholder collaboration. While the project successfully fostered initial awareness of societal issues and promoted shared responsibility within teams, its limited engagement with the Ugandan community underscored the need for more structured and sustained support systems. This approach demonstrates the potential of embedding care ethics into education to prepare students to tackle relational, ethical, and societal complexities, but also highlights the need for enhanced practices that prioritise inclusivity and co-creation in addressing intricate global challenges. By positioning the ethics of care as a cornerstone of humanising pedagogies, this study explores how embedding care ethics into education can enable students to design solutions that prioritise the well-being of people and the planet. It highlights the potential for fostering collaboration, effective communication, and the ability to navigate uncertainty when addressing societal complexities. However, the findings emphasise the importance of structured support, sustained stakeholder engagement, and inclusivity to fully realise these goals. By increasing exposure to care-based, transdisciplinary projects, engineering education can help students build confidence and competence in addressing wicked problems through empathy, contextual understanding, and responsiveness to the specific needs of those involved.

Accessibility and equity have become increasingly important in recent years. Inclusive Engineering Design is an approach to design that “enables and draws from the full range of human diversity” [1]. Through showcasing a number of examples, this paper demonstrated the need for engineers to embrace inclusive design principles in all fields of engineering. The examples used in the paper centre around Urban Planning and Housing, Unconscious Bias in Artificial Intelligence and Automotive Engineering – testing the car design. Urban Planning compared a housing development in Brazil with that of one in Vienna. The one in Brazil was a re-housing design project that took no input from the residents that were to be relocated from the favellas, resulting in their lives being upended. Vienna’s housing project was co-designed with the residents to ensure a better quality of life for all. Section III on Unconscious Bias in Artificial Intelligence showcased a range of examples where lack of diversity on the design team had a detrimental effect on people. People of colour were labelled as gorillas by Google’s photo application; gender classification worked best on white males and worst on darker females; criminal risk assessment software rated black defendants as 77% more likely of committing a future violent crime and cardiovascular disease (CVD) was not being captured in women using Al, as CVD presents differently in males and females [2]. Test dummies in Automotive Engineering have traditionally been designed using dimensions and physique of a male body. Because a woman’s body is biologically different to that of a man, women aew therefore 17% more likely to die in a car crash than a man and 47% more likely to be seriously injured. Pregnant women and the older generation fair even worse. Underrepresented groups in engineering, such as females, people of colour and those with disabilities continue to be affected by the design choices that were and are being made by engineers worldwide. This paper highlights why design methodologies need to change to be more inclusive. While the consequences of the designs showcased in the paper are unintended, they still have a resonating impact that goes beyond their intended use.

Participatory design techniques are used to involve children with special educational needs and disabilities in the design of video games and other artefacts, but previous research has not sufficiently addressed several issues. Among these are (1) the need to develop techniques to facilitate the involvement of children with a wider range of disabilities, including children with severe and profound intellectual disabilities (ID); and (2) the need to evaluate the potential benefits of such participation for the participants themselves, and not merely in terms of the benefits to the software or other artefacts produced. We have developed a multisensory design technique: ten children (8 - 17 years; 3 female) with a range of special educational needs (including children with severe ID) participated. Parents and teachers completed a questionnaire and reported that the technique was engaging and enjoyable for children, and that they would support the use of the technique in future.