Is wanting to do good, good enough? It’s a great start, says Jeremy Smith, but not sufficient to ensure that your well-intentioned engineering projects actually do good. Communication, contextualisation and partnerships are key to understanding what the problems are, and what would be a culturally, contextually appropriate solution. Encouraging diverse, cross-disciplinary teams can help practitioners understand that people, not technology, are key to positive engineering outcomes. We must continually ask ourselves, ‘is this the right thing to be doing?’

Jeremy Smith is a senior lecturer and engineer at the ANU Research School of Electrical, Energy and Materials Engineering. He introduces us to the principles of engineering for social benefit, where building a brighter collective future is a social process.

Music credits: Our theme music, Anders by Blue Dot Sessions, is licensed under an attribution non-commercial licence.

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