Right-brain thinking in engineering education

Which do you think is more urgent: to change the way our companies use water, or to get households behave more sparingly?

The thing that drives water is the consumption by people. But the major volumes that can be saved are more connected to the industry itself. Reducing leaks in water management, reusing water – these are things that will require the companies to invest in infrastructure. That's where you get the big changes. But one piece of that is demand conservation and that has to come from the public. The public have got to be a little bit wiser in the way they use water and also be educated about the use of different quality waters for different purposes not being a risk. For that, we have to create public trust.

At the same time, urban consumption of water is quite small compared to other uses like agriculture or industry. Even though we can do a lot within the urban water sector, the other sectors also have to play a role. The impact of improvements within the urban water sector will be significant, but potentially not as much as in other sectors. For example, in a country like India, you would encourage the urban water sector and the agricultural sector to be like best cousins because there's a lot of wastewater we generate, which is nutrient rich. And if the agricultural sector uses that water, then they use less of the surface water that the city might need. So, it's not one or the other – I would say it's a team effort.

You spoke about the various water source systems they developed in Singapore and Chennai, India. Isn't such an infrastructure too much of an investment for smaller and poorer countries?It's sometimes a bit expensive, but usually these kinds of changes are motivated by necessities. In Singapore it was done because they didn't have enough water and in Chennai it was in response to a drought. When you find these sorts of issues arising, you have to make difficult choices. There was a situation in South Africa some time ago where there was water scarcity. A big industrial user was taking water from the city, and when water became scarce, the city had to make a decision. Its priority was the people, but that would then have had economic impacts because the industry would not have the water. They deregulated, allowing another company to buy the wastewater, treat it and supply the industry. So, the industry was able to use a slightly inferior quality of water. In a country like Hungary, there are possibilities such as reducing leakage, using grey water, or capturing rainwater. I think we have to change the mindset of utilities –  the reuse of wastewater frees up a lot of water.

In Hungary, it is a current dilemma that we have problems both with increasing drought and recurring floods.

These are not only two different problems, but also ones where two different sets of infrastructure that deal with them. When you look at too much water, there are two things you're looking at. One is the potential to capture that excess water and utilize it during the dry season. For that, there's a lot of work on stormwater harvesting. You put that water into the ground to store it, and then in the dry season you can use that water. You might have stormwater reservoirs where you can hold that water temporarily and then utilize it. But the fact that people get affected by flooding is not going to be solved by groundwater recharge. This is much more related, particularly in urban environments, to the way we are building. We are creating spaces where the water cannot infiltrate. There are opportunities to try and improve some of that with nature. But when you have extreme events, it's very difficult, and with climate change, it's becoming even more complicated. Rainfall patterns are changing, thus we cannot predict on the basis of historical data any more. And when you're building infrastructure, it's a bit risky to spend money not knowing what the future is going to look like. We need to use flexible systems, systems that can change over time and can adapt, which most of our infrastructure doesn't do because it's centralized and it's concrete. People have to be trained and educated about how to cope, how to respond, and how often this might happen in their life. And then they will feel more comfortable if a warning comes in time.

And what would the paradigm shift you mentioned at the end of your presentation require from universities?

I myself also used to be a teacher, and I think we follow a very traditional curriculum. Universities should realize that while analytical, scientific, accurate left brain thinking is important, we need creative people now. We need to think a bit out of the box. We have  to think about how nature can be used, how we can respond to uncertainty, how we can use water multiple times. These are questions where you need to be a bit more creative, to use more of the right brain thinking. That's the challenge for engineering education. We want students to be equipped with analytical tools but we sometimes don't pay enough attention to some of the softer skills. So, I think that universities have to rethink their curriculum to recognize that.

The way I see education evolving is that young people are going to be educating themselves much more than being educated by teachers because of generative AI and all the resources they have. I see this in my organization: a lot of the new ideas are coming from young people and from people in developing countries because they face these challenges more starkly than we do. In the West, we have well-functioning systems, but they're not sustainable in the long term.

What is the area researchers should focus on in the first place?

Decentralization. Independent sanitation units may potentially be a game changer. In terms of scale, they can serve even individual households, but a community of 30 to 50,000 people seems to be the ideal scale, for the cost of professional operation to be reasonable. But in every case we have to look at the local context. It’s not one-size-fits-all.

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