University of Edinburgh

Design is often regarded as the central creative activity of engineering. This course develops a foundation for the skills of analysis, synthesis, and communication required to develop solutions to open-ended problems. It focuses on three things: (1) understanding an engineering problem, (2) finding a solution to it, (3) communicating that solution to others. This course is predominantly taught through interactive team-based design studio sessions with support from lectures on topics including the philosophy, history, and ethics of engineering design. A series of group activities with mini assessments will cover key skills like research, problem solving, and the graphic, verbal, or written communication of engineering concepts.

The theme of the course is the relationship between private troubles and public problems, i.e. how the personal challenges many of us face in our lives are shaped and defined in ways that often appear to be beyond our direct control. The course introduces students to the sociological perspective by examining four significant topics in the discipline of sociology.
 

This course covers concepts of rationality, the "classic" research into the cognitive psychology of reasoning, and decision-making. Topics include nature of representation, operations on representations, and levels of analysis; different types of models in psychology (i.e., descriptive, normative, verbal vs formal); epistemic rationality and its connection to Bayes' Theorem; issues of rational belief revision; deductive reasoning in syllogisms and if-then conditionals, with a specific focus on the debate between mental rules and mental models approaches to these topics; probabilistic approaches to deduction. Dual process models of reasoning; instrumental rationality and its connection to decision theory; abductive reasoning & science of explanation; subjective expected utility theory and Prospect Theory; and decision by sampling and heuristics within the bounded rationality paradigm.

Biotechnology is an exciting subject that combines the application of knowledge and expertise in biochemistry, chemistry, genetics, microbiology, molecular biology, and physics. Biotechnology is relevant to several areas of activity: agriculture and food production; public health and medicines; ecological and environmental management; creation of novel products; development of new advanced techniques. Biotechnology is a very innovative scientific area and is well supported by UK Government Research Councils, in particular the BBSRC. Biotechnology also involves a high level of commercial activity, creation of new intellectual property and start-up companies, and job opportunities (requiring scientific, business and legal skills) in industry. 

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork. At the heart of this course is collaborative project in which students learn about qualitative methods by putting them to the test in practical group work. Their collective ethnographies require them to write extensive field notes, which are assessed, and which function as an extended period of learning to write effectively in an academic manner. 

This course allows students to explore sound-based interaction methods in the context of new music, live performance, sound installation, and design by looking at creative approaches to using computers and code. Lectures cover a range of areas based on the development of interactive software systems for manipulating, sampling and synthesizing sound in real-time. Students investigate these aspects and apply them through coding their own projects in relation to areas such as interactive sound design, digital musical instrument design, data sonification, sound therapy, algorithmic composition, and audio- visual installation and performance. Projects are developed using an accessible software programming language such as Max.

This course provides an introduction to the Social Study of Science and Technology. This is an area in which Edinburgh has longstanding strengths and which the course draws upon. The course examines some of the different ways of analyzing and understanding technology in society. It explores both the consequences of technical innovation for society and the ways technology is itself shaped by cultural, economic, political, and organizational factors. Students learn about a range of analytic perspectives on Technology in Society - drawing upon history, economics, and the sociologies of work, gender, and science & technology themselves. Students explore these issues in various settings - at work and in everyday life and in developing as well as developed countries. In the second part of the course, students apply these perspectives to particular technologies or issues, working together in student-centered learning. 

Students study works by post Spanish Civil War writers. The novels chosen are written in radically different styles, ranging from social realism and naturalism to post-modernity or extreme experimentalism, and treat an array of themes, the conflict between the individual and society, the struggle against social norms and sexual morality, the deployment of fiction as a means of shaping both personal and national identity, and the alienating effects of modern society. Via these novels a variety of issues are considered, such as the changing role of the novel over the 20th century, the way novelists create an individual "voice" in dialogue with their predecessors, the function of the reader in the interpretative process, and the socio-political environment and sexual politics of reading and writing fiction.

In this course, students cover contemporary safety and environmental concerns as they impinge on the practicing engineer, the legal and regulatory background to engineering activity, to ensure safe operation of hazardous processes, and the procedures to be followed in seeking a license from the environmental protection agencies for the operation of processes involving prescribed substances. Generation, propagation, and the fate of pollutants discharged to the air, to water, and to the ground are discussed along with means of mitigating emissions by elimination, substitution, and pre-discharge treatment are considered. Methods of identifying process hazards are introduced leading to risk assessment and consequence analysis using hand calculation methods are presented to allow risk assessment and its application to the process industries to be appreciated.

Since the formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, no era has witnessed so much environmental change as the past five hundred years, merely a moment in the history of our planet. Industrialization, capitalism, and the insatiable need for more and more "things" has unleashed uncontrollable destructive forces. This course focuses on a number of key developments to consider two related questions. First, how have humans altered the Earth's systems - climate, atmosphere, ecosystems, oceans, and landscape? Second, what are the implications of these changes for human society and the relationship between humans and the other species that inhabit this planet? The coverage begins in the late 15th century with the Columbian Exchange of diseases, crops, ideas, animals, and people between the Old World and the New World in 1492. It then investigates a number of critical issues relating to land use and the production of food, the exploitative relationships between humans and other species and the impact of industrial capitalism, urbanization and the use of fossil fuels as the main source of energy. The final section of the course focuses on the post-1945 world, exploring consumer capitalism, the development of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and concludes with an assessment of the current climate crisis.