Sustainable Systems Engineering

One of the very first courses of its kind to appear in industrial engineering curricula, sustainable systems engineering (SSE) dwells on the fundamental forces that are expected to shape the nature of industrial engineering in the near future. This introductory graduate course combines all such aspects under a balanced and expedient exposure. This course is designed to explain the processes that lead to the current state of industry and environment. It explains how industrial engineering has been shaped by these historical developments. It also presents the challenges of the new century, in which significant paradigm shifts are to be expected, for the most part, due to the urgent concerns of sustainability. Pedagogically, any such diverse course poses significant demands on its delivery. The initial offering of the course in the Fall semester of 2008 at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, was based on two innovative pillars. This paper explains these pillars: the "anchor and framework" structure, which comprises the static component, and the "unfolding and enfolding" of ideas, which summarizes the dynamics of course delivery.