As Chair of the Society for Social Management Systems, I am writing my blog this week from Yichang, China, as I lead the second International Symposium on Social Management Systems. Interestingly, the SSMS is primarily composed of members from Asian countries. Japan and China have the largest number of members. Yet, I as an American was asked to chair the society over a year ago at its first symposium in Japan. At that time, Mr. Lu Youmei, Chairman of The Three Gorges Project Corporation, invited the Society to hold its 2007 conference in Yichang, where the Three Gorges Dam Project is located. The Three Gorges Dam Project is the largest hydroelectric projects in the world and by all measures one of the largest projects to ever be built outside of the Great Wall. The symposium was held at the Three Gorges Dam Project hotel and reflected the very issues which many have been debated for years and to which engineers today must take into consideration in the new sustainable environment-societal impacts.

Andrew G. Wright Lu Youmei at Three Gorges Dam in 2004.

The Asian culture has always been a culture that looks towards the well-being of its citizens from both a holistic and from the perspective of protecting their health, safety and welfare. However, unlike most engineered projects in the western world that look at meeting the needs of the stakeholder for whom the project is being built, engineers in Asia consider additional aspects when designing and constructing projects-that being the "social" impact the project may have to society. In that regard, social systems, which underlie the objectives of the SSMS, are critically important for the engineer to understand.

A social system consists of the processes and rules that are necessary in order to meet the needs of a society. As we move forward in the 21st Century, we must look beyond the typical parochialism of individual professions: social scientists, the various engineering disciplines, the legal profession, economists, and politicians and bureaucrats. We need a vision that focuses on how to best determine and create future societal needs by taking into account all stakeholder needs, and approach the management processes accordingly. They must be prioritized so that government and private industry better meet the current, evolving and future infrastructure needs, both physical and non-physical. To accomplish this result, the SSMS strives to inter-relate the knowledge from all these professions. By analyzing the way social systems operate and offering solutions to problems, SSMS serves as a vehicle to support the development of management systems that meet the needs of both social demands and the social environment.

Engineering and the social sciences have always been elements intended to improve society. However, there is little interaction between engineers and social scientists in the western world. But, by integrating these concepts, the engineering of today and for the future will fulfill a great void in the development of new ideas that will meet the demands of the global population and can make a real contribution that will address tomorrow's issues as well as guiding social scientists and engineers today. But that means that we must integrate into our thinking, research and decision-making from different perspectives instead of the approaches that we have had in the past.

The symposium these past few days has allowed engineers to "think out of the box," focusing on how best to determine and create societal needs. By integrating discussions on social science and engineering, we can hope to ultimately achieve a management process that is attuned to the new and evolving stakeholder needs. It is a new challenge for engineers today and one for which in this era of sustainability we need to consider in our built environment-sooner than later.