The Challenge of Change – Stimulating Engineers with the Spirit of Innovation

Engineering involves thinking. Innovation involves change. Innovators are critics; they think critically to stimulate change.

The spirit of seeing a solution of a problem to be ubiquitous in everyday life acts as a driver, an attracting pole, if you wish, pushing the innovator toward finding a solution for the problem that he or she sees. The question I’m trying to answer in this post is how well are engineers being educated to be critics, or, similarly, how well are engineer being educated to be innovators.

Innovators can not be called pessimists because of their continuous search for shortcomings in what they see. On the contrary, Petroski describes them as “supreme optimists, for they pursue innovation with the belief that they can improve the world, or at least the things of the world.” [1]

Educating future engineers to be innovators requires educating them to be risk takers, and, more importantly, critical thinkers. Someone may ask: does this also require, in some sense, equipping them with the spirit of entrepreneurship? It is not true that engineers should be businessmen whom ultimate goal is to turn ideas into money. The dilemma of whether the job of an engineer is to turn an idea into innovation or to turn an idea into money is an interesting one. This is because it depends on our understanding of whether innovation and money are two faces of the same coin or not. In a short, nice read book, published not too far ago by an aerospace engineer called Thomas Hanson, entitled Engineering Creativity, Hanson describes the ideal designer [2]. In addition to having a tough hide and a healthy ego, because creativity involves many more failures than successes, Hanson says that “truly driven, life-long inventors such as Edison, Steinmetz, and Kettering are much less easily understood, because their thinking tends to be unconventional, and their values and motivations are quite different from those of most people.” Talking about Edison, in particular, Hanson mentions that “based solely on the list of his inventions, Edison should have been the richest man in the world, but he was a very poor businessman. I suspect this was because money as such didn’t much interest him. To Edison, money was apparently just another tool.”

In so many ways, I believe teaching engineering is being similar to teaching art. I attended recently an art exhibition in which the displayed artifacts were works of students in an art class. The task assigned to the students was to first read the same poem (which described a generic painful case), then visit a cancer hospital, and finally reflect on what they have seen with connections to the poem by means of artistic artifacts. As an engineer in that exhibition, I understood that the poem served the same purpose of that of the Request for Proposal we give to our students in typical engineering design projects. The two teaching philosophies of the art class and an engineering class is almost similar: given a task, generate an outcome. The art students were not there in the exhibition to talk about their works, but rather the works were eloquently speaking for themselves.

I know that an exhibition is not the very right place where an engineer’s work should reside; engineers products are around us, and they speak by fulfilling the functions they should be fulfilling. Although being almost similar in the teaching philosophy, I believe that the element that was present in the art class and was absent in engineering classes is the challenge to think critically. In the art class, the students were challenged to see the hidden characters in the cases and stories that they saw, and then to expose them in reflective art.

I believe the reason for this shortcoming in engineering classes is the criteria by which the end product, compared to the art class, is being judged. Assessing engineering design in classroom settings continue to be a challenge, whereas for an art class, students’ works being in display in an exhibition is quite sufficient. Engineering creativity is different from artistic creativity. Hanson writes, “Creativity without objective judgment to guide its course rarely results in anything useful. One of the great obstacles to effective inventing is the very human tendency to fall in love with one’s invention, and for this reason designers must be careful not to let emotion and ego wrap their judgment.”

Brilliant engineering designers as Hanson describes them do not fall in love with their designs. I am not trying to say that art designers do fall in love with their work just because we tend to think of them being more emotional, but I really appreciate the approach of encouraging critical thinking in art schools. I wish to see one day engineers being taught to design in the same way artists are being taught to design; more specifically, to be reflective, critical thinkers. I wish engineering educators could rise up to this challenge of change.

Hanson describes the most brilliant and creative engineer with whom he worked with, who never attended college, saying, “I believe one of his major strengths was that his thinking had never been channeled into conventional grooves,” orderliness which is a result of traditional scientific and engineering education that inhibits creative thinking.


References:
[1] Petroski, Henry (1992). The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
[2] Hanson, Thomas F. (1997). Engineering Creativity. Newhall, CA: T. F. Hanson.