Engineering in 2020 and Beyond

Reading a few chapters from the Engineering of 2020 reminded me of the week where we read many older reports on Engineering. One particular theme reemerged--the inclusion of social science, humanities, business, and other non-engineering courses in the engineering curriculum. Although it had been brought up before, one thing that was new was tying the need for more non-engineering classes in the curriculum to the changing global circumstances of our current times. Still this is an issue that has appeared more than once throughout the many reflexive moments in engineering's history. Furthermore, and I'm not sure if this is simply a limit of space and time they had to dedicate to the topic, or if this is covered in Educating the Engineer of 2020, but in the Engineer of 2020 it is simply suggested that the engineering curriculum should include more classes in social science, humanities, life sciences, and so on, to expand engineers boundaries of knowledge and ability. This line of thinking is like what Robin talked about during the week where we read all the reports (and I mentioned in an earlier post)--the debate over curriculum becomes a zero-sum game where people battle for including new things but other engineering educators want to retain their old content, leading to staggered or fragmented change. If the argument keeps centering around content and whose content gets included and whose gets truncated, it will be hard to effect more systematic change, which is something that may be discussed in the full book or Education the Engineering of 2020.

This brings me to another point. Its powerful to look the future and try discern what engineers should aspire to and what attributes the engineer of the future will have. However, aspirations engineers should have and attributes they should have are individual centered concerns. The topic above, the zero-sum battle of content cannot be fully addressed at this level. The environment in which engineers have these aspirations and may potentially gain these attributes needs to be considered. As Robin pointed out in her article we also read for this week, its important to look at engineering as a complex system--one that is composed of many interactive, interrelated parts--to take into account both the individual aspects of engineering (attributes, attitudes, beliefs, etc) and institutional or environmental aspects (educational institutions, professional societies, resources, etc). Reducing the complexity of this problem to things that need to change with engineers misses the important changes that must happen in larger institutions or social systems. Nevertheless how individuals think, act, and what skills and knowledge they have is also important; if just the university of examined, for instance, it will miss all the different types of students, learning styles, and experiences that go into the process of receiving an engineering education. Not only does a complex systems perspective take all of these into account, it is built on the assumptions that such systems are dynamic, adaptive, evolving and sometimes self-generating (so for instance we see a continued pattern of problems identified by engineers that continue to reappear--there are many questions as to why this happens, but from a complex systems perspective, we might infer that there is something about how the different elements of the system interact that result in these questions reemerging over and over again.) Problems of the size and scope we are dealing with (dramatic change in the ways engineers are taught and how institutions of learning are organized and run) need to be addressed at many levels and through many avenues, but they need to be addressed finally at a holistic level such as this to really make a case and push for major change.