Same Old Questions - Shifting Elegant Solutions

I have been thinking about our discussion about last week’s readings in the forms of reports on the state of engineering education and the discussion about the fact that we keep asking the same questions. In the conversation, I heard the frustration about the fact that perhaps educators were doing something wrong because we seem to be asking the same questions; we haven’t appeared to come up with the solution that will allow us to answer questions once and for all. I guess the question I might ask is, why is it a problem that we continue to ask questions? And why is it a problem that we ask the same questions?

One of the issues that I noticed is that we did not discuss the context of these engineering reports. Engineering as a profession occupied very different spaces in terms of number of people in the profession, professional identity, professional capital, place in the university, place in the society etc. The nature and situation of the engineering profession was significantly different in 1918 than it was in 1968 than it is in 2010. Perhaps it is appropriate to ask the same questions. As a class exercise, we went through and asked the same questions of many of the philosophies of education in Nodding’s book. Each society asks questions (often the same ones) and answers them for themselves. Sometimes what works in one moment won’t work in the next. However, the question is still provocative and important.

Perhaps we should be asking the same questions as our situations shift, where my concern lies is the ability to be present and listen to the discussion and move from the discussion into the process of designing complex, elegant solutions that include multiple voices that will in turn go on to ask many of the same questions again: What does it mean to be an engineer? How do we educate someone to become that person? Are we educating engineers that are capable of meeting the needs of industry and our society?

These are not fixed answers; just as we think we may have answered the question, the need to re-ask the question arises. Just as few design situations are fixed, once we have finished one design, new ones arise for us to consider… Perhaps being an engineer means being able to ask hard questions and participate in a process for providing a system of evolving responses to ever present, ever important questions. Perhaps it means committing to the idea that elegant solutions are not universal solutions – elegant solutions are situational and often result from serious considerations of age-old questions…