Preparing Tomorrows Engineers
How we prepare the engineer of tomorrow – Let us think
carefully.
* How can we ensure that technology is humane and not
insane?
*Whether a product or a project aids humanity (which may not
be wildly profitable)
*That which may not be positively good to individual humans
and to society at large.
*Just because something can be done does not necessarily
mean it should be done. Engineering can invent almost anything society wants.
*The big question is how will the society going to make a
good use of it?
*Engineers have a positive, social responsibility to make
ethical judgments about goodness and that engineering functions as a useful
profession as surely as medicine or education.
*Engineering with a conscience is just plain good, long
range business.
Many issues are complex and in the long run their eventual
solution will require not only individual engineers but also corporates and
other institutions to act in good conscience.
* Therefore, one universal solution – literally all the way
from product design to world peace is just for humans to talk openly with
another.
* In product development, communication is the most
important feature.
*Only then can we establish understanding, going beyond the
barriers of race, culture and language
*Once people realize that they can contribute much more,
when collaborating, barriers will disappear automatically. Hence, such
communications must start as early as possible, preferably in college
undergraduate years or even earlier.
*We need make students sensitive about the impact of
Engineering on society, irrespective of whether they meet environmental or
other code for their type of project.
*Engineers must build the right stuff. They must see content
fitting into broader environmental and cultural context.
*So Training of Engineers depends more on history and more
on humanities
Significant challenges for engineers include:
*Provision of adequate housing
*Production of distribution of food
*Availability of education and medical care
*Conservation of global resources.
*Control of global pollution
*Maintenance and privacy in communications and computing.
*Control of unknown diseases.
These are
as old as humanity itself. Some require pure technical approach, some are
primarily societal balancing of material priorities and focused largely on
values. All these issues involve Engineering Techniques and expertise.
The roles of
scientists and technologist in future engineering are
*Construction of major grids
*Distribution of electric power
*Making urban subway system and sky scrappers
*Advent of elevators and water pumps
*Air-conditioning systems
*A transistor as a part of integrated circuits
*From main frame to PC’s, to cell phones, and to space craft
*In the areas of entertainment, acceleration, finance, food
preparation and storage, Medicare, military capabilities transportation and
education of children
*Most young people are attracted to engineering because they
love making feasible, workable, technical concepts and become entrepreneurs. In
fact many engineers want to help in improving the quality of people’s lives and
they see Engineering as an effective means of doing so.
In this process it is the duty of educators, administrators,
teachers and students of engineering
education to supply thought on the following points.
1. Students
must be exposed to the societal impact of Technology (re-iterated by 5 great
Technical experts). In fact they should be made sensitive about the impact of
prospective technologies on society and environment
2. Emphasize
on transforming UG Engineering education from being individual competitiveness
(class rank) to one of collaborative teamwork.
3. In
Re-engineering engineering education
a. Students
must understand materials and how they are used in fabricating components
b. Besides
counting books in the Library and the number of faculty, we need to think of
whether students are learning what they need.
c. More
particularly students must be given skills like working collaboratively in
teams (communicating effectively with co-workers), rather than emphasizing too
much on job training
d. More
opportunities are created for multi-disciplinary teamwork and hands-on
experience. In fact the proof of any Engineering Programme (syllabus or school)
is in the performance of its students after they come into the society. Focus
on outcome instead of the process. (Told by EC2000 criteria architect).
e. Among
other things, engineering programmes must demonstrate the graduate’s ability,
among other things to design and conduct experiments as well as to analyze and
interpret data. To design a system, component or process to meet desired needs.
To communicate effectively and to understand the impact of engineering
solutions in a global societal context (continuous feedback loop is needed)
f. Education
is the learning of how to learn as opposed to learning how to do. (If you do a
lot of training and teaching of how to do a specific task-instead of educating,
you are doing a disservice to students, i.e., education must position engineers
to keep learning.
g. To
understand better of the social context in which students will be practicing
engineers – they must be allowed to take-up some arts and Humanities subjects
like communications & management skills,
h. They
should be allowed to involve in inter-disciplinary problems involved to develop
an implicit knowledge base (It is just not an explicit one – something you just
read and memorize but is something you have to experience to learn. The
implicit knowledge is something like a sixth sense,
i.
a professional
develops after a long experience and judgment, when somebody is struck up with
a trouble on the design of a complex system – only experts do have such
judgment).
j.
In-fact a lot of societal implications falls into the
realm of implicit knowledge.
k. Curriculum
must contain capstone engineering projects
l.
Societal Issues and Engineering Ethics are believed to
pave way for implicit knowledge.
m. 99%
of the students want to know
How do I use this instrument?
How do I use these data?
How do I get the right answer?
n. Some
problems related to societal impact are
Environmental issues in slums
Deterring the ravages of pollution
in canals
How to improve and find
technology, which helps the physically and mentally challenged.
Some of the alumni could help in
these kinds of problems
Broadening the Young Engineer:
1) Engineering
is a profession of tradeoffs and compromises. So teach more of Engineering
ethics and Engineering management, as each compromise or a design tradeoff carries with it a seed
of ethical lapse.
--- Some of the ethical lapses
include falsifying data, misleading colleagues, taking credit of others work,
putting on the market a product that is unsafe and harms the public someway,
fatal or minor accidents likely to occur in the placement of gas-tank on the
automobile, etc.
2) In-fact
there is no single foolproof, correct solution to a design problem; even
all-possible eliminations of failure mechanisms within reasonable limits may
not ensure accident free model. Ethical situations must be dealt with on its
own merits.
3) Students
need to be appraised of
a) An understanding of when and
how ethical issues arise in the every day routine of engineers and b) to
explore the impact of teamwork and peer influence on ethical behavior, specific
ethical issues.
4) More
generally engineers, engineering managers, faculty and corporate managements
focus on the “potential ethical dimensions of design decisions”
5) Perhaps
it is better to see the profession more objectively and from the straight
forward documentation of technical developments (when, where, what and who) to
the inclusion of analysis of influences of culture, environment, economics,
politics, personalities on a particular technical development.
This leads to the influence of
historical points related to the technology (by the custodians of a body of
technology) on the successful design approaches. Also some of the Engineers for
example EE engineers should be thoroughly schooled in the physics of electron
and electro-optic devices and fundamentals of reliability engineering etc., to
keep people aware of fundamentals
Catching them Young:
Students
must be allowed to experience the excitement of working of science and
technology. Excitement of learning – Mars 2030 project involving several
countries (http://www.mars2030.net).
This is a multi-disciplinary project
How to
survive physically but also how to survive intellectually? – To investigate all
aspects of actual long-term community, encouraging imagination among
youngsters.
Attracting young creative people to engineering:
Women engineers can take more interest in environmental
engineering and bio-medical engineering.
Programs similar to “engineers to neighboring schools” is
worth pursuing.
Volunteers must speak in classes about their profession and
help teachers prepare experiments.
More women must be encouraged for careers in engineering/
also for the economic well being/ to design differently fitting to culture.
We cannot afford to lose the creativity of large sub-groups
be it in any corner of the country.
The beauties of diversity lie in creativity – E.Baum
Products success is more important than market success.
We should catch the young people at the age of 12 as many
people are thinking about careers and profession by age 12)
Working engineers must be at a stage to tell assertively
that they make life better for people – we are the problem-solvers for the
benefit of society.
Today’s 15 year olds are more excited to learn and
contribute to humanity
A sort of upping of the engineer’s image should be done by
making the human application clearer.
With the advancements of Internet Technologies (how to use
information in design Teacher or
professor should now needs to be much
more of a mentor or a facilitator
This technology must allow students to tailor studies around
their hours of employment or to participate from different time zones---
leading to distance education and learning – but people need to address the
quality of courses which are being offered.
Sustaining Creativity:
* Managing creativity is about taking diverse group of
people with diverse skills and getting them to produce a brand new thing ----
Donna Shirley (Designer of 6 wheeled sojourner for mars exploration)
* Encouraging creativity is not a regular part of engineer’s
classroom education but is learned on the job.
* How to think and do things innovatively, we need a process
(systems) that focuses on creative process through the products of full
lifecycle
* Thus concentrating on lifecycle creativity keeps people
mindful of things that can kill the creativity at every time.
* Device a series of lectures on creative process relating
to the design of a particular thing.
* In making a group of people experience the process by
working through creative solutions to a problem, we focus on getting people to
understand and appreciate the value of those differences in creative process.
*Creative teams must be from diverse areas.
*Diversity means, having been exposed to differing points of
view of live situations and also differing intellectual approaches.
*Sustaining creativity means allowing time for daydreaming
and for pursing unrelated activities like art and music.
*This means opening of sub-conscience up to connections.
*The NASA’s mantra is better, faster, cheaper produced great
missions
Evaluating Creativity:
*How to develop an understanding of how to harmonize our
differences to our advantage.
*All creativity has 2 components: Discovery and Invention
*In Discovery, we find new things. It is creativity based on
analysis, physics, chemistry and other sciences (work of Einstein)
*Invention is putting together of known things in completely
new ways, which is creativity based on synthesis. (Work of Edison)
*Engineering is the epitome of invention, needs a foundation
in the analysis and discovery of physics on which to build (design of a
transistor) Thus creativity is the beginning of a common language. Wherein we
see that what makes all disciplines hold together, you have a way to ascertain
the quality and the value of people’s contributions.
*Therefore people should not be judged on the basis of
analytical contribution rather on their inventive capabilities.
*Viewing creativity as having the components of both
discovery (analysis) and invention (synthesis) allows one to see commonalities
across fields that are usually viewed as separate.
*In music and literature, there is more invention.
*Engineering has more creativity overlapping with music than
pure science.
*We need to give more weightage to the social needs of the
people, in maximizing benefits to all people. Individuals require compromise
from both sides.
*The compromise is similar to that in physics between
knowledge of subatomic particles momentum and placement.
Effective Communication leads to developing best
products:
*Engineers are not the strongest of communicators.
*They don’t talk with their counterparts in materials and
manufacturing
*In history the best products have been built by
cross-functional teams that were given tools to maximize communications.
*It is necessary to design products, which are simple,
reliable, efficient and cost-effective as possible.
*Good communication is both the seed of the problem and its
solution.
*We need a crisp and a clear understanding on requirements,
interfaces, contingencies and over sights (RICO).
*Requirements (developing products, which are not what
customers wants is of no use. It is necessary to complete concept and to
discover the exceptions, the products need to handle.
*Good subsystem interfaces.
*Best product are designed to accommodate the user’s needs,
the systems should be developed to fit the human capabilities and not the other
way around.
*Engineers need to think along negative paths to see how a
product might fail and envision how to mitigate the effect of failures. One
must work on a FMEA (failure moods and effects analysis) asking “what if”.
*Improvements in communication are catching oversights.
Thus when
people have the opportunity to communicate going beyond barriers they can
produce good designs.
In conclusion the secrets of happiness are related to:
One need
nor care whether you succeed or fail but you must care that you try, that you
try – Greatbatch (Inventor of pace maker)
*One must not fear failure because failures are valuable
learning experiences.
*If everything is a success without failures then you are
not trying hard enough.
* In fact great failures may be part of some grand success
and may not even take place in your life time
*Obviously you should not crave for success always, but for
some appreciation for what you do.
*You should do your work because it is a good thing to do;
your reward is not in the result but in doing.
*Focus on what really needs to be done with clearer mind to
concentrate on the core of the problem in-front of you, free from all
encumbrances the world would so willingly lay on you and 90% of the stresses
will drop away, if you are freed of failures and craving for great successes.
This will lead to a true happiness
*Go forth and select something you want to do i.e., a good
thing in the Lord’s sight, then study it, work it, live it, work harder at it
than you have ever worked before. Just enjoy your total immersion in it. You
will be left as the happiest person in the world.
You should do your work because it is a good thing to do.
Ref: The above article is based on EC2000 and Engineering
Tomorrow books of IEEE.
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