Eswaran Subrahmanian Toluwalogo Odumosu · Jeffrey Y. Tsao Editors Engineering a Better Future Interplay between Engineering, Social Sciences, and Innovation Engineering a Better Future Eswaran Subrahmanian • Toluwalogo Odumosu Jeffrey Y. Tsao Editors Engineering a Better Future Interplay between Engineering, Social Sciences, and Innovation 123 Editors Eswaran Subrahmanian Jeffrey Y. Tsao Carnegie Mellon University Sandia National Laboratories Pittsburgh, PA Albuquerque, NM USA USA Toluwalogo Odumosu Engineering and Society University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA USA ISBN 978-3-319-91133-5 ISBN 978-3-319-91134-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91134-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942629 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. This book is an open access publication. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface Engineers make up roughly 2% of any country’s population, however, they exert an outsize impact on the lives of citizens and on society in general. Since the Industrial Revolution through the current Information Revolution, engineers through their work have played the roles of sociologist, economist, political scientist, and policy analyst, changing the patterns of our lives. Socially embedded innovations such as the cell phone and the Internet are transforming the economic, social, cultural, and physical well-being of people all over the world. The debate is often over how the technology fits into society and not necessarily over how society is reflected in the technology developed, i.e., for example, how the technological system reflects preexisting bias and inequality. As the 1991 NAP report on “Engineering as a social enterprise” states, the dominant view of engineering is one of detached techno- logical quests apart from society. The social implications of engineering and the social influence of engineering is often left out leading to a paucity of interaction between social sciences and engineering in any meaningful way. Engineers are often unaware of technological history and the role of social forces in the history of the development of technologies. Furthermore, the importance of social under- standing of innovation processes is often downplayed both in daily and academic discourse on engineering. The workshop was designed to bring together these two cultures. Our hope is that they are not as divided as C. P. Snow declared, but rather, it is the lack of recognition of the intertwined nature of engineering and social sciences that prevents interactivity. The goal of the workshop was to bring together engineers and social scientists to examine the role that engineers have in the future of our living environments and our economies, and to begin a discussion on how best to integrate the social sciences into engineering practice and research. The best innovation systems anticipate characteristics of technological use and culture, and these are best informed by the social sciences. The symposium addressed the role of social sci- ence research in shaping engineers’ view of their work and its role in the trans- formation of society. v vi Preface Engineering is shaped and informed by social sciences in ways that would benefit from open discussion and greater integration. Often the larger population and engineers themselves are seldom aware of engineers’ contributions to social sciences. From Stevenson to Ford, engineers continually envision and actualize profound changes to social character and behavior. Individuals such as Benjamin Whorf, Vilfredo Pareto, and Fredrick Taylor whom, while engineers in practice, made significant contributions to social sciences, suggesting the close interrela- tionship between engineering and social sciences. Given the range of problems faced by global society from global warming, the automation of work, to envi- ronment degradation and social inequity, it is clear that only through the collabo- ration and appreciation of the each other can engineers and social scientists work together to solve these critical problems. The workshop brought together a variety of scholars from the social sciences and engineering (see list below) to Carnegie Mellon University for a period of 2 days. The workshop was divided into three themes: Meeting at the Middle (challenges to educating at the boundaries); Engineers Shaping Human Affairs; and Engineering the Engineers (thinking about design in designing thinking). Pittsburgh, USA Eswaran Subrahmanian Albuquerque, USA Dr. Jeffrey Y. Tsao Charlottesville, USA Prof. Toluwalogo Odumosu Organizing Committee Acknowlegments We would like to thank Prof. Venkatesh Narayamurthi for his encouragement to find ways to make this workshop happen. He brought us, Subrahmanian, Jeffrey Y. Tsao, and Tolu Odomosu together, as organizers that allowed us to pull off the workshop and the edited book. We would also like to thank, Prof. Maryann Feldman, Heninger Distinguished Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina, who was the Program Director of SciSIP program of NSF, supported and funded this workshop. Our thanks to Prof. Douglas Sicker, Head of the Department of Engineering and Public Policy for his active partici- pation in the workshop, Prof. Burcu Akinci, Associate Dean for Research at College of Engineering, Rebecca Gray, and all other Staff at the Engineering Research Accelerator at CMU who supported in making this workshop successful. This workshop was funded by the NSF grant 36513. vii Contents 1 Innovations in Energy-Climate Education: Integrating Engineering and Social Sciences to Strengthen Resilience ........ 1 Jennie C. Stephens 2 Technology, Policy and Management: Co-evolving or Converging? .......................................... 9 Margot Weijnen and Paulien Herder 3 Reconnecting Engineering with the Social and Political Sphere ............................................... 15 Jameson M. Wetmore 4 Ecole des Mines de Paris: A Few Lessons from a Long History .............................................. 21 Armand Hatchuel 5 Evolving from Single Disciplines to Renaissance Teams ......... 33 Dan Siewiorek 6 Designing the Future We Want............................ 39 Yoram Reich 7 Engineering Design and Society ........................... 51 Shyam Sunder 8 The Cult of Innovation: Its Myths and Rituals ................ 61 Langdon Winner 9 A Generative Perspective on Engineering: Why the Destructive Force of Artifacts Is Immune to Politics ..................... 75 Ron Eglash 10 Does Law Wear Out? ................................... 89 David Howarth ix x Contents 11 The Role of Emotion and Culture in the “Moment of Opening”—An Episode of Creative Collaboration ............. 97 Neeraj Sonalkar and Ade Mabogunje 12 Do the Best Design Ideas (Really) Come from Conceptually Distant Sources of Inspiration? ............................ 111 Joel Chan, Steven P. Dow and Christian D. Schunn 13 Integrating is Caring? Or, Caring for Nanotechnology? Being an Integrated Social Scientist ........................ 141 Ana Viseu 14 The Art of Research: A Divergent/Convergent Thinking Framework and Opportunities for Science-Based Approaches ........................................... 167 Glory E. Aviña, Christian D. Schunn, Austin R. Silva, Travis L. Bauer, George W. Crabtree, Curtis M. Johnson, Toluwalogo Odumosu, S. Thomas Picraux, R. Keith Sawyer, Richard P. Schneider, Rickson Sun, Gregory J. Feist, Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Jeffrey Y. Tsao 15 Knowledge, Skill, and Wisdom: Reflections on Integrating the Social Sciences and Engineering ........................ 187 W. Bernard Carlson 16 Dealing with the Future: General Considerations and the Case of “Mobility” .......................................... 197 Georges Amar Contributors Georges Amar Mines ParisTech-PSL Research University, Paris, France; RATP, Paris, France Glory