Silk flowers are just as artificial as plastic ones: value engineering in the university context

Abstract

This paper moves beyond the competence focus of mainstream value engineering training (e.g. Miles 1989, Techniques of Value Engineering and Value Analysis; Kaufman 1990, Value Engineering for the Practitioner), such books achieve their training goal well but lack the pedagogic aim we argue in this paper. This paper achieves our aim by describing the philosophical linkage between value engineering, function analysis and innovation and the economic imperative businesses bring to modes of engineering consideration. This philosophical underpinning uses Heidegger's attack on Descartes' ‘I think therefore I am’ and the assumptions such logic brings to the central question of an individual existence among the existences of everything else. Rather than singularly focusing on ‘what’ or ‘that’, Heidegger calls upon us to consider ‘how and why’ as a product of ontological functioning. However, we do not seek to replace Cartesian rationalism with Heidegger's phenomenological methods, as the latter does have several aspects we disagree with. We argue for their mutual inclusion, something Heidegger would argue against, to enable systematic modes of considering ‘know-that’ and ‘know-how’ in an informed and objective approach to managing innovation and engineering epistemology. Value engineering is offered as a means to enhance the way we teach our students how to innovate and make them aware of the dangers of thinking man-made or artificial-technology is superior to an all-embracing natural or ontological-technology.

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the work of Prof. Dan Seni of the University of Quebec at Montreal and the Miles Value Foundation for helping us to move forward from a craft-based approach to VE towards VE as a research programme. Also Jerry Kaufman and Joe Otero from SAVE International warrant thanks in this same regard.

Notes

That Heidegger was a Nazi shows the weakness of sole reliance on socially constructed value. Notions of value must be derived from an ontological-technology within which our socially constructed rules and actions are formed, contained and played out.