Editorial

Greetings for a new year and a new volume of Engineering Studies. Issue 11.1 has some exciting content, all broadly concerned with how to educate interdisciplinary engineers who will be more attuned to societal context in their design practices. Yet despite that common thread, this issue’s two articles, one Report, and one Critical Participation piece approach the topic from very different directions. That diversity in striving toward a common aim is one of the strengths of this field and its journal.

The most personal of this issue’s contributions is our Critical Participation piece, ‘Interdisciplinarity in Practice: Reflections on Drones as a Boundary Object’, by Elizabeth Reddy, Gordon Hoople, and Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick. The authors describe a course at the University of San Diego created by Hoople (a faculty member in USD’s School of Engineering) and Choi-Fitzpatrick (a faculty member in USD’s School of Peace). The point of the course was to foster an interdisciplinary environment in which engineering and peace studies students would teach and learn from each other and cause each other to question their own assumptions. Reddy, as a postdoctoral fellow and cultural anthropologist supported at USD by the National Science Foundation, approached the course as an ethnographic field site where she could interact with the students and faculty members participating in one of the projects funded by NSF’s Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments program.

Hoople and Choi-Fitzpatrick assigned the students to develop a ‘drone that might have a positive social impact’, on the theory that ‘drones’ (a popular rather than technical category) are a controversial technology that would nudge the students toward frank and productive interdisciplinary debates. Unfortunately, the interdisciplinary ideals of the course fell somewhat short in practice. Instead of the peace studies students prompting the engineering students to take a more critical stance, in practice the presence of the engineering students seems to have given the peace studies students leeway to take a less critical stance. Fortunately, the authors take that setback as an opportunity to reflect on what happened, draw some lessons, and put their experiences in front of the engineering studies community for further discussion.

One thing I like about this article is that it reinforces the long-standing ties between peace studies and engineering studies; these are fields that ought to be natural allies.¹ But intellectually what I find exciting here is the intersection of two forefront topics in engineering studies and related fields. On one side, there is now a fast-growing critical literature on interdisciplinarity. For many years now, ‘interdisciplinary’ has been used as a synonym for ‘good’ on many university campuses, especially but not only in North America. And interdisciplinarity can be a force for good, as this journal tries to demonstrate. But it is not an automatic good, and it some cases it can even be counterproductive to its promoters’ aims.² We need a critical understanding of interdisciplinarity if it is to do the things claimed for it – and articles like this one are an important contribution to that.

On the other side, ‘drones’ are an increasingly ubiquitous technology and topic of public debate. And where there’s a debate, an academic literature will follow with critical analysis. We know from that literature, for instance, that drone technology is much older than is usually assumed in the public debate, and that the same tricky questions have hovered over it throughout that history.³ That literature explores the use of drones in warfare, of course, but also in contexts such as journalism and rural development that are often ignored in the public debate.⁴ Reddy, Hoople, and Choi-Fitzpatrick make a welcome contribution to that literature by offering a concrete example of that technology's ambiguities in an interdisciplinary pedagogical context.

Responsible innovation in engineering pedagogy

Stepping back a bit, Rider Foley and Beverley Gibbs survey the landscape of engineering ethics education in order to motivate and describe a new approach based on the framework of Responsible Research and Innovation. Engineering ethics has a long but highly contested place in engineering education and in the professional codes of engineering fields.⁵ To some extent ‘engineering ethics’ is a bit like ‘democracy’ – everyone says they want it until you get down to figuring out what it means. There’s broad consensus that engineers should behave ethically, and that therefore we need to train them in a way that encourages ethical behavior later on. But there’s much less consensus as to what that training should look like.

For Foley and Gibbs – and I wholeheartedly agree – it is not sufficient to teach engineers what constitutes unethical behavior because there are many situations in which all the engineers involved have done the best that can be expected from them (from both a technical and ethical perspective) and yet the outcome may still be damaging to society. What’s needed then is a more positive vision of how to help engineers and engineering students acknowledge and act on their obligations to others in a complex world. There are many proposals for how to do this; one particularly prominent set, including those Foley and Gibbs link to, are grouped under the umbrella of Responsible Research and Innovation. RRI may be more familiar to readers in Europe than elsewhere because of the European Union’s embrace of the concept – though the idea has plenty of adherents around the world, and the Journal of Responsible Innovation (with which Engineering Studies has much fruitful overlap) is based in the US.

Predictably, there’s no consensus as to exactly what RRI means either, in part because it has a longer and more varied history than many of its proponents acknowledge.⁶ But there is some agreement that in practice it should be responsive, inclusive, anticipatory, and reflexive.⁷ That is, engineering that aims for the outcomes that RRI means to facilitate should include a wide range of voices, should do so in way that tries to explore a variety of different possible future pathways, should acknowledge the engineers’ own positionality and the influences on their views and behavior, and should in fact respond to the concerns raised by those diverse voices. As Foley and Gibbs show, engineering ethics education rooted in RRI moves the locus of ethical behavior away from the individual and toward the collective – not to give the individual a pass, but to remind them that they are embedded in networks where they must act on their obligations to the other participants in those networks.

Putting into practice

As this issue’s Report shows, however, there are significant obstacles to encouraging that supra-individual view of the engineer’s obligations. In ‘Engineering Manager: Constitutive Elements of This Profession’, Jelena Fischer, Mladen Pecujlija, Djordje Cosic, and Bojan Lalic describe and then survey the relatively new engineering management community in Serbia. They show that engineering management spread across the world from the United States, reaching Serbia in the early 2000s. Its initial professionalization and legitimization there, however, was quickly checked by the disruptions caused by the 2008 economic crisis. As a result of the crisis, engineering managers in Serbia have been forced away from the interdisciplinary ideals of their field – i.e., a true hybrid of engineering and management expertise – and toward a niche where they are responsible for ruthless cost-cutting and labor outsourcing. In that environment, engineering ethics education of any kind – but particularly the reflexive and inclusive RRI model espoused by Foley and Gibbs – has little hope of taking root. And in fact, the surveyed engineering managers ‘are aware of the importance of business ethics, but in actual business processes they fail to comply with their code of ethics’ and see little ‘obligation of managers to protect social justice and the environment and serve the welfare of society’.

In an environment where all incentives are pointed in the other direction, what can we do to ensure that engineers do feel such an obligation? The mechanisms that operated in the 20th century – professional courtesy and solidarity in particular – didn’t work all that well back then and seem to be even less effective today. One possibility, discussed by Trust Saidi, Christopher Mutswangwa, and Tania Douglas in ‘Design Thinking as a Complement to Human Factors Engineering for Enhancing Medical Device Usability’, is to show that inclusivity is necessary for successful engineering. Designers who don’t talk to potential users or others who are relevant to the technologies they design will end up with a product that doesn’t sell or that causes harms leading to legal action. Thinking more about usability – or even going the extra step of adopting RRI principles – is no guarantee of a successful product, but the two are linked. Saidi, Mutswangwa, and Douglas show that this is particularly the case for medical devices, which are embedded in complicated legal regimes and where users usually have requirements that engineers would have difficulty imagining on their own. And here we come full circle, because the authors argue that interdisciplinarity stimulates engineers’ imaginations: ‘multi-disciplinary teams that are a key feature in design thinking provide valuable input from diverse expertise, increasing the spectrum of ideas which enables the generation of a wider variety of possible solutions’.

So interdisciplinarity isn’t a panacea, but it is good practice. The same goes for responsible research and innovation. They both merit experimentation as well as the type of critical reflection and analysis that this journal aims for. And with continued experimentation and critical reflection and analysis we can encourage an engineering that is more humane, sustainable, and conscious of its far-ranging obligations in a complex, networked, global society.

Notes

1. Vogel, “Bioweapons Proliferation”; MacKenzie, “Science and Technology Studies and the Question of the Military”.

2. Frickel, Albert, and Prainsack, Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration; Kaplan, Milde, and Schwartz Cowan, “Symbiont Practices in Boundary Spanning”; Ku, “Forming Interdisciplinary Expertise”.

3. Chandler, “Drone Flight and Failure”.

4. Parks and Kaplan, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare; Gusterson, Drones; Laflamme, “A Sky Full of Signal”.

5. Johnson and Wetmore, “STS and Ethics”.

6. Shanley, “Looking Forward, Looking Back”.

7. Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe, “Responsible Research and Innovation”; van Lente, Swierstra, and Joly, “Responsible Innovation as a Critique of Constructive Technology Assessment”; von Schomberg, “A Vision of Responsible Innovation”; Rip, “The Clothes of the Emperor”.