Short Version: Playing Well with Others in a Creative Era

Playing Well with Others in a Creative Era David E. Goldberg Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, IL 61801 [email_address]

Fast Times at Global High
Live in fast-paced, global times.
Premium on creative, interdisciplinary work.
Engineering a broad, integrative activity.
Yet, odd relationships with other disciplines.
Engineering faculty paid well, but not at the center of academic discourse.
Need to understand our relations to others & develop ways to work with them more closely.

Roadmap
Creative era as motive for playing well with others.
Conceptual barriers to playing well: envy, namecalling, and a paradigm.
Organizational/Institutional aids to playing well: meso-level dot-connectors & pairwork.
Examples of playing well: ETSI, WPE, iFoundry & OIP.

Playing with Others in a Creative Era
Engineering an integrative discipline: knowledge and knowhow from many sources.
Creative era: Flat worlds, whole new mind, & creative class.
Increased returns to category creators vs. category enhancers.
Renewed need to play well with other disciplines.
But it isn’t easy.

Relation to Math & Science
What is engineering relationship to math & science?
Some say “engineering is applied science.”
Engineering academics are concerned with “rigor” and “the basics” (math, sci, eng sci).
But engineering is so much more.
Myth: radar and bomb won WW2.
Engineering envious of math/science.
Especially in the academy.

Relation to Humanities, Arts & SS
Humanities, arts & social sciences (HASS) increasingly important to engineering.
Yet, we use strange words.
Call HASS “soft” as contrasted to “rigorous.”
View engineering as superior to HASS.
We envy scientist/mathematicians and consider ourselves superior to HASS.
A epistemological classism.
A totem pole in our minds.

Trapped in Cold War Paradigm
“ Paradigm” traces to Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962.
Engineering is stuck in cold war paradigm.
Defending “rigorous” curriculum is not an argument.
Offending HASS as “soft” is namecalling.
“ The basics” include science, but belief in “the basics” not itself scientific.
Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996)

Solution: Emphasize Common Heritage
Missing basics of engineering tie us to others.
Traditional curriculum to senior design, they
Can’t ask questions (Socrates 101).
Can’t label things (Aristotle 101).
Can’t model qualitatively (Aristotle 102, Hume 101).
Can’t decompose problems (Descartes 101).
Can’t experimen t or measure (Locke 101).
Can’t visualize/ideate (daVinci/Monge 101).
Can’t communicate (Newman 101).
Gifts to civilization dating back ~2500 years .
Socrates (470-399 BCE)

Create Meso-Level Dot Connectors
Departmental faculty have access to
Identity
Space
Communications
Clerical support
Funds
Getting different groups to play requires some work.
Dot Connector: Meso-level organizational structure
Gather people intellectually, virtually, and physically.
Easier in world of digital and social media.
Examples: ETSI, iFoundry, APIE2.

Pairwork then Networks
Went from solo to teamwork in the quality revolution. Skipped pairwork.
Georges Harik, early Google employee: pairs 20x more productive than singletons.
Get
Large opportunity for complementary skills.
Low coordination costs.
Maximal opportunity for marginal creativity.
Effective emotional leveling.
Great pairwork yields great networks.
Wilbur Wright Orville Wright

Blogpost  ETSI  WPE  iFoundry
ETSI = Engineering & Technology Studies at Illinois. http://www-illigal.ge.uiuc.edu/ETSI
Started as lecture series & website in 2006 following blog post.
Grew to grassroots network of faculty.
Continues to interact & fundamental to educational & research initiatives.
Need new institutional forms for minimal support of interdisciplinary initiatives.
Led to WPE-2007, iFoundry. OIP, & APIE2.

Playing Well: Change Minds & Orgs
Need to get our minds right.
Need to get our organizations right.
Creativity imperative of 21 st century is calling.
Links:
http://ifoundry.illinois.edu
http://www-illigal.ge.uiuc.edu/ETSI
http://www-illigal.ge.uiuc.edu/wpe
www.apie2.org

Summit on the Engineer of the Future 2.0
Grassroots meeting: 31 March – 1 April 2009 (Tuesday evening – Wednesday), Olin College.
Keynote: Karan Watson from TAMU.
Panel of young engineers and their transformational experiences.
Brainstorming breakouts.
Signing of the transformation proclamation.
Olin in Action, Thursday, 2 April 2009.
http://engineerofthefuture.olin.edu

Short Version: Playing Well with Others in a Creative Era

by David E. Goldberg on Mar 23, 2009

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