The public has little awareness or appreciation of engineering as the source of technology. The engineering community spends mightily to try to improve public awareness, but an NAE-commissioned survey of activities intended to raise public awareness found little coordination among them and few measures of success. This report provides the results of this survey, explains why it was needed, and recommends how the engineering community can work successfully to communicate the importance of engineering to society.
The public has little awareness or appreciation of engineering as the source of technology. The engineering community spends mightily to try to improve public awareness, but an NAE-commissioned survey of activities intended to raise public awareness found little coordination among them and few measures of success. This report provides the results of this survey, explains why it was needed, and recommends how the engineering community can work successfully to communicate the importance of engineering to society.
Interdisciplinarity is increasingly viewed as a necessary ingredient in the training of future oriented 21st century disciplines that rely on both analytic and synthetic abilities across disciplines. Nearly every curricular document or vision statement of schools and universities include a call for promoting creativity in students. Yet the construct of creativity and giftedness across disciplines remains elusive in the sense that the prototypical examples of such work come from eminent scientists, artists and mathematicians, and little if any work has been conducted with non-eminent individuals. This monograph is an attempt to fill this gap by putting forth the view that interdisciplinarity and creativity are related constructs, and that the cultivation of domain general creativity is possible. Mathematics has historically been anchored to numerous disciplines like theology, natural philosophy, culture and art, allowing for a flexibility of thought that is difficult to cultivate in other disciplines. In this monograph, the numerous chapters from Australia, U.S.A., Canada, Cyprus, Denmark and Japan provide a compelling illustration of the intricate connection of mathematics with literature, paradoxes, history, technology and modeling, thus serving as a conduit for interdisciplinarity, creativity and learning to occur.
This book explores the nexus between professional technical societies and engineering education by examining several societies’ efforts to promote and support engineering and engineering education in the areas of pre-university education, university education and informal education through programs and activities designed to leverage social innovation. Professional societies are in a unique position to support and contribute to engineering education, and have dedicated substantial resources to social responsibility programs and activities that promote engineers and engineering. The book is chiefly intended for engineers, engineering educators, staff members of professional technical societies, and for the broad range of scholars whose work involves technology education and education policy.
Chapters Chapter 1: Spaces for Well-being: Designing Healthy and Human-Centric Environments Chapter 2: Pushing the Limits: Breakthroughs in Structural Design Chapter 3: The Digital Transformation: Computational Tools in Building Design Chapter4: Building for a Green Tomorrow: Advancing Sustainable Architecture Chapter 5: Materials of Tomorrow: Revolutionizing Construction Techniques Chapter 6: Evaluation of the seismic performance of suspension bridges using nonlinear modeling and solutions to deal with failures in these structures Chapter 7: Smart Cities: Transforming Urban Infrastructure Chapter 8: Beyond Boundaries: Exploring the Future of Built Environments
Can the United States continue to lead the world in innovation? The answer may hinge in part on how well the public understands engineering, a key component of the 'innovation engine'. A related concern is how to encourage young people-particularly girls and under-represented minorities-to consider engineering as a career option. Changing the Conversation provides actionable strategies and market-tested messages for presenting a richer, more positive image of engineering. This book presents and discusses in detail market research about what the public finds most appealing about engineering-as well as what turns the public off. Changing the Conversation is a vital tool for improving the public image of engineering and outreach efforts related to engineering. It will be used by engineers in professional and academic settings including informal learning environments (such as museums and science centers), engineering schools, national engineering societies, technology-based corporations that support education and other outreach to schools and communities, and federal and state agencies and labs that do or promote engineering, technology, and science.
This volume, the result of an ongoing bridge building effort among engineers and humanists, addresses a variety of philosophical, ethical, and policy issues emanating from engineering and technology. Interwoven through its chapters are two themes, often held in tension with one another: “Exploring Boundaries” and “Expanding Connections.” “Expanding Connections” highlights contributions that look to philosophy for insight into some of the challenges engineers face in working with policy makers, lay designers, and other members of the public. It also speaks to reflections included in this volume on the connections between fact and value, reason and emotion, engineering practice and the social good, and, of course, between engineering and philosophy. “Exploring Boundaries” highlights contributions that focus on some type of demarcation. Public policy sets a boundary between what is regulated from what is not, academic disciplines delimit themselves by their subjects and methods of inquiry, and professions approach problems with unique goals and by using concepts and language in particular ways that create potential obstacles to collaboration with other fields. These and other forms of boundary setting are also addressed in this volume. Contributors explore these two themes in a variety of specific contexts, including engineering epistemology, engineers’ social responsibilities, engineering and public policy-making, engineering innovation, and the affective dimensions of engineering work. The book also includes analyses of social and ethical issues with emerging technologies such as 3-D printing and its use in medical applications, as well as social robots. Initial versions of the invited papers included in this book were first presented at the 2014 meeting of the Forum on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology (fPET), held at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. The volume furthers fPET’s intent of extending and developing the philosophy of engineering as an academic field, and encouraging conversation, promoting a sense of shared enterprise, and building community among philosophers and engineers across a diversity of cultural backgrounds and approaches to inquiry.
