Car Engineer of the Century

Transcription

So I'm David Goldberg, and 51 days ago I resigned my tenure at the University of Illinois, to start a consultancy and an executive coaching firm to help transform engineering education in this country and around the world. In the next 6 minutes, I want to tell you a little story about why that's so important to me and why this is important to you. The story begins at the end of World War II, the beginning of what became the Cold War. Engineering education and engineering practice, realigned themselves with the perception that physics won the war, and as a result design and practical subjects were removed from engineering training and in part from engineering practice. Fast-forward to our times, now in the 21st century, and we live in a world that some have said we live in a world that is flat. Richard Florida says that we live in a world with a rising creative class. And Dan Pink says that we live in a world that requires a whole new creative mind. So that gap between the Cold War engineer, post war, and the engineer of the 21st century, could be a big one. And so how can we go about exploring that, and what I would like to do is follow Stephen Covey's advice, and begin with the end in mind. How might we do that? So let's get together with a team of 3 students at the University of Illinois, and go and solve a real world problem as part of an industrially sponsored senior design course. In fact let's go up to Chicago, to Azteca Foods, and try to reduce the amount of dusting flour used. Doesn't sound like a big a problem, but it's a problem that cost that company millions of dollars and causes them to be unprofitable. So we sent the kids off into the field to go talk to the client. And what's the first thing we noticed that they don't know how to do? We noticed that they don't know how to ask a good question. And that's a little surprising, because Socrates taught the Western world to ask good questions in the 5th century BC in Athens, and that's part of our great Western tradition. So how is it that we created engineers that don't know how to ask? So you coach them and you get them to ask those questions, and they collect a lot of data. Then what don't they know how to do? Then they don't know how to label the patterns in the data that will help them solve the problem. And of course that's a little puzzling because Aristotle taught the Western world how to do that in about the 4th century BC. So again, we've lost some of the greatness of the Western tradition in how we teach our engineers how they conduct themselves. Well again, you coach them and you get them to work on the problem, solve the problem you get them to label some patterns, and then they have to figure out what the problem really is and that requires them to model conceptually, either as a categorical list or perhaps as a causal chain. But — their inclination is to plug into equations, because after all that's what we taught them how to do. We taught them to plug into Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations to beat the band, but when actually have to think logically, from step to step, or think decompositionally, they don't know how to do it. Then they actually have a problem to solve, they've kind of modeled it and now they have to bust that big problem up into about a bunch of little problems in order to make some progress, in the course of the semester. In here the failure is a failure that Descartes warned us about in his discourse on method, to decompose problems is the beginning of solving them. And our students have trouble doing that, because they're still looking for that set of equations to plug into and get the magic answer. So you coach them on that. Now they've got little problems to solve and some of those little problems are problems where the quickest way into a solution, the royal row to a solution, is a little experiment out in the world, to query a problem. To query nature and find out what the answer might be rather than to do some theory. So we coach, we prod, we get them to model, we get them to experiment, and they succeed, but their inclination wasn't with them. And so you might call that a failure of your favorite empiricist here, I've chosen John Locke as my poster child. So now they've really got things going and now they really have to come up with a creative solution to the problem and, of course, at the Cold War we've removed a lot of engineering graphics and ideation and creativity from the curriculum, and so they are at a loss as to how to do those things. And so here we might say this is a failure of Da Vinci 101 or Monge 101, depending on which great person you want to pin it on. So again you coach them and get them to sketch, you get them to visualize. And finally, they solve the problem. And they have to present the results to their client, they have to present a report, they have to make a presentation. And what don't they know how to do? Well, this is really akin to the warden in the Cool Hand Luke, saying, "What we have here is a failure to communicate," so we'll tag the great western sage, Paul Newman, with this failure. These 7 things in the iFoundry initiative at the University of Illinois we call, "The Missing Basics of Engineering": the ability to question, the ability to label, the ability to model, the ability to decompose, the ability to experiment, the ability to visualize and ideate and the ability to communicate, are skills that are absolutely essential to be a great engineer. There are also things that are really important, if engineers of our century are going to connect to human problems and connect with humanists, social scientists, artists, and the rest of the intellectual and practical community to help solve these tough problems. And if we do those things, we'll create a category creating engineer who is creative in a way that alignes with the imperative of our century. Thank you. (Applause)