Beyond Engineering
by Dennis L. Feucht
Innovatia Laboratories
In Engineering 101 we were taught that engineers are society's technical
problem solvers; that we use scientific and engineering principles to better
the physical existence of humanity. While we expend major efforts on technology
development, how effectively are we solving problems of society? This leads
us to consider some wider aspects of engineering.
Is Marketing Engineering?
To ease into the topic, consider this question: is marketing actually part of engineering? If engineers are society's problem-solvers, then is not an important first step in engineering to define the problem to be solved? In Engineering 101, that was the first step of the "engineering method," followed by a search for solutions, then deciding on one and specifying it -- somewhat simplistic, but maybe okay for a freshman course.
Some problems are obvious. If you were a design engineer at H-P or Tektronix during the 1960s, increasing oscilloscope bandwidth was your central problem. Your fellow design engineers were thinking and talking about technical details and new ideas involving circuit speed. How that impacted society was indirect at best. It more immediately impacted whether the large computer companies were going to buy Tek or H-P 'scopes to service their increasingly fast minicomputers and mainframes. Computers were in a high-growth phase of development as an upcoming technology, and they impacted the direction of test-equipment development. It was also obvious that computers could solve numerous problems, from replacing the tedium of manual calculation, to communications networking and automatic control of a wide range of processes and devices.
The combination of computing concepts and emerging semiconductor capability set the direction that electronic technology took in the last half of the 20th century. Computers, as breakthrough technology, at first had an indeterminate range of future possible applications, giving inventive engineering minds, like artists, a medium in which to exercise creativity. The excitement that breakthrough technology brings consists in part in the fact that we do not know how far it will allow our powers to be extended. The word breakthrough connotes the removal of conceptual obstacles, freeing engineers to enter new and unexplored territory. On these frontiers, technical adventure drives activity in the belief that what is found will be useful in solving human problems. This is why intelligent tinkering is not a waste of time, though it may not directly address a human (or economic) need. Engineering proceeds in part on the faith that new technical possibilities will in some way advance human life. What constitutes an "advance" is assessed on the basis of one's wider view of reality and our purpose as humans. It relates to concepts involving the larger reality beyond engineering.
This open-ended engineering research is not usually associated with marketing, for it is not focused on satisfying human desires but on empowering engineers. Some technical projects address enablement rather than customer interest in the hope that problems lacking solutions will become solvable, leading to novel products of great market appeal. Marketing, as is commonly practiced, is restricted to a search for an understanding of existing problems that can be fulfilled with technology the marketer assumes is within the reach of in-house capabilities. Visionary marketers who imagine too far beyond the actual state of technology tend to sell vaporware. And at the other extreme marketers lacking vision can lead their respective engineering departments into me-too development lacking sales potential.
If the problems we set out to solve are too far behind the technological frontiers, the resulting products are not competitive, offering too little, too late. But at the other extreme, if we try to push the state of the art too aggressively, we might never get a product to market. Finding the "leading edge" and solving problems there, which are neither too easy nor too hard, is the mark of a good engineer.
Marketing, in this sense, is the first step in product design, but not research. Product design engineers are marketers in that they are aided in knowing how best to direct their innovative efforts and choose their problems by their understanding of the larger societal picture (called "the market") and the needs they find within it. Consequently, the nexus that brings engineers and the larger society together is the effort to satisfy human desires, consummated in the form of product sales. It is not, therefore, surprising that many good marketing people are former design engineers.
One additional comment on marketing: customers usually do not understand their own needs well. Marketing field trips to major customer sites seeking answers to the question, "What do you want us to build?" is often fruitless. Customers can tell whether a product will meet their need, but they usually cannot articulate the need itself. When a new product or feature eases or eliminates some of their problems, they are quick to recognize it and buy. It takes creative marketing insight to identify these problems, the kind of insight associated with inventors or design engineers. Good marketing is part of engineering.
Must Engineers Be World Watchers?
The expansion of engineering concerns to marketing is but one step into a larger world. Wider societal issues related to engineering terrify some engineers, causing them to retreat deep within the confines of their respective laboratories. Most of the problems solved by applying science and technology are capable of eventually being reduced to something simple, described clearly in rigorous, quantitative language, and solved using repeatable, reliable methods. As engineers, we like those kinds of problems. Solving them gives us a sense of concrete progress. We prefer to relate to the physical rather than the social world in our work.
In contrast, the social setting is more complex, complicated by human desires, conceits, and the vicissitudes of human will. No clear, generally-accepted resolution to the wider issues is obtainable in the way it is possible to settle questions in engineering. Consequently, no firm conclusions have been reached that are agreed upon by all. Much talk and analysis goes on but little is ever resolved by the social philosophers, chattering media, and political pundits. Engineers often regard these wider problems as intractable, conceptually unmanageable, and efforts to solve them result in little to no visible progress nor benefit. They are too far ahead of the leading edge for feasible problem-solving, it might seem.
While the bigger picture is messier, none of us can avoid it entirely. We all operate within it, bringing to it our wider views about life and reality. (Marketing people often act as a buffer between this larger reality and design engineers.) Our combined mental model of social and physical reality guides our selection of which technical problems to work on and which products to develop. Many others like ourselves are doing this around the world. The North American advantage in doing product design is that a historic reservoir of American ingenuity, technical know-how, and infrastructure has given North American engineers the advantage for much of the last century. But the parameters of the world are changing in a way that is profoundly affecting American engineering, forcing engineers to look at the larger situation. Let's do some of that, at a time when the bellwethers of global economic and social disruption are clearer than ever.
Where the World Is Headed
In their book The Sovereign Individual, two world-watchers, global investor and history buff James Dale Davidson, and British ex-parliamentarian and history buff Lord William Rees-Mogg, describe how, about every 500 years, new technology changes the basic social state of affairs. The Middle Ages ended with two inventions, one in military weapons and one in communications. The invention of gunpowder led to the indefensibility of castles, empowering kings to consolidate rule within their realms and build large central governments. And the printing press led to the rapid spread of ideas, resulting in a reformation in European Christendom and a renaissance in thinking. Both of these new technologies had unimaginable social consequences in 1500.
Now, 500 years later, we are caught up in another transition of the ages, driven by two new technologies, again one military and the other in communications. We are seeing the end of the age of large, centralized governments and the nation-state in general. The Soviet Union has already broken apart and since the early 1990s the number of nations in the UN has increased by about 50%. Technological innovations are shifting power back toward the individual, and the meaningfulness of nation-state boundaries is fading, as central governments struggle to maintain a reason for their existence.
The Internet is obviously the communication innovation that is "globalizing" the world. When information, influence (which is the essence of political power), and money (which is the means of political power) transfer freely across nation-state borders via the Internet, the borders become less relevant. And, militarily, when a small group of individuals, or even a single person, can possess a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) capable of destroying a large city, the balance of coercive power shifts back to the individual. The size of a state's military is irrelevant in combating WMDs. Any of the eighty or so suitcase-sized nukes that the former head of Soviet intelligence has said is missing give their operational possessors a substantive negotiating position.
A key political struggle of our time is that of nation-states attempting to maintain control over their jurisdictions against the social changes set in motion by new technology. To combat WMDs requires that a state have the power to discourage the will to use them, to successfully enforce thought control. We live in an age of unprecedented mind management, propaganda, and mass-media spin-doctoring. (And you thought the movie, The Matrix, was fiction, eh?) Without explicit investigative effort to the contrary, one's view of reality will, by default, be what the power elite will construct it to be through the prevailing information institutions. The television networks, newspapers, and radio stations in the US are owned by about 8 large energy conglomerates.
This relates profoundly to engineers. The technology we develop: how will it shape the future? If we want it to be for good, how can we foresee the consequences? It is a broad question, yet it is possible to achieve an acceptable answer, though it takes considerable effort of an unusual kind for engineers. It requires a massive diversion from engineering to a study of the world system. In Matrix movie language, one must take the red pill, and study political history (reading more than what the winners of wars have written), economics, law, global finance, the power elite, and covert operations (including organized crime). The result, when carried out, might leave you with a different viewpoint from which to do engineering. Hopefully, this wider investigation will bring more depth and wisdom to the selection of which kind of engineering problems to address, and a better sense of which are liberating versus which contribute to the decay of civilization and the growth of the police state.
Electronics is incomprehensible to those who do not apply the needed effort to understand it. Similarly, one's impression of the dynamics of society and its institutions can be misleading to those who do not look beyond the appearances.
Some Places to Start
In conclusion, the viewpoint of a mature engineer encompasses a continuum from detailed technical competence to an awareness of the overall social context in which it is applied. The alert and well-rounded engineer also has a range of mental habits that not only include those of engineering, but also those needed to see the picture in the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of information about the wider reality affected by our efforts.
A few years ago, I turned off my soldering iron for a while and did this kind of study. At first, the challenge is simply in qualifying one's sources (especially for covert operations). From this distilling process, I leave you with a list of websites that I have found provide insight into what drives world events. Apply your own investigation to an assessment of these sites, and however you get there, get to the bottom of what's going on. It will affect your engineering outlook immensely. I wish you well in the search and let me know if you find something really interesting that I missed.
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