Studying from disaster | MIT Expertise Evaluate

Engineers are famend clock-problem solvers. They’re additionally infamous for treating each downside like a clock. Rising specialization and cultural expectations play a task on this tendency. However so do engineers themselves, who’re sometimes those who get to border the issues they’re attempting to resolve within the first place. 

In his newest ebook, Depraved Issues, Guru Madhavan argues that the rising variety of cloudy issues in our world calls for a broader, extra civic-minded strategy to engineering. “Wickedness” is Madhavan’s approach of characterizing what he calls “the cloudiest of issues.” It’s a nod to a now-famous coinage by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, professors on the College of California, Berkeley, who used the time period “depraved” to explain complicated social issues that resisted the rote scientific and engineering-based (i.e., clock-like) approaches that had been invading their fields of design and concrete planning again within the Nineteen Seventies. 

Madhavan, who’s the senior director of applications on the Nationwide Academy of Engineering, isn’t any stranger to depraved issues himself. He’s tackled such daunting examples as attempting to make prescribed drugs extra reasonably priced within the US and prioritizing growth of recent vaccines. However the ebook isn’t about his personal work. As an alternative, Depraved Issues weaves collectively the story of a largely forgotten aviation engineer and inventor, Edwin A. Hyperlink, with case research of synthetic and pure disasters that Madhavan makes use of to elucidate how depraved issues take form in society and the way they may be tamed.

Hyperlink’s story, for individuals who don’t understand it, is fascinating—he was liable for constructing the first mechanical flight coach, utilizing elements from his household’s organ manufacturing facility—and Madhavan provides a wealthy and detailed accounting. The challenges this inventor confronted within the Nineteen Twenties and ’30s—which included determining how tens of 1000’s of pilots might shortly and successfully be skilled to fly with out placing all of them up within the air (and in peril), in addition to instill belief in “instrument flying” when pilots’ instincts often informed them their devices had been mistaken—had been among the many quintessential depraved issues of his time. 

To deal with a world stuffed with depraved issues, we’re going to want a extra expansive and inclusive concept of what engineering is and who will get to take part in it.

Sadly, whereas Hyperlink’s biography and lots of the interstitial chapters on disasters, like Boston’s Nice Molasses Flood of 1919, are fascinating and deeply researched, Depraved Issues suffers from some depraved structural decisions. 

The ebook’s elaborate conceptual framework and hodgepodge of narratives really feel each fussy and pointless, making a fancy and nuanced matter much more troublesome to understand at occasions. Within the prologue alone, readers should bounce from the idea of cloud issues to that of depraved issues, which get damaged down into laborious, delicate, and messy issues, that are then reconstituted in numerous methods and linked to 6 attributes—effectivity, vagueness, vulnerability, security, upkeep, and resilience—that, collectively, type what Madhavan calls a “idea of operations,” which is the first organizational software he makes use of to look at depraved issues.

It’s so much—or a minimum of sufficient to make you ponder whether a “techniques engineering” strategy was the right lens by way of which to look at wickedness. It’s additionally unlucky as a result of Madhavan’s final argument is a crucial one, significantly in an age of rampant solutionism and “one neat trick” approaches to complicated issues. To successfully tackle a world stuffed with depraved issues, he says, we’re going to want a extra expansive and inclusive concept of what engineering is and who will get to take part in it.  

MIT PRESS, 2024

Whereas John Downer would possible agree with that sentiment, his new ebook, Rational Accidents, makes a robust argument that there are laborious limits to even the very best and broadest engineering approaches. Equally set on the earth of aviation, Downer’s ebook explores a elementary paradox on the coronary heart of in the present day’s civil aviation business: the truth that flying is safer and extra dependable than ought to technically be doable.