h-Engineering Impacts
ABET accreditation states that, “Engineering programs must demonstrate that their students gain a broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in global and societal context;” and this is important because as an Engineer we work worldwide to improve our living and make the world a better place. Engineering spans tons of different disciplines, from Civil engineer and designing better roads and buildings, to electrical engineers who design our lighting systems used to power buildings and cities all the way to chemical and biological engineers who use chemical and biological processes to improve medicine, food, and many other things. Almost every single aspect of our lives that isn’t naturally occurring on this planet has been engineered in some way. So why is it important to understand why our engineering solutions here are important to other countries and societies? Well, as stated earlier almost everything in our lives has some kind an engineering process in its background. Many of our phone parts, cars, clothes, and such are all manufactured in other countries. The world works together in a strange cohesion to create the wonderful technology, medicine, and products we have today. As such each decision we make as an engineer, even in a small place like Columbus, Ohio could potentially have a global effect on jobs, economy, pollution, societal pressures, and many other things. Because our decisions can have such an impact on the world, we need to understand the world and the potential consequences of our actions. In order to understand the world, it is important for Engineers to be educated on different societies and cultures and understand the kind of issues they face and what our engineering to could to help or hinder these issues. The best place to learn these things are often in an undergraduate’s general education on global and social diversity.
During my undergrad I took a couple classes on global and social diversity one of these classes included HDFS 2200, This class was on family interactions and emphasized the developmental, social and cultural influences of the family experience. This class focused a lot on different family types and different issues that families may face depending on what type of family they are and their culture. Engineering impacts families as it can allow their lives to be easier like cars and buses for transportation. But I think a more specific example that is affecting almost all families today is our phones. Computer engineering and technology have taken great steps in recent years. Nowadays the power of google, texting, facetiming, gaming and many other things are all accessible by our fingertips. As a result, family dynamics are much different than even just 15 years ago. Censorship for parents of their young kids are harder and harder to control as even kids as young as 11 have smartphones and can look up literally anything in a matter of seconds. Behavior is a much bigger issue as well; depression and social anxiety is at an all time high and kids turn to social media as a way of expressing themselves and coping instead of turning to their parents. And because smartphones and the social media age is relatively new most parents don’t know how to deal with it and help their kids as they never had to deal with it themselves. While the exponential rise in technology at the hands of engineering as brought many great things to our lives, it does have numerous downsides to it as well, and a lot of these downsides put a lot of strain on young children and their parents, changing how we understand family dynamics and roles in society.
Another class I took was Slavic 2230, this class was about Vampires, Monsters, and the idea of Evil. While seemingly a strange class at first glance, the class the very educational on Eastern and Western European folk belief and it also touched on American pop culture and how we view creatures such as vampire’s to how the Slavic people in Eastern Europe viewed them. This class touched a lot on symbolism, folklore and what we think of as evil, and how all these ideas have changed over time from 18thcentury to now. One of the overarching ideas from class was that “Every age creates the vampire that it needs”. Today our vampires are often romanticized and nothing like old folklore stories of the Eastern Europeans from the 18thcentury. I think Hollywood has created our version of Vampires we see today. Through engineering, cinematography was created, and as a result Hollywood. Engineers play a huge role in films today from helping create realistic physics in otherworld scenarios to the engineering behind Computer Generated Imaging. From the first video camera Engineers have had a foot in Hollywood and by virtue the filming of vampires. Nosferatu was one of the movies we studied in Slavic 2230 and we discussed how this movie created a more romanticized version of the Count Dracula stories of old. From there it has evolved into stories like Twilight and Vampire Stories which are centered around romance. Romance and attractive actors and actresses are both things movie goers want from their movies. Even for the horror genre watchers want attractive looking protagonist, and even antagonist. As a result, it was almost inevitable that vampires in movies would turn into the pale, beautiful, mysterious creatures of the night we have now. Nothing like the grotesque, child stealing, man eating, devils of the 18thcentury. Without the influence of Engineers and Cinematography, vampires could very well remain the same horrendous creatures of our past and have the same role in folklore.
The last class I took involving global and social studies was CLAS 2220. This was a class about Classical Mythology. In the class we look an in depth at books like The Iliad, The Odyssey, and other ancient mythological stories, as well as works from Plato about Socrates. Along with reading these we spent a lot of time comparing the events that took place in the books to our own lives and western culture. We looked at the personalities of the various God, Goddess, Heroes, and Villains and compared them to our own. Much of the class was very introspective and challenged you to look who exactly are you and what kind of impact you are making on the world, The Ohio State University, and your peers. The class also discussed why it is important for us all to read books like The Iliad and what we can learn from them. This class was definitely my favorite non-engineering class I have taken at Ohio State, so I got a lot out of this class. One of the biggest takeaways I got was from Socrates’ ideas about philosophy. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates spends much of his time on trial, defending himself from a court, about his teachings of Philosophy and how thinking like Socrates could improve our lives. One takeaway from his teachings was less focus on material things and more focus on doing things that make you happy. Engineering and Philosophy go hand in hand a lot of the time. In fact, I took a whole Philosophy class about Engineering ethics and how engineers should act and develop new things with an ethical direction. When I think back to this Classical Mythology class and on the teachings of Socrates, I think we have failed him as engineers. Yes, engineers have changed the world for good many times and created a lot of wonderful things that improve our everyday lives, however I think a lot of engineering has powered this societal need for bigger and better. New technology is coming out everyday and consumers are demanding more and more. Because their consumerism is funding more engineering, we are in this state of constantly trying to outdo each other. On the technological side we are trying to make better and betterphones and computers and outperform the competition. Pharmaceutical companies want better and better medicine from Chemical and Biological engineers so they can make more money. Cities want bigger and better buildings and landmarks from Civil Engineers. People want fancier and faster cars from Mechanical Engineers. I think Engineers themselves have a desire to make the world better, I know I do, but society makes it hard to make any real progress bur I feel right now Engineering is going the opposite direction of Socrates’ teachings. I hope that soon we might see a change in the Engineering world, and I think soon we will. A change in the Engineering world would greatly impact the world in itself. I hope soon that can change. I hope to see tons of innovation like we have but for purposes that legitimately improve the world and not just create a phone with a better CPU. Third world countries, disease, sustainable food sources, renewable energy and much more are all things engineers can play a major role in improving. I think if the focus of engineering was switched to things like that and that’s the image mainstream media put forth, we could impact the whole world to slow down, look up from their phones and do their own part in making the world a better place. Engineers are the backbone of all society and science and by adopting the things learned in Classical Mythology we could impact the world even better than we do now.