[Themaintainers] Imaginary Projects for Making Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care

[Evan Hepler-Smith]

Dear Lee and all,

A fantastic idea. One thought, off the top of my head, for electrical
engineers / software engineers / data scientists / connective media types:
a lot of institutions have their own depositories for student and faculty
publications and, often, for research data. Maybe a project in maintaining
these depositories to make the stuff that goes into them more accessible
for re-use, both in-house and by outside researchers, including metadata on
methods and provenance needed for effective re-use, at minimal
energy/environmental cost?

It also occurs to me that you could turn the design project on its head by
assigning students to study the specs for past projects that have been
carried out locally (say, some aspect of their school's physical plant, as
you suggest), look at current data on how it's running compared with the
projections in the plans, and participate in maintenance / create a
maintenance plan / revise the original design to take maintenance into
account for some aspect of this project.

All best,
Evan





On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 11:33 AM Lee Vinsel <lee.vinsel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Maintainers,
>
> Andy Russell and I are writing an essay for a forthcoming edited volume
> titled _Can Innovators Be Made?_. As its title "Making Maintainers"
> suggests, our essay argues that our education system should focus as much
> or more effort on making essential maintainers. In this essay, we are
> focusing particularly on college engineering education, for several
> reasons, including because it is close to our experiences at Stevens
> Institute of Technology and elsewhere and because engineering education has
> become a hotbed of innovation-speak.
>
> In one section of our essay, we point out that undergraduate engineering
> degrees often culminate in senior design projects, which in recent decades
> have become framed in terms of innovation. And YET, many (most?) engineers
> will go onto work in Maintainers-y positions that will have little or
> nothing to do with innovation but will instead be centered on keeping
> complex technological systems going.
>
> For this reason, it may make sense to have engineering students also work
> on maintenance projects. I have thought up a couple: one in which students
> would work with physical plant managers at their college campuses; another
> focused on maintaining/conserving wetlands. But I also imagined that people
> on this list would have great ideas, which is why I'm coming to you.
>
> What do you think?
>
> I'm happy to hear all kinds of thoughts, including "That's a *terrible*
> idea!!!" But I'm primarily looking for hypothetical maintenance projects
> for college seniors.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Lee Vinsel
>
>
>
>
> --
> Assistant Professor and Director,
> Program on Science and Technology Studies
> College of Arts and Letters
> Stevens Institute of Technology
> Hoboken, NJ 07030
> leevinsel.com
> Twitter: @STS_News
>
>
>
>
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