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

[Hugh Lester]

Everyone:

I really like Evan's second suggestion.  Diagnostics comes into play. (Pirsig's wonderful passage comes to mind.)

Hugh

hlester at stevens.edu
714-234-5374 mobile

> On Jan 26, 2017, at 11:57 AM, Evan Hepler-Smith <evan.heplersmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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