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

Fri Jan 27 10:30:51 EST 2017

To add to your repertoire and in case you want to make the point that such ideas permeate the educational system, in business schools we teach innovation (and sorry to say) even disruption.

Like engineers, business graduates often end in maintenance jobs, from keeping information/paper moving to taking care of brands or looking after retail bank branches.

You may even point to Chandler’s three-pronged investment as based on keeping things moving rather than on innovation. Joshua’s quote could be a nice illustration of this.

From: themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu [mailto:themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu] On Behalf Of Joshua Braun
Sent: 27 January 2017 15:18
To: themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu
Subject: Re: [Themaintainers] Imaginary Projects for Making Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care

Hi Lee,

I'm super excited to have found this list! With respect to your question, the following extended quote from the former CEO of MSNBC.com might be useful. He's discussing web development/software engineering for large media organizations and how the teams that develop new products are actually quite small, but supported by a much larger corpus of workers whose labor is focused on maintainership, or "ownership" as he calls it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=62DdCgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA123&dq=this%20program%20is%20brought%20to%20you%20by&pg=PA243#v=onepage&q&f=false

Cheers,
Josh

On 1/26/17 5:07 PM, Melinda Hodkiewicz wrote:
Dear Lee
I’m racing to get on an airplane but felt I ought to respond now briefly and would be happy to extend this later.

1.      You are correct, engineering undergrad design projects in my experience (and I have been a client and mentor for them here at UWA in mech, elec and compsci) do not explicitly cover thinking about through life support including maintenance.

2.      The reason for this is that most academic engineering faculty do not have formal maintenance training or experience. Maintenance is absent or only superficially covered in most engineering curriculum.

3.      If we tell students to consider maintenance in their project without giving them the appropriate training then we could do more harm than good. It’s like telling you to clean your teeth but not having an understanding of when to do it, why to do it and how to do it, where the answers to that are all these questions developed in a structured way with a repeatable process.

4.      I teach maintenance as part of the “risk reliability and safety” unit here at UWA. It is a relatively new unit, only 3 years old and taught to all engineers regardless of discipline.

5.      Here is a recent email from a student who got vac work recently with Chevron “This semester I was a student in the unit GENG5507 (Risk, Reliability and Safety) that you lectured. I just wanted to give you some feedback and thank you for the work you put in. I started my vacation work with Chevron on Monday and I’m based in their Reliability and Integrity unit for Wheatstone. Everybody in the team was really impressed that I had previous exposure to concepts such as SIL, RCA, FMEA, failure modes, bathtub curves, white/black boxes, RCM matrix, HAZID, Causal trees, etc. Pretty much everything I learnt in GENG5507 is what I’m using in practice. It saved them a lot of time when they were explaining the scopes I’d be responsible for and also made me look great in the first week I started. I’m really glad I took the unit this year and it’s by far the most useful unit with regards to the vacation work I’m doing. Thanks again for your work.” I put this in because it is full of acronyms that mean nothing to the outside world but are integral to an understanding of maintenance. Engineering schools struggle to find academics to teach these concepts and struggle to make room in an already crowded curriculum to put them in.

6.      As a minimum to include any section on maintenance in a design project, students would have to know how to use correctly an RCM tree, see attached.

If you and the others would like I can offer a couple of things. First, I have some recordings of between 6-10 minutes each that explain maintenance theory. They are used in my class as pre-work (the class is taught in flipped learning mode to about 350 students). I could post them on Dropbox. Second. I am happy to run a workshop on this at Maintainers II if there is interest.

Hope this helps the discussion
Best wishes
Melinda

From: themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu<mailto:themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> [mailto:themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu] On Behalf Of Lee Vinsel
Sent: Friday, 27 January 2017 12:34 AM
To: themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu<mailto:themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu>
Subject: [Themaintainers] Imaginary Projects for Making Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care

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<http://leevinsel.com>
Twitter: @STS_News

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