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

Sun Jan 29 09:40:52 EST 2017

Thanks Bernardo. If we expand into other fields, we should note the recent
letter, linked below, that Charles Marohn sent to the President on behalf
of Strong Towns, an organization devoted to a more resilient urban
development model. Marohn notes a 1950s vintage infrastructure development
model predicated on incentivizing new growth rather than maintaining
existing urban and inter-urban networks. Cities were built without
considering that the same subsidies might not be available for upkeep. The
result is a system today where infrastructure costs exceed cash flow and
actual wealth created. Short term growth came with non-performing assets
and massive, unmanageable upkeep costs, and in the choice between
additional subsidized short term growth (with higher financial burdens in
15 years ) and necessary upkeep, cities continue to choose growth. "Cities
with huge maintenance backlogs still prioritize system expansion because
they are chasing the short-term cash benefits of new growth, even at the
expense of their future solvency." Marohn calls for reprioritizing spending
in a number of ways and for a number of policy reforms. I found a lot of
sense in the letter as it relates to the work of the Maintainers.

The letter:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/22/a-letter-to-potus-on-infrastructure

I'm an urban planner in the New York area (and on the New York job market).
I'm happy to discuss this further with anyone interested.

Best,

Ezra Monasebian

(914) 262-1672

On Jan 27, 2017 9:30 AM, "Bernardo Batiz-Lazo" <b.batiz-lazo at bangor.ac.uk>
wrote:

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
<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
*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
Twitter: @STS_News

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