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

Tue Jan 31 08:13:44 EST 2017

apologies, my note, below, should have gone to the listserv
 
please consider what I offer, below, and let’s discuss

Tim MacDonald
evergreencore.org


> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Tim MacDonald <timmacdonald1 at me.com>
> Subject: Re: [Themaintainers] Imaginary Projects for Making Maintainers: Engineering Education and an Ethics of Care
> Date: January 31, 2017 at 8:12:15 AM EST
> To: Bernardo Batiz-Lazo <b.batiz-lazo at bangor.ac.uk>
> 
> Lee and all
> 
> Investment also has a contribution to make to this important and intriguing initiative, but in this domain of investment, our conversation has to be about innovating more than maintaining, in that we need to be creating by design adaptive innovations in the architecture of investment so that it can properly value maintaining as part of the equation that delivers prosperity to the people.
> 
> The most popular form of investing today is securities trading, and securities trading is created by design to invest in growth.  It does this by reducing all the many different values that contribute to enterprise success and social prosperity to this one, single point of value: the market-clearing price. This price is always a present expression of current expectations for future growth in the future selling price: “I buy today at this price because I believe I will be able to sell to some unknown future buyer at some unknown future point in time at this hoped-for higher price”.
> 
> We get Growth as the paradigm for prosperity, where Growth is really just the forward projection of an historical trend line.
> 
> What if prosperity is not just about Growth, but also about staying strong at the peak of popularity?   This is what I believe this group is thinking about when it talks about maintaining.  And what if prosperity also requires that we manage the fading away of choices that begin to become less popular with the people, as times change and people evolve new and different choices in adaptation to that change?  If we always pretend this fading away doesn’t ever happen to us (because it is the opposite of Growth and Growth is all our investment decision-making framework is designed to recognize and value - "we innovate, we don’t fade”), then we are creating by design (but maybe not so much with intention?) a prosperity that gyrates violently between boom and bust, because every boom is just a bust that has not happened yet.
> 
> A new investment decision-making framework is needed that can ride the flourish-and-fade of popular choice through change and prosperous adaptation to life’s constant changes, with grace and elegance.
> 
> A new decision-making framework needs a new process for making those decisions, a new place to execute that process and new people in that new place applying that new process to make those new decisions.
> 
> The securities trading process is not the right process, the public stock markets and alternative trading platforms are not the right places, and professional traders expert in buying and selling securities on expectations for changing expectations about future selling prices are not the right people to be valuing the value of maintaining.
> 
> We need a new process, new places and new people to adaptively evolve a new investment decision-making framework that properly values the contribution of maintaining to a prosperity of always having enough, recognizing that “enough” is provisional, suited to its times and also changing over time, as times change, and people evolve prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes.
> 
> Those people will value engineers (and others working in business) trained in the skills of maintaining, and will support (financially and with career pathways) educational programs - and educators - who teach engineering students (and all students) those skills (and the importance of that work).
> 
> Is there some way that we can weave this thread into the tapestry that is The Maintainers?
> 
> Tim MacDonald
> evergreencore.org <http://evergreencore.org/>
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 27, 2017, at 10:30 AM, Bernardo Batiz-Lazo <b.batiz-lazo at bangor.ac.uk <mailto: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> [mailto: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 <mailto: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 <http://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 <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 <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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>> 
>> -- 
>> Josh Braun, Ph.D.
>> Assistant Professor of Journalism Studies
>> Journalism Department
>> University of Massachusetts Amherst
>>  
>> @josh_braun
>> Skype: wideaperture
>> http://wideaperture.net/ <http://wideaperture.net/>
>> new book: http://wideaperture.net/?view=book <http://wideaperture.net/?view=book>
>>  
>> "Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain.  An inheritance of wonder and nothing more."
>> William Least Heat-Moon
>>  
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