The Challenges of Engineering: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
by Dean Thomas L. Magnanti, Vol. 2, No. 6, November 2005
Q: How many Deans of Engineering does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Four – one to get the pliers to remove the base of the shattered bulb stuck in the socket, one to shut off the electricity before the metal pliers come in contact with the socket, one to call the manufacturer's customer service line in India to complain about the shoddy quality of light bulbs, and one to conduct a systems analysis of the production of light bulbs and sockets.
Several years ago in a professional talk called "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," I summarized
- technical issues that my own domain had solved successfully (the "good"),
- those that posed almost insurmountable challenges (the "ugly"), and
- others that lay somewhat in between (the "bad").
Presumably, every field has its list of similar issues. What about engineering? What has engineering done very well? What are some of our most insuperable challenges? And what issues between these extremes do engineers face? Before you read further to see my personal reflections, I would encourage you to think about these categories and create your own lists. Like me, you might find doing so to be illuminating.
The "Good"
As I craft my list, it appears that the "good" and the "ugly" of engineering are easy to identify. (I'll say more about the "bad" later.) Regarding the "good," I have frequently commented that our world is replete with wonderful engineering achievements. Reflecting the National Academy of Engineering's list of monumental engineering accomplishments of the 20th century – we wake up each morning to clean water and to electricity in our homes and workplaces; we travel in our automobiles back and forth to work and to visit with friends and loved ones; we benefit daily from the fruits of information, communications, computer, and electronic technologies and from numerous other achievements of engineering. All of these technologies and many more benefit humankind. As a very personal illustration, I take a pill each day to maintain my cholesterol at a reasonable level. The "good" of engineering is indeed very good.
The "Ugly"
The "ugly" category includes engineering undertakings that have resulted in spectacular disasters. Calamitous events, such as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, the Challenger and Columbia accidents, and the Bhopal chemical disaster, stand as truly tragic failures of engineering. In the "can do," no-nonsense spirit of engineering, it is incumbent upon us to take an honest look at our most challenging issues and, indeed, our failures so that we can learn how to prevent similar tragedies from occurring.
Beyond these examples, the "ugly" additionally comprises some of our most pressing problems, those that continue to elude solution by nature of their extraordinary complexity: significant health care issues or escalating problems of traffic congestion, energy, environment, and others. These are enormous issues, not only for engineering per se but also for society as a whole. We would do well to remember that large-scale, "ugly" challenges with major, long-term impacts personally affect huge numbers of people.
For example, a national report has indicated that 67 percent of peak-period travel today is congested compared to half that in 1982 (33 percent); travelers in 75 urban areas spent 3.5 billion hours stuck in traffic in 2001, up from 0.72 billion in 1982.[1] No wonder that every morning I never know how long it will take me to drive the 35 miles from home to work. Some mornings I'll make it in 45 minutes, and in mornings of heavy congestion, it takes an hour and a half to two hours. One personally feels this particular failure of engineering.
We can see similarly staggering statistics in the challenges of health care or other areas. For example, more people die in a given year as a result of medical errors in the U.S. than from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS;[2] in a survey conducted several years ago, only 40 percent of Americans were either "very satisfied or fairly satisfied" with their health care system.[3] So many of us have had to face family diagnosis and treatment of cancer that the failure of engineering in this area especially hits home. Why are treatments not more effective in addressing cancer and why don't they have less harmful side effects? Can't we create an environment that leads to fewer instances of cancer? When we can personalize these massive "ugly" problems to the faces of our friends and loved ones, we gain a heightened appreciation for engineering's tremendous successes and renew our commitment to continuing to work toward improving the world for all.
The "Bad"
Turning now to those challenges that lie somewhere between the extremes of "good" and "ugly," I struggle a bit with trying to articulate the "bad" of engineering. Perhaps one way to think of this is 'Tom's frustrating daily interactions with technology.' While they could be failures of Tom (and several are), I think they are failures of engineering as well. Here are some recent examples:
First are the daily struggles with my computer. Every day, it mysteriously hangs up or one of the applications crashes; I am inundated by spam; and as I open my email, I am often warned about viruses. Devastating? No. Irritating and bad? Indeed.
In a similar vein, my office printer and my wireless printer at home stopped working a couple of weeks ago. I called the manufacturer, and after spending an hour at midnight talking to a service provider, I asked how things were in India. He couldn't fix the problem. It took more than another hour dedicated to this problem the next day by one of our best technical people at MIT before we finally figured out how I might be able to print at the office. I still can't print wirelessly at home. That's a failure of engineering.
In another instance, I was recently driving from home to the airport at 65 miles an hour on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Without any warning, my car (albeit old) lost all power due to an electrical failure! I was able to safely pull off the road, so certainly no disaster. But bad? Yes, indeed.
As a final example, I offer a "simple" technology: the light bulb in our kitchen. Whenever we go to change it, it is stuck in the socket. Perching precariously on a ladder, we have to struggle mightily to remove it. On a couple of occasions, we've had a broken bulb that I then have had to remove with a set of pliers. Certainly seems like a failure of engineering.
No question, my illustrations here don't stack up in significance against the formidable challenges posed by cancer and other very pressing societal problems. The "bad" have very localized or short-lived impacts that we can live with and manage to work around. Yet, these engineering challenges still require our attention.
Some of our products and services have become very complicated, and pose significant challenges, for example, creating effective functional interfaces among complex interacting technologies. However, complexity doesn't necessarily lead to "bad" results. Every day we rely on common, complicated technologies. A landline telephone almost always works, and by and large, when I plug something into the electrical outlet in my house, I get electricity. Except for my recent (and very unusual) experience, I can dependably start my car every morning, and count on it to drive from home to work; I don't have to reboot it halfway there. We take for granted some of our most complicated and trustworthy technologies.
So, why is it that in a variety of other areas, engineers have failed to create products that are stable, robust, reliable, and consumer-friendly? Why do some of these "bad" technologies fail to interact well with the physical environment? Why are the instruction manuals that accompany some of our products completely incomprehensible? We need to ask ourselves if our schools of engineering are graduating people with the right skills. In many different forums, the nation is currently undertaking important conversations about the future of engineering education and the engineering workforce. [For example, see "Engineering education workshop draws national leaders".] It is timely that we raise some of these questions to help us better prepare for the future.
Considering the "Good, Bad, and Ugly" of engineering
Reflecting on the "good" within engineering is extremely satisfying and indeed inspiring. By examining the "bad" or the "ugly" we are not damning engineering, but rather, asking how we might improve. We do some things extraordinarily well, and yet we are challenged to do better. While that's true of nearly every profession, with our "can do" attitude in engineering, we're willing to be honest about and then tackle the challenges we face. We will work to bring engineering thinking, modeling, and analysis to bear upon these challenges. At MIT, both our ongoing research and the changes we are making in the education of our students will contribute in significant ways to these efforts. As but two examples, I would site our popular new program called Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP), as well as a course cutting across all our departments called "Colossal Failures of Engineering." I feel enormously gratified knowing that we at MIT and others from the academy will continue to apply engineering know-how to the world's most pressing problems.
[1] From "Traffic Congestion and Reliability: Linking Solutions to Problems" (a Federal Highway Administration report on traffic congestion), July 2004
[2] From "To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System," Institute of Medicine, November 1999
[3] From "The US Health Care System: Best in the World, or Just the Most Expensive?" (PDF), prepared by the Bureau of Labor Education, University of Maine, Summer 2001