Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Creative collaboration in engineering design teams involves interpersonal interactions between the engineers in which the engineers exchange ideas and information. The quality of these interactions determines how ideas are generated, accepted, and evaluated in the team. But what determines the quality of interaction for creative idea generation? What patterns of behavior do we observe during an idea generation interaction? In this chapter, we will look at a particular pattern of interaction called a moment of opening that occurs during idea generation. We will describe the behaviors manifest during a moment of opening and discuss the effect of emotions and culture on a moment of opening interaction.

Design ideas often come from sources of inspiration (e.g., analogous designs, prior experiences). In this paper, we test the popular but unevenly supported hypothesis that conceptually distant sources of inspiration provide the best insights for creative production. Through text analysis of hundreds of design concepts across a dozen different design challenges on a Web-based innovation platform that tracks connections to sources of inspiration, we find that citing sources is associated with greater creativity of ideas, but conceptually closer rather than farther sources appear more beneficial. This inverse relationship between conceptual distance and design creativity is robust across different design problems on the platform. In light of these findings, we revisit theories of design inspiration and creative cognition.

One of the most significant shifts in science policy of the past three decades is a concern with extending scientific practice to include a role for “society”. Recently, this has led to legislative calls for the integration of the social sciences and humanities in publicly funded research and development initiatives. In nanotechnology—integration’s primary field site—this policy has institutionalized the practice of hiring social scientists in technical facilities. Increasingly mainstream, the workings and results of this integration mechanism remain understudied. In this chapter, I build upon my three-year experience as the in-house social scientist at the Cornell NanoScale Facility and the United States’ National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network to engage empirically and conceptually with this mode of governance in nanotechnology. From the vantage point of the integrated social scientist, I argue that in its current enactment, integration emerges as a traditional and conservative kind of care work, with social scientists being fashioned as its main caretakers. Examining integration as a type of care practice as a “matter of care” allows me to highlight the often invisible, existential, epistemic, and affective costs of care as governance. Illuminating a framework where social scientists are called upon to observe but not disturb, to reify boundaries rather than blur them, this article serves as a word of caution against integration as a novel mode of governance that seemingly privileges situatedness, care and entanglement, moving us toward an analytically skeptical (but not dismissive) perspective on integration.

Applying science to the current art of producing engineering and research knowledge has proven difficult, in large part because of its seeming complexity. We posit that the microscopic processes underlying research are not so complex, but instead are iterative and interacting cycles of divergent (generation of ideas) and convergent (testing and selecting of ideas) thinking processes. This reductionist framework coherently organizes a wide range of previously disparate microscopic mechanisms which inhibit these processes. We give examples of such inhibitory mechanisms and discuss how deeper scientific understanding of these mechanisms might lead to dis-inhibitory interventions for individuals, networks and institutional levels.

This paper develops two themes. First, I argue that to improve engineering education we need to think about the nature of engineering practice. I suggest that engineering practice embraces three components: knowledge (facts, theories, and data), skill (knowing how to use knowledge), and wisdom (knowing when to apply different skills). This epistemological framework is useful in determining what we hope to accomplish by including more of the social sciences in engineering curricula. Second, drawing on this framework, I describe how my colleagues and I in the Engineering and Society Department teach concepts from the social sciences and Science, Technology, and Society to undergraduate engineering students in order to develop their potential as leaders, entrepreneurs, and designers. In particular, I offer 3–4 concepts that we develop in our courses about communications in engineering, the interaction of technology and society, and engineering ethics. Overall, I want to describe the ways by which we have made the social sciences integral to the education of engineers at the University of Virginia and how our practices can contribute to reconception of engineering as a profession.

To tell is not to foretell.

Prospective is not prediction.

Big data and computers, so-called artificial intelligence, have made our predictive capacities higher than ever. Health expectancy, chance of marriage and divorce or even fortune: Everything is computable. Is it really interesting?