Assessing the past and Future of Engineering Judgment

• In Event: Engineers: Makers of the World or Cogs in the Machine? - I: Engineers and Power in Politics, Organizations and Everyday Life

Abstract

In the 2019-2020 school year, ABET, the accrediting body for US engineering programs, will release new criteria for graduating students. Among many changes and rearrangements is the introduction of the term “ judgment” as one of the competencies that students must develop to prepare for professional engineering. However, judgment is not defined in the criteria, though it is a ubiquitous concept in the philosophy of engineering and engineering education. Furthermore, judgment appears in two distinct criterions: as engineering judgment, relating to interpreting data, and as ethical judgment, relating to engineering’s impact on the world. Two questions arise from these changes: 1) how should we understand judgment in the engineering context? And 2) how can we unite its two distinct applications so interpretation of data is done with an eye to ethical impact? I argue that contrary to technical and individualistic conceptions, engineering judgment is fundamentally rhetorical and aesthetical, and thus capable of tying innovation and interpretation to politics. The presentation will substantiate this argument by tracing a history of engineering judgment through a century of reports from the American Society for Engineering Education in order to juxtapose its conceptions with the variety of engineering judgment described in an ethnographic case study of an undergraduate engineering design course. Finally, I move towards a framework for making engineering judgment, and thus engineering design, political through recent reconstructions of Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment from STS (Feenberg, 2017) and feminist political science (Zerilli, 2016).

Author

• Jonathan Weedon, Texas Tech University