Abstract

Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts and inventions. Now, it’s increasingly about complex systems. As the airplane taxis to the gate, you access the Internet and check email with your PDA, linking the communication and transportation systems. At home, you recharge your plug-in hybrid vehicle, linking transportation to the electricity grid. Today’s large-scale, highly complex sociotechnical systems converge, interact, and depend on each other in ways engineers of old could barely have imagined. As scale, scope, and complexity increase, engineers consider technical and social issues together in a highly integrated way as they design flexible, adaptable, robust systems that can be easily modified and reconfigured to satisfy changing requirements and new technological opportunities. This this seminar on Engineering I will offer a comprehensive examination of such systems and the associated emerging field of study. Through scholarly discussion, concrete examples, and history, we will consider the engineer’s changing role, new ways to model and analyze these systems, the impacts on engineering education, and the future challenges of meeting human needs through the technologically enabled systems of today and tomorrow. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of information technology in this interconnected world. 

Link to new book on this topic:  http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12746