IT’S NOT ALWAYS EASY to please an engineer. Victor Mills hated washing cloth diapers. At sixty, he did that often when he had to take care of his granddaughter. He thought it was “a mess.”
Mills was a chemical engineer. He worked for Procter & Gamble for over thirty-five years, where his résumé included several notable achievements. He devised a clever process to stop the separation of oil in peanut butter; people loved Jif. He found a way to eliminate the clumps in Duncan Hines moist cake mixes; smoother cakes are always a hit. He developed a system to uniformly stack and pack potato wafers; Pringles was a sensational success.
P&G was trying to figure out how to make the best use of a recently acquired pulp mill—Charmin Paper Company. At home, Mills was frustrated with cloth diapers. At work, Mills was vexed about the pulp mill. Mills put two and two together: use the mill to produce absorbent paper for diapers.
Mills enlisted his staff engineer Robert Duncan to help produce a test model. They stacked thick, rectangular pads of paper and used polymer wrapping for stable inner and outer layers to withstand wetness. For the actual testing, they used Betsy Wetsy—a doll that squirted water—as proxy for a urinating child. Mills’s grandchildren offered an opportunity for more diaper testing during long road trips.
The result was a sensational consumer product: Pampers. As the world’s first successful disposable diaper, Pampers gave birth to a multi-billion-dollar child care products industry. An array of health products then emerged to improve hygiene and convenience.
Mills’s group was not the first to think of throwaway diapers. What made their effort worthwhile—and ultimately successful—was the customer feedback they applied to refine their product. Mills’s team consulted with mothers, pediatricians, economists, and environmentalists.
Norma Baker, a home economist and Mills’s colleague, was skilled in the art of connecting with customers. She advised Mills to create two diaper models: a tape-on version and a pin-on version. Both turned out to be more effective than plastic pants, especially on warm days in places without air-conditioning. She reported that mothers found P&G diapers too expensive—a whopping ten cents apiece. Mills found a way to mass-produce them at lower cost. Until then they had been hand-sewn on the order of tens of thousands. Baker’s field studies made it clear that diapers also needed to be extra absorbent. Subsequently, a new market for disposable diapers materialized: patients in hospitals.
The story of disposable diapers is a lesson in responsive design. Engineers worked with the end users to improve their product. It’s an example of how social interactions with customers can be a powerful force in influencing engineering design. The same dynamic was at work in the story of the ketchup bottle.
IN 1869, around the same time the First Transcontinental Railroad project in the United States was completed in Utah, the H. J. Heinz Company introduced the clear-glass-bottle design for ketchup. The glass container had obvious advantages: it was easy to manufacture, and people could clearly see how much ketchup was left.
The biggest hassle, though, was getting the ketchup to flow out of the bottle easily. It required shaking, poking, knifing, and, above all, persistence. Then there was the problem of syneresis—the separation of watery tomato serum in the bottle that was called the “ketchup spit”—which was unappetizing. Struggling to come up with a solution, Heinz decided to learn from its consumers. The company’s research with six- to twelve-year-olds showed that kids liked to draw ketchup art on their plates. Heinz found the idea inspirational.
Corporate engineers and designers spent days with their modeling software and arguing about trade-offs. The upside-down ketchup container made out of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) became a reality. An orifice controlled the ketchup flow, and the container had a stable molded hinge. Poking was eliminated. Every squeeze squirted a single serving of ketchup. Knifing and shaking were gone. A trap cap to pneumatically “suck back” the watery stuff was put in place. The look and feel of ketchup dramatically improved. By applying a little extra pressure on the PET container, kids could draw a smiling sun on their plate. Artistic possibilities were now boundless. The container even emptied “as fast and cleanly as a gas can at a NASCAR pit stop,” as one journalist put it. Consumer experience was elevated.
The idea of using the valve and self-sealing cap design for ketchup was hardly novel. Many shampoo bottles work the same way. But Heinz’s approach to improving its product design—notably the ergonomics of comfort, grip, softness, and squeeze—was informed directly by the end users themselves. When it relates to the engineering of consumer products, education always goes two ways, even if it’s a problem that consumers don’t lose sleep over.
SOPHIE VANDEBROEK takes her dreams seriously. As the chief technology officer for Xerox, she runs “dreaming sessions.” These are like improv sessions with end users—or coinnovating, as Vandebroek calls it—so Xerox’s solutions and services end up being useful to their clients.
Vandebroek is originally from Leuven, a township near Brussels in Belgium. “I was one of only fifteen girls in my class of five hundred students,” she said. “It was the most difficult bachelor’s degree program to get into, and also the only one for which there was a separate entrance exam.” After years in the technology industry, Vandebroek began to develop a unique respect for social scientists. “They are trained to really observe and deeply understand human behavior and processes. They are able to articulate what would really make a huge difference in the customers’ lives,” she added.
Vandebroek couldn’t expect this sort of deep understanding of human behavior from her fellow engineers. This deficit on the part of engineers became evident when Xerox launched color copiers decades before color printers became ubiquitous. Making a copy of a color original was a breakthrough idea from an engineering perspective, but Vandebroek said the idea didn’t make any sense at that time. Why? There were relatively few original color prints to begin with. “This clearly wasn’t the pain point of the customer. Although a technological breakthrough, it didn’t sell. It was way too early.”
Something similar happened with the first color digital production press in the 1990s. Xerox engineers packed in many sophisticated work-flow tools and an automatic color calibration software system that they thought would be a blockbuster in the world of offset printing (a widely used process of mechanical ink transfer from a printing plate to a rubber roller and then onto paper). The digital press also seemed a clear vehicle for saving time and money. “When people actually bought these machines, they didn’t use any of these automated features and capabilities we had built in, and they continued to do color calibration the same old way it was done in analog offset presses,” Vandebroek said. “Only after our ethnographic scientists went and observed our clients in their shops did we engineers realize what was happening.”
Experiences like these were not completely new for Xerox. In the early 1980s, Lucy Suchman—then a staff researcher specializing in how humans interact with new technologies—videotaped some top scientists and engineers trying to make double-sided copies. They struggled. The photocopier was way too complicated.
The digital production press had the same problem. Were it not for anthropologists and ethnographers, Xerox engineers wouldn’t have known why their products weren’t being used in the way they were supposed to be used. Xerox anthropologists began “shadowing” users. During these ethnographic studies, the offset-printing vendors piled on their dislikes and complaints. In response, all it took on the engineering side were some software tweaks. The machine’s operations were simplified, and the clients were pleased.
It was a “bingo” moment that engineers couldn’t have recognized without the help of anthropologists. Unfortunately, this realization occurred only after product launch. Executives at Xerox were getting nervous because the users were complaining. “This notion of really understanding your client in the very early stages of research was definitely counterintuitive, and just very, very powerful,” Vandebroek said. “We now involve the clients from the very early stages and have ethnographic experts participate in all big research projects. The client’s environment is our laboratory.”
The crux of the issue may not be the absolute complexity of a photocopier or a printer, but how the customer perceives the complexity of the technology, as Suchman explains in her book Human-Machine Reconfigurations. She raises the notion of contingent coproduction—which is similar to Vandebroek’s dreaming sessions—or the idea of codesigning with the end users to make technology friendly and intuitive.
Smartphones, GPS, microwave ovens, cars—they’re all incredibly sophisticated and complex technologies, but making them approachable and accessible in collaboration with customers is a hallmark of engineering innovation. After all, it’s easier for engineers to learn about their customers’ pain points than to expect their customers to learn software routines.
SONY’S TAPE RECORDER was having an existential crisis. After years of hard work, Sony found out that no one was really looking for a tape recorder. “The tape recorder was so new to Japan that almost no one knew what a tape recorder was, and most of the people who did know could not see why they should buy one,” Sony’s legendary chairman Akio Morita recounted in his memoir Made in Japan. “It was not something people felt they needed. We could not sell it.”
Morita was discouraged that people were willing to spend more on vanity art than on something like a tape recorder that might have a deep practical value. It was a crafty solution in search of an opportunity until a group of overworked Japanese court stenographers adopted it. They were an enlightened group of users. For them the tape recorder was a godsend; “to them it was no toy.”
The need for a new technology—like improved diapers, plastic ketchup containers, color copiers, or tape recorders—is not always intuitive. The value of a consumer appliance is short-lived if it’s simply about the technology. Social perceptions drive technology adoption and acceptance in society. Countless companies and their products share a version of the journey made by P&G, Heinz, Xerox, and Sony.
Refrigerators are a good example. Besides the obvious merit of food preservation, what truly seemed to influence the sales of refrigerators was social marketing. When refrigerators were first introduced in the 1920s, from a narrative standpoint it was an easy sell: they “preserved women” by aiding the servantless wife. From a technology standpoint though, we know how refrigerators have lengthened the preservation of perishable goods and stimulated the explosive growth of supermarkets and their supply chain systems. Washing machines have a similar pedigree. The initial claim was that they saved women from the household drudgery of doing laundry. Soon what were once “prestige products” came to be valued in the same utilitarian spirit as cutlery.
UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER HABITS is a treasure chest for new product development. If Xerox’s approach has been to rely on the wisdom of the social sciences, then Toyota’s strategy comes from a different angle. To better understand its customer preferences, Toyota created a “set of planning and communication routines” to “market the goods that customers want to purchase and will continue to purchase,” according to a classic Harvard Business Review article entitled “The House of Quality.”
Using this framework, dubbed the “quality function deployment,” Toyota “improved its rust prevention record from one of the worst in the world to one of the best by coordinating design and production decisions to focus on this customer concern.” In a practical sense, Toyota’s product engineers and designers took a modular systems approach by breaking down customer concerns into fifty-three key items over eight different design levels, “covering everything from climate to modes of operation. They obtained customer evaluations and ran experiments on nearly every detail of production,” the article explains. Toyota could well have treated customer feedback as a “soft” constraint, but this example illustrates that customer concerns were not regarded as optional issues but became an integral part of Toyota’s design decisions to handle rust.
Similarly, Toyota engineered the second generation of the Avalon, its flagship vehicle, to eliminate what the company called the “stone-pecking noise”—something that was caused by the deflection of pebbles from the tires onto the chassis, and that customers complained about. Where others might have disregarded the problem as a trivial issue, Toyota undertook a total systems analysis to eliminate the annoying noise. In doing so—as an article in the Los Angeles Sentinel reported—they started “exploring new multilayer floor-carpet silencer,” and “engineers added sound deadening felt to the luggage compartment, revised door seals and thickened the side window glass, plugged dashboard holes, selected new tires, and repositioned the windshield and wipers.”
From Toyota’s perspective, the customers and their preferences appear to be the constraints, and the design issues are the trade-offs. Process innovations stemming from Toyota’s quality control principles are not about creating cool geometric models, in the view of Michael Kennedy, a consultant in lean production engineering; rather, it’s thinking about the “range of customer interests, what you can do to meet them, and where you have gaps in your knowledge.”
Learning from others’ experiences shouldn’t be an accessory to engineering design; it should be a core technical necessity—just as music isn’t successful if it stays in the mind of the composer, but only when it spreads across the outer world to make listeners sing, dance, feel, and fall in love with it. “The biggest difficulty is moving a new technology into people’s lives. Once the public recognizes the advantage this technology brings, they come to expect it,” writes Morita. “What housewife would want to go back to the washboard?”
IN THE SUMMER of 1853, U.S. president Millard Fillmore commissioned naval commodore Matthew Perry to travel to Japan so that the two countries could become trading partners. Japan was isolationist at the time. Opening up to the Western world was a shocking prospect. Perry and his fleet showed up on the shores of Edo Bay in four well-armed black ships. After prolonged negotiations at the 1854 Convention of Kanagawa, the Americans and Japanese came to an agreement. Japan was “liberated.” It moved into a new era of trade and development.
Referring to the vessels that Perry used to awaken Japan, historians use the term “black ship effect.” The engineering profession also needs a black ship effect. Engineers should rise above the comforts of cold, mechanistic, isolated problem solving. The best people to help the engineering profession with this creative liberation are cultural anthropologists.
The difference between a typical engineer’s approach and an anthropologist’s approach is simple. Engineers naturally tend to focus first on the product and then on its users. For an anthropologist, it’s the exact reverse: people come first, then the product. “It’s really about shadowing the people because ultimately for anything to be successful, it has to be user centered,” says Margaret Szymanski, an anthropologist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC).
Social sciences like anthropology are best known for their “unbounded inquiry,” writes industrial anthropologist Francisco Aguilera. He stresses that anthropology is not about describing the forests and the trees, but about “pursuing the ecology into the bordering grassland.” But unfortunately, branches of cultural anthropology—like ethnography—have historically been overlooked by other professions, especially engineering. Many engineers regrettably think that social sciences are “common sense,” a sentiment that the late Diana Forsythe, an eminent anthropologist of technology and computing, had criticized as the “problem of perspective”—the difference between what engineers know and what they assume they know about customer preferences. Another advantage of working closely with anthropologists is the ability to appreciate the “problem of order,” as Forsythe described; to rely not on snapshot feedback to make rapid tweaks, but to continue the process of social observation over time to build effective, long-lasting products.
As a human tendency, engineers sometimes take pride in perfectionism, to the extent that they overengineer product designs and worsen the customer experience. Even after all these years, how many of us are still able to effortlessly open clamshell plastic packages without scissors—or even with scissors? And why can’t we unwrap those modestly sized airplane snack crackers without crushing them? There are clearly limits to how engineers sometimes think.
In Toyota Culture, Mamie Warrick, an administrator at the University of Toyota, tells the story of engineers involved in the production of the RAV4. These SUVs didn’t have any cup holders when they were first launched in the U.S. market in the mid-1990s. As Warrick describes,
To help the chief engineer understand the situation, one of our distributor members picked up the chief engineer in the current RAV4 model, took him to the local 7-11 and bought the guy a 32 ounce hot cup of coffee. The purpose, of course, was for him to discover there was no place to put that cup. So the American team member helps the chief engineer into the car and gives him the cup of coffee. The chief engineer is so delighted with the coffee, he doesn’t bother to put it down and just downs it. It’s steaming hot! (The Japanese have a higher tolerance for hot liquids.) And at that point he has the empty cup and realizes, ah! There is no place to put it, there is no cup holder. And then the point is made.
Whether we’re talking about massive systems development or conservation efforts, the engineering profession must go beyond its traditional analytical trappings and embrace disciplines like cultural anthropology as partners for better understanding society. The wisdom of anthropology can help engineering take a more enlightened approach in appreciating our interdependencies. It’s only at the intersection of numerous disciplines—far beyond our cushy comfort zones—that innovations catch fire and spread.
MUSIC AND MOTION PICTURES offer fine examples of the art of collaborating with audiences. The audience is very much included in the creation process, says Rob Cook, an Academy Award–winning Pixar engineer. “No one has precircumscribed the set of things you can create. In engineering it’s easy to get far afield from creating something that’s useful and has an impact. You can have an idea in your mind, ‘Oh, this is exactly what would be useful to this particular type of customer,’ but then you go build it, and it turns out ‘No, actually, it doesn’t really work for them.’ ”
Tastes differ, so an average of customer preferences would mislead. There’s no formula to get around this preference paradox. If Henry Ford had done a customer survey, he might have received requests for faster horses. Consider air bags, a valuable safety feature in modern cars. How many of us could have thought of a balloon blowing up from the steering wheel during a crash as a design concept? Despite these intuitions, engineers would be better off learning to listen at a deeper level to what people are trying to say, which is different from producing a checklist of features requested by users. “If you really deeply understand the sorts of things people are doing and create something in response to that, that’s when it really strikes a chord,” Cook said.
The late Steve Jobs, who cofounded Pixar, related the emotional elements that influence the forms and formats of technologies. In an interview for Fortune magazine, he said: “We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design.” Using the iMac computer fan as an example, he continued:
I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn’t drone all the time. That was not just “Steve’s decision” to pull out the fan; it required an enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started. . . . This is what customers pay us for—to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, “ ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’ ”
The essence of a good technology is that it’s intuitive, and it evolves. Ideally, you don’t even want to know it’s there. Many modern interactive technologies have become so instinctive that children learn how to flick, pinch, and zoom on their tablet screens even before they learn how to walk, talk, or write. As Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo! points out, “All of the complication lies underneath, just like an iceberg, there’s just that thin little layer that you interact with.” But the curious thing is that many intuitive technologies we rely on would have never come about in a focus group.
THE INDONESIAN ISLAND of Bali is renowned for its water temples. The Balinese doctrine of Tri Hita Karana takes a holistic view: God, nature, and humans are interrelated. Underlying the emerald-green rice terraces in Bali is an integrated system of organic farming and shared water management called subak. This cooperative practice among farmers has been governed by millennia of transcendental belief under the aegis of the upper-caste priests of the water temples.
As evidence of indigenous engineering design, the Balinese people built sophisticated irrigation tunnels dating back to the eighth century AD. These tunnels facilitated the water sharing between upstream and downstream farmers. The artificial ponds supporting the rice fields depended on seasonal monsoon rains. The rainwater that washed away from the volcanic rocks deposited phosphate in the pond, transferring some vital nutrients to the rice paddies.
Twice a year the harvests occurred in a well-coordinated fashion. This synchrony also had a powerful time-tested usefulness: it succeeded in controlling pests. After a harvest, all the pests would be wiped out for a time, which was a much better scenario than having pests year-round. Through this practice, “the water temple networks optimize the trade-off between pests and water,” says Stephen Lansing, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona. By maximizing water conservation and simultaneously reducing pest attacks, Lansing adds, “one can see that these water temples play a useful role in finding the appropriate scale of coordination to optimize those two opposing constraints.”
Everything seemed normal in this ecosystem—except when some government technocrats decided that this age-old process was inefficient. Officials involved in the green revolution—an outcome of agricultural engineering—managed to convince farmers to use their “technology packets” of high-yield varieties of seeds, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. The goal was to substantially intensify rice production. The farmers could have four or five crop rotations per year in place of two. The notion of efficiency—treating a crop as an instrument to multiply output—uprooted the subak tradition, just as Gribeauval had stripped away from the French cannons all the artistic elements that he thought were meaningless.
After initial increases in yield, the Balinese results turned devastating. “Miracle rice produced miracle pests,” notes Lansing, who has studied and documented these effects in his scholarly book Priests and Programmers. The IR8 variety of rice that was introduced turned out to be vulnerable to brown plant hoppers, leading to a loss of 2 million tons of rice in 1977. The upgraded IR50 strain succumbed to tungro virus. Soil erosion and a huge disruption in water schedule ensued. This was a “litany of horrors,” Lansing says. “We’ve made colossal mistakes. . . . These systems are collapsing right before us.”
In the Bali case, the scientific community introduced a technology without respecting an already productive system rooted in rites and ancient tradition. Despite the disastrous effects of this shortsighted approach, government officials weren’t convinced that the system overseen by the temple priests was any good. It took computer models to sway them. The results showed that the highly sophisticated pest aversion strategy of the traditional approach was far superior to the new technology.
THE BALI STORY reminds us that ideas can have split personalities. In the 1960s, the green revolution transformed India’s farmland from a begging bowl to a breadbasket. But the same concept backfired in Indonesia, and it may never get off the ground in parts of Africa. Cultural considerations are powerful determinants of a technology’s success. Even more, nothing on earth has only benefits. Every positive thing can also have bad outcomes. That’s why mindlessly privileging efficiency and productivity while not considering other native factors is a flawed approach. More efficiency may actually lead to more consumption. But complex social circuits make it difficult to predict when things that seem good will go bad.
Engineering is no exception. The same principle that’s used to produce a software security patch can create a destructive computer virus. The space program has its origins in the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Internal-combustion engines have helped humankind reach remote corners of the planet, but they are a major contributor to pollution and climate disruptions. Optimization algorithms have increased financial yields but also had an “invisible hand” in financial disasters. From the conveniences of packaged food to the casualties of processed food, engineering plays a central role. Location-enabled technologies—such as enhanced 911—can augment public security but fuel stalking. The cell phone technology was created to offer the freedom of mobility, but that freedom has also had a reverse effect: people are now tied to their jobs and the so-called “social networks” that blur the lines separating work, family, and everything else. Gone are the days of going online; many of us now live online.
Life as we know it is a string of choices that lead to consequences. Intended or not, consequences sometimes can’t be realized until decades have elapsed. It’s not always possible to foresee the real possibilities of our creations—something philosophers refer to as designer fallacy. The Chinese invented gunpowder centuries ago, but it was Europeans who applied the technology to power their cannons in the process of modernizing warfare.
There’s also the intentional fallacy: design geared specifically toward villainy. Hitler’s engineers found efficient ways to commit genocide. From designing “reliable” ovens to “optimizing” the quality of genes to “standardizing” the construction of concentration camps to “tracking” inmates like packages to “mass-producing” cadavers, these were morally repugnant applications of the engineering mind-set. As history has clearly demonstrated, these examples are instances in which engineering principles did, unfortunately, work in practice.
Is engineering good or bad? This is a “curate’s egg” question. We should look instead at a continuum of risks and benefits, as we often do in matters of consequence. “Technology is not like a gentle rain that falls on all equally, as Buddha suggested in the parable of medicinal herbs,” Levent Orman of Cornell University has written. “It is more like a thunderstorm that benefits some but devastates others.”
Like it or not, the engineering mind-set is use oriented and outcome focused. It craves specific end points. Perhaps because of these core attributes, British sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog controversially proposed that engineers and individuals with technical backgrounds are overrepresented in terrorist and other fundamentalist groups. It would be ridiculous, however, to link engineering and social radicalism. In fact, to the contrary, it’s the engineering sense of being oriented to the mission that Gambetta and Hertog prominently discuss in their thesis. They conjecture that “engineering as a degree might be relatively more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive ‘closure’ and clear-cut answers as opposed to more open-ended sciences—a disposition which has been empirically linked to conservative political attitudes.”
Although feeling certain about particular outcomes can motivate people toward antisocial behavior, mental illness is an important contributor too. One could argue that methodical systems-level thinking also plays a crucial role. “Asking how organized a subject is may be far more important than asking whether the subject is mentally ill or not,” says Robert Fein, a forensic psychologist specializing in the prevention of targeted violence, including assassinations. Further, like all other people, terrorists need to have skills relevant to their horrible mission in order to be successful.
These complex social issues go deeper than traditional analyses and arguments. At a fundamental level, they may point toward tragic flaws that are an inherent part of being human. Our lives, beliefs, and experiences set us on specific paths. Certain people are predisposed to see life’s challenges as hammers and nails, and such a leaning can’t be blamed on the powers of engineering. The best we as a society can do is to periodically review our social contract with engineering. The best engineers can do in return is not to waver on civil responsibilities and the trust that society bestows on them.
ENGINEERING HELPED put humans on the moon. Engineering has dramatically enhanced our living standards. But why haven’t we been able to eliminate poverty and inequality? These “moon and the ghetto” problems, as economist Richard Nelson dubs them, exist because there are no clear paths to solutions. We don’t have the know-how to effectively deal with a wide range of thorny issues. Backward thinking may become convoluted.
Many of our social challenges are fuzzy. They are boundless, have poor structure, and lack an expiration date. Most important, these challenges impose uneven social costs that change with the pace and priorities of our societies. These costs could be either useful or harmful. For every technical solution, such as in the construction of a new road, there often ought to be a commensurate market-based solution, like peak-load pricing. A purely technical solution, without the market forces to support it, would be like blood flow without oxygen.
Engineering can help tackle many but not all social challenges. Moreover, we will continue to encounter new opportunities and challenges in developing complex systems that engineering alone will not be able to answer. Information and communication technologies have already started producing new kinds of relationships between humans and engineering creations, which in turn are producing new kinds of social norms and interactions. Only through improved understanding of the subtleties in human behavior can engineering continue to boost our economies and serve our society. To expand its peripheral vision, engineering must be educated and enriched by the vision, wisdom, and inspiration of creative arts, literature, humanities, sciences, and philosophy.
Technical education shouldn’t reinforce a commodity mentality, but nurture a collaborative mentality. In doing so, the engineering profession needs to embrace and apply fresh forms of aesthetics, a lively sense of openness, and an energetic type of pluralism. Engineering can bolster its performance and endurance by learning new sensitivities, by capitalizing on new synergies, by better relating to social sensibilities, and by continuing to adapt to cultural necessities.
Ultimately, what matters are not first impressions, but lasting impressions.