Post-normal Science, a Component of Adaptive Engineering

Abstract

Past reliance on highly-specialized, disciplinebased knowledge has not only led to great prosperity, but it also has the tendency to ignore broader social and environmental contexts, resulting in decreased resilience and unintended consequences. This decreased resilience is manifested in engineering education and practice through a busier, less integrated curriculum, an inability to work across disciplines and a lack of connection with the end-user. We propose a new curriculum model called Adaptive Engineering. Our pedagogy does not strive to replace the curriculum, but rather supplement it by addressing certain values that are necessary to improve resilience. Adaptive Engineering promotes reflexive, preventive, and multidisciplinary engineering with practitioners who are community focused, socially just, and who make decisions through Learning Alliances. Our resilient model essentially draws from two key characteristics of post-normal science: ‘extended peer communities’ and ‘extended facts.’