The Six Minds of a Whole New Engineer

Abstract

Guest Editorial Early engineers of the 19th century were rock stars of their times, much like famous dot-com entrepreneurs of our times. Petroleum engineering got its start after this early “generalist” phase of the profession when the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) formed a standing committee on oil and gas in 1913. The first petroleum engineering degree followed suit at the University of Pittsburgh in 1915, and today SPE represents more than 140,000 professional and student members around the globe. From that early formative period of petroleum engineering, technical specialization increased and continued into the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, but more recently, engineering has faced pressures to change. Mark Somerville, a professor of electrical engineering and physics at Olin College, and I have written about this in our book, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education. In particular, we spell out the six minds that all of today’s engineers need to embody to reach their full potential. They are the Analytical mind Design mind Linguistic mind People mind Body mind Mindful mind Analytical Mind Most engineers will have no trouble identifying with what we call the analytical mind. They know (and have survived) the drill of “applying” mathematics and science, so let’s move to the others. Design Mind When we talk about design mind, we are probably still within most engineers’ comfort zone. However, maximizing our design capabilities has had some ups and downs over the years. A report called the Grinter Report in 1955 ultimately led to (a) raising the math/science content of the engineering curriculum, and (b) reducing the design and practical content. Meetings in the 1960s helped redress some of the perceived harm of the Grinter changes by establishing capstone senior design courses at a number of schools, and increasing design content has been an important trend ever since. Today, these design education efforts are going further. Companies such as IDEO integrate industrial design, engineering design, and applied anthropology so that design thinking connects human usage and conceptual design directly. A required second-year class called User-Oriented Design at Olin College has students working in teams with groups of individuals (firemen, soup kitchen operators, flight instructors, bicycle messengers, to name a few) over the course of the semester. The goal of the course is to create a conceptual design of technology that will improve the work lives of the group studied.