Recent News

Mike McMeekin & Kyle Davy

In his new book, Wicked Problems, Guru Madhavan of the National Academy of Engineering tells the story of Ed Link, the inventor of the flight trainer for pilots which transformed the aviation industry in the early 20th century by addressing the educational, workforce, and cultural challenges that accompanied the rapid development of aviation technologies. Link’s technological expertise and systems approach addressed a significant challenge of his time. In the 21^st century, we face an even more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. The 2024 Engineering Change Lab – USA (ECL) Engineering Ideas Institute featured a deep dive into the role of the engineering community in this VUCA world. Madhavan posed a key question to the participants in the Institute, “What is the equivalent of a Link trainer for engineering in the 21^st century?”

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Mike McMeekin & Kyle Davy

The engineering community faces a grand challenge with respect to its current and future workforce. At a time when ever greater contributions are needed from the engineering community to address societal challenges such as deteriorating infrastructure, climate change, access to clean water, threats to the natural world, the need for better medicines, cybersecurity threats, and the need for more equitable communities, future forces are aligning that could, if not addressed, widen the gap between workforce supply and demand.

Engineering Change Lab – USA’s (ECL) virtual summit on June 18, 2024, explored the nature of this grand challenge in detail, looking at the forces impacting the future workforce supply, identifying key leverage points, and shining the light on innovative strategies being employed now to attract and retain students and workers in the engineering community. Key focus areas of the summit were the need to frame the purpose of engineering as improving the lives of people, emphasizing purpose-driven practice as a key factor in attraction and retention of our future workforce, the imperative of confronting an enrollment cliff facing higher education, and the need to enlarge the circle of our workforce to include those who have traditionally been excluded.

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Kyle Davy and Mike McMeekin

We live in a world in which ever more complex digital technologies are being integrated into our critical infrastructure systems (water, wastewater, electrical, pipelines, and manufacturing). The cyber security threats resulting from this transformation are outpacing the ability of society, and the engineering community, to effectively prevent and manage them.

A new, essential role for the engineering community is emerging — creation and stewardship of cyber-resilient critical infrastructure on behalf of society. Engineering Change Lab – USA’s (ECL) virtual summit on March 19, 2024, explored the magnitude of the threat, the consequences of cyber-attacks, barriers to progress in addressing these threats, and the nature of the “step change” required for the engineering community to fully embrace this leadership role. … Read More

Qingbin Cui, Ph.D., Kyle Davy, AIA & Michael McMeekin, P.E.

March 13, 2024

Advanced technologies such as connected autonomous vehicles, robotics and drones, artificial intelligence, bio-medical technologies, smart cities, and other cyber-physical systems pose new and serious challenges to the ability of the current engineering licensure regime to assure that engineers and the organizations employing them are protecting public health, safety, and welfare. The existing licensure system is also challenged with respect to providing guidance on the many macro-ethical dilemmas emerging alongside these advanced technologies.

It is imperative that our systems of regulating and licensing engineering adapt in parallel with the development and deployment of these emerging technologies and in a manner that is reflective of the engineering community’s role as stewards of public safety, society, and the environment.

These conclusions, reached at the end of Engineering Change Lab – USA’s (ECL) 2020 summit exploring Licensure Models for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, prompted the launch of a follow-on ECL initiative designed to imagine a transformational regulatory system that addresses the demands and dynamics of engineering practice in the 4^th Industrial Revolution (4^th IR).

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The following post was written by Andy Bochman, Grid Strategist-Infrastructure Defender for Idaho National Laboratory’s National & Homeland Security Directorate. Andy will serve as a provocateur at the March 19 Moving From Cyber Security to Cyber Resilience Summit.

Whatever primary hat you wear (engineer, attorney, cyber guru, standards writer, regulator, or end user), imagine for a moment the challenge of cybersecurity from the perspective of each of those other folks. You are familiar, I take it, with the parable of the elephant in the dark room, and how one’s impression of what animal it is depends on which part they encounter first as they feel their way around.

Speaking of elephants, as framed by the engineering standard of care, if one were designing a bridge capable of safely and reliably supporting the passage of up to 100 elephants at a time, the normal best practice thing to do is design and build it with a safety factor — let’s say a structural design and materials selected to support 140 standard elephants. Of course, we need to define whether we are talking African or Asian elephants, as there’s a not insignificant weight difference, with Africans often reaching seven tons and the Asian species topping out at a bit over five.

In other words, details matter. We must pay attention to how initial assumptions about users can be proved wrong by future shifts: in technology, regulation, user behavior, or weather patterns for that matter…. Read More

Kyle Davy and Mike McMeekin

The history of engineering for urban development and infrastructure is commonly told as a story of progress, achievement, and positive contributions to society. There is, however, another part of that narrative that is often left out or glossed over — that is the story of how, on too many occasions, engineering work has also contributed to racial inequity and harm. Examples include efforts that helped give rise to segregated urban development patterns, routing of freeways that divided and devastated minority neighborhoods, siting of hazardous industrial and infrastructure facilities in low-income areas, and unequal access to clean water and sanitation infrastructure.

Engineering Change Lab – USA (ECL), launched its Engineering Equitable Communities (EEC) initiative to explore this more complete narrative and to pilot new practices and behaviors that engineering practitioners can adopt to prevent future inequity, heal past harms, and help create a more just future for our urban environments…. Read More