Policy analysis and policy making
Early in my engineering education, I saw my work as being fundamentally disconnected from other people. In my classes, I learned how to judge the safety and cost of structural designs using quantitative methods based in logic. The whole affair of engineering seemed highly analytical and dispassionate.
When I started my graduate education, I began to notice how unanalytical and human-oriented engineering actually is. I took classes where the solution was no longer exact, but required engineering judgement. I began to understand the sweeping assumptions made by engineers when we analyze structures like beams and trusses, and how these assumptions were idealizations, not reality. As I began to conduct my own research into unexplored areas, I found that I needed a motivation for my work. The elegance and simplicity of analysis was not enough; I needed people to motivate me.
Through my PhD experiences, I have reframed how I see engineering and its role in society. Engineering is a means of helping people by solving their problems using rigorous methods. My undergraduate education prepared me well to understand these methods, but I still needed to learn more about the people I was working to help. To this end, I enrolled in the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Certificate through the Ford School at the University of Michigan.
Perhaps the most profound idea I have learned from the classes I have taken to satisfy the certificate requirements is that all technology is inherently political. Now, you might look at the pen sitting next to your computer and wonder which side of the aisle it sits, but that is not what I mean. Rather, the way that pen was design comes from a political place. Engineering design is full of arbitrary decisions: How should the pen gripper be shaped? How much ink should be in the pen? What color should the ink be? Each of these questions was answered by the designer by considering who would buy their pens and for what purposes.
A more consequential example comes from the field of structural engineering. In his seminal article, Do Artifacts Have Politics?, Landon Winner describes parkways that connect New York City to Jones Beach in Long Island built in the early twentieth century [1]. Specifically, the bridges that cross over the parkway were unusually low, with clearances from the parkway to the bridges being as low as nine feet. To most, this was a strange, but meaningless design choice. Winner cites an argument made by biographer Robert Cairo that the choice of having low-clearance bridges on the parkway was not arbitrary, but reflected the values of the lead designer, Robert Moses. Cairo argues that the choice was made so that buses could not use the roadway, and because buses were mostly used by low income people and members of racial minorities, Robert Moses imparted his values and biases to make the beach inaccessible to these groups.
In Winner’s example, we see how engineering design can be used to enforce human values, including classism and racism. Countless other examples exist throughout engineering and science. I encourage any reader to learn more about the politics of engineering and science. I was stunned how much the science and technology discoveries of the twentieth century were dictated by policy decisions and values that governments and universities made.
The upshot to this is that all engineering designs face constraints dictated by the values of the client or designer. Constraints like cost, aesthetics, construction time, and function of the technology, all stem from the needs of the people choosing the design. The concept of an optimal design requires a human being choosing, based on their arbitrary values, what optimal means.
In my service and research, I choose to apply what I’ve learned from the public policy realm. I have learned to consider as many sides of an argument as possible and to discuss the purpose of my research with the people who will use it. I cannot design a technology without feedback from the people using the object. No equation can model the values and needs of humans. Furthermore, being able to consider all sides of an argument requires having a diverse group of individuals who have the experience to inform what the different arguments will be. As humans, engineers have limited experience. By expanding who we welcome to our engineering firms, we can expand the creative capacity of our designs.
Below is a link to an annotated bibliography and reading list that I’ve assembled about science, technology, and public policy. I’ve chosen documents and other sources that give evidence for the importance of policy and democratic processes in design [2].
Click here for the annotated bibliographyReferences
[1] Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121-136.
[2] I want to thank Joy Rohde and other faculty of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy certificate program at the University of Michigan for introducing me to this literature and inspiring the ideas I present in the annotated bibliography.