Are ethical discoverers and inventors born, or can we create them? How can we improve public understanding of the processes by which we have transformed the world? This chapter will discuss these issues, using the detailed case-studies in previous chapters as examples and the cognitive analysis as a framework.
I have adapted three broad categories of learning from Mortimer Adler (1982). The first two are also emphasized by Gilbert Ryle .
1) Information: (What)
Often, the kind of factual knowledge a scientist or inventor possesses gives her or him an advantage over others. Kepler had to know what the latest data were on the orbits of Mars. Bell knew more about acoustics and the structure of the ear than other inventors. Jack Kilby deliberately read widely, scanning dozens of magazines and patent applications far removed from problems he was working on at the time. This strategy gave him a unique knowledge base. When asked to find a way to print carbon resistors on a ceramic base, he remembered an article on tiny sandblasters he had read in a dental journal .
2) Skills: (How)
But information alone is not sufficient. Kepler had to know how to solve mathematical problems. Krebs had his ‘secret weapon’--from Otto Warburg, he had learned how to slice tissue. Bell hired Watson to provide the skill necessary to build the first telephone.
Other skills include writing, mathematical techniques--and even the set of skills involved in lifelong learning.
Gilbert Ryle emphasizes the distinction between knowing that and knowing how. About experts, he says, "we are interested less in the stocks of truths that they acquire and retain than in their capacities to find out truths for themselves and their abilities to organize and exploit them, when discovered" .
3) Wisdom: (When and Why)
Novices and experts can often share the same pieces of information, but only the expert represents this information in a way that shows when it can be applied to a particular problem. "The expert sees the situation, and sees what to do" . Part of this representation is a way of classifying problems that also suggests what heuristics or algorithms will solve them. This kind of wisdom is often referred to as judgment.
On unfamiliar problems, this kind of judgment is especially important, and experts frequently make it by referring to other cases that are similar in certain ways. One of the classic heuristics for making this kind of comparison is ‘follow the analogy of nature’. Confronted with the problem of transmitting speech electrically, Bell ‘followed the analogy of nature’ and used the human ear as his mental model. He had to have knowledge of the ear , the skill to build a device like one and the wisdom to see the potential connection to the speaking telegraph. Similarly, The Natural Step and the McDonough/Braungart design protocols are based on an analogy to nature. Again, this analogy is productive because the authors of these frameworks are able to use Nature’s cycle to generate mental models that suggest promising directions for environmental design.
There is another aspect of wisdom that relates to "when". It is the willingness to ask "why". Frankentstein should have asked this question before creating a human being. Cloning researchers are asking this question now. Before and during the process of creation, there needs to be reflection on the consequences. Will this design or discovery make the world a better place? As Norbert Wiener said, "Our papers have been making a great deal of American ‘know-how’ ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than know-how and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is the ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be" . Wiener’s ‘know-what’ clearly means ‘know what to do’, which I refer to as ‘why’.
Moral imagination is an important part of this kind of reflection. In order to think about long-term consequences of technological innovation, one has to be able to see one’s current paradigm as a view, and seriously consider alternatives. How would the world be transformed if all products followed Nature’s cycle and there were no waste?
I teach mostly engineering students. Standard education in science and engineering is oriented towards categories one and two. Students learn a mountain of facts, procedures for testing and refining, and algorithms for solving problems. Only rarely are they ever prompted to consider why.
For engineering students, the courses I teach come in the category of ‘other’ -- ‘stuff’ that isn’t engineering. My biggest problem is to convince them that this material is the essence of engineering. I belong to a Division within the engineering school--Technology, Culture & Communications--that has the mission of teaching engineering students communication skills and the sort of wisdom that will make them into virtuous practitioners. Humanities and social sciences courses that teach knowledge of these disciplines and their methods are extremely valuable for any student, but students often compartmentalize this knowledge and see it as irrelevant to engineering practice.
My goal is to produce students who will be:
The focus of this book has mostly been on (1). It is the essential first step in making (2) and (3) possible. Creating a better world begins with understanding the kind of thinking and imagining that could produce it.
In Chapter 2, we made the distinction between in vivo and in vitro methods for studying science. To review, the former involves actual case-studies of scientific practice; the latter involves experiments that simulate aspects of scientific thinking.
The advantages of experiments come at a cost in terms of realism. A simulation can and should model only certain aspects of science, and therefore simulations need to be complemented by case-studies; experiments can suggest features that ought to be studied in cases, and cases can suggest variables that ought to be manipulated in simulations. Psychologist prefer experiments, in part because they want to appear to be scientific . Sociologists of scientific knowledge generally prefer 'thick descriptions' of actual cases . The obvious answer is we need both--and we need to connect these two, using experiments to isolate variables that seem to play a role in cases, then going back to do further case-studies looking, in part, for the kinds of patterns suggested by experiments .
Experiments and case-studies can also be used in the classroom to teach scientific thinking. For example, I have used both the 2-4-6 task and a task based on the card game Eleusis to illustrate what is meant by verification and falsification, and how they work in practice . I ask students to work in groups to try to solve rules like ‘three different numbers’. On this particular rule, it is easy for students to imagine positive tests, because virtually every triple they try initially has number patterns that go up or down. I have them write down their hypotheses so when they are done we can talk about confirmation and disconfirmation. In discussion, I try to get them to identify examples of positive and negative tests from their own experiments, and get them to discover that whether a test is confirmatory or disconfirmatory depends on their hypothesis and how they represent the rule.
Once students have these analytic tools under their belts, they can apply them to notebooks or other detailed descriptions of invention or discovery . In the course of applying what they learned from experiments, students will also come to see the inadequacies of models derived from simulations. For example, I like to lead them on a discussion of how the 2-4-6 task does and does not model scientific practice, and how it could be made more ecologically valid .Then I can introduce the version with error, in order to show how one can add features that simulate additional aspects of real-world science.
Robert Rosenwein and I have proposed a complex simulation based on William Gamson’s "Simulated Society" (SIMSOC). In SIMSOC, class participants are placed in one of four regions, given unequal amounts of "Simbucks" and compete to get ‘simjobs" in simulated industries or political parties or media a kind of judicial group.
Bob and I proposed to convert SIMSOC into a SIMSCI, which would substitute scientific laboratories for industries, different theoretical perspectives for political ones, publication outlets for media and granting agencies for judicial. Each participant would be assigned to one of several research teams, except for a handful, who would be left to work on their own or join a team. Teams would have to choose problems, compete for resources, and publish brief accounts of their work.
Teams would start with unequal resources, in terms of 'Simbucks' and equipment. For example, one research team might have a computer that allowed them to work on an artificial universe task like the one created by Mynatt, Doherty & Tweney. Other teams would have to pay for access to this equipment. Because experiments were costly, research teams would have to spend their resources carefully.
One of the ways of attracting more resources would be to announce a new discovery and have it substantiated, thereby increasing the likelihood that the funding agencies that are part of SIMSCI would support the team's research. A wide range of task variables could be manipulated to increase or decrease the likelihood of a discovery, including amount and type of error present in the problem.
This SIMSCI environment could potentially serve both research and pedagogical aims--it could be used to test the way in which a number of variables affect problem-choice and discovery, and also teach students about the way in which scientific thinking is embedded in a network of social negotiations.
The biggest advantage of in vitro simulations is that they allow the researcher or educator to manipulate variables that might affect discovery--like the amount of error present in a particular task, the distribution of resources, the agendas of funding agencies, and the like. SIMSCI could include the manipulable features listed below:
1. Resource allocation and control:
Scientists--especially senior scientists--spend an inordinate amount of time seeking funding for their laboratories. The effect of this struggle for resources could be simulated by including funding agencies and laboratories in SIMSCI. Resources could be located in laboratories, each of which would start with a director who would be responsible for keeping the lab alive by recruiting new members and obtaining further funding. Lab directors would begin with unequal resources, so that some would have great advantages over the others. Some participants would belong to no lab, and could be recruited to assist in research.
To get additional resources, labs could appeal to two funding agencies, one of which worked like a federal agency, with proposal criteria and rules that indicated funding priorities and a review process that included student participants as reviewers. Another funding agency might have a tacit agenda, simulating foundations like MacArthur that decide on winners without a standard application process. Labs that managed to guess the tacit agenda would be given funding. It would be interesting to see if the peer-refereed funding agency began to reward the same winners, thus creating a Matthew effect.
2. Nature of the Task:
Another manipulable feature of Sim SCI will be the types of tasks participants could choose to work on. We want these tasks to simulate aspects of scientific thinking; fortunately, there is a long cognitive literature on such tasks, including ones that use numbers, or cards, or programmable devices, or complex artificial universes .
Experimental: This sort of task involves generating repeated manipulations of a phenomenon in an effort to discover and test hypotheses. Most of the tasks used in the literature on scientific reasoning are of this sort. For example, one could ask students to determine the rule that dictates how playing cards can be laid out in a series. To determine the rule, students would have to try different card sequences, and receive feedback on whether each was correct or incorrect.
(b) Observational: This sort of a task involves carefully watching a process without influencing it--except that the act of observation can itself be an influence. Tasks of this sort are less common in the psychology of science literature. We outline one which resembles a problem in astronomy below.
Tasks would require different resources. For example, a simple number problem like the 2-4-6 task might be relatively cheap--pencil and paper and access to a calculator that could give feedback on trials. An observational task, in contrast, might require a computer with a color monitor, access to which could only be purchased by a lab. Problem choice would be dictated, in part, by resources, but discoveries could be made on inexpensive problems. It would be interesting to see whether these inexpensive solutions are assigned less status than solutions to more expensive, resource-intensive problems.
3. Communication:
Another important, related issue is communication. SIMSCI needs to be able to model sharing of scientific information and the ‘publish or perish’ structure of the scientific reward system, including the emphasis on achieving priority.
(a) Journals:
Obviously, a time-limited simulation cannot simulate all the rhetorical features of actual science. But one can include competing newsletters--perhaps electronic ones, disseminated via e-mail--which report brief accounts of results and will be peer reviewed by students. Initially, newsletters will be based in competing labs with extensive resources, but any group of participants that can assemble sufficient resources will be able to start its own newsletter. Subscriptions will cost resources, which will be turned over to the newsletter. So again, an underfunded newsletter can gain resources by attracting subscribers.
(b) Conference presentations:
Just as any group or lab can organize a newsletter, so any group can organize a conference. But participants will have to spend resources to get to the conference. One alternative will be to be invited to a conference supported by a lab, or be sent by a lab to a conference. In both of these cases, the lab would have to pay.
(c) Informal contacts:
Participants will also be able to send written messages to other students whom they can identify by name and role. (This could be done via e-mail). This simulates the kind of informal communication that takes place in letters. The receiver of a message will, of course, be under no obligation to respond.
Again, constraints on all these forms of communication could be manipulated in a variety of ways in SIMSCI. One could, for example, have newsletters reward positive results and refuse to publish replications--or one could do the reverse. One could even attempt to assess the importance of rewarding priority of science by providing no reward for it. What if multiple, independent re-discoveries were given equal status? How could one be sure what counted as independent? The point is, SIMSCI does not have to mimic the structure of science as it usually appears--one can deliberately experiment with different kinds of reward structures.
4. Outside Events:
SIMSCI will also allow the controllers to introduce a wide range of outside events. For example, at a certain stage of the simulation, improved equipment could be made available which would provide higher resolution on the perceptual task, potentially making terrain or other features far less ambiguous. Use of this new technology might be very expensive. One might also introduce the possibility of 'lower tech' improvements that could be made and/or utilized by lower resource groups. Using mechanisms like this, SIMSCI could begin to explore the role of technological improvements in science.
One could also introduce a new theory, or task, or change the priorities of one of the funding agencies. Special awards like the Nobel Prize could be introduced. Controllers could select outside events that reflect the goals of their simulation.
SIMSCI could include a variety of measures of the cognitive and social processes of its participants, ones that they could use to reflect on and improve their own efforts to solve problems and succeed as scientists and that could also be used to compare permutations of variables like differences in resources and changes in reward structure. The SIMSCI manual would include suggestions on how to get the maximum amount of information out of the minimum amount of data.
(1) Documents:
Each participant in SIMSCI will be required to keep a notebook, recording ideas for experiments and actual results. Participants could be shown portions of Faraday's notebook and Alexander Graham Bell’s as examples.
Participants would also be writing e-mail messages and longer articles to appear in electronic newsletters. In addition, participants would be writing proposals to funding agencies. All of these public documents, and all drafts of them, would provide a useful record for further reflection, including those articles that were not accepted and proposals that were not funded.
(2) Protocols:
Selected participants could be protocoled as they work on their tasks, i.e., they would be asked to talk aloud as they work. Laboratory meetings could be taped, creating a record similar to the one produced by Kevin Dunbar’s molecular biology laboratories . Conferences could be videotaped. Meetings of gatekeepers--journal editors, foundation boards, review panels--could be recorded as well.
(3) Interviews:
Selected participants could also be drawn aside for interviews at random times during the simulation. The interviews will allow exploration of cognitive/social relationships--they could be asked questions about their progress in solving the tasks as well as their career trajectories and their attitudes toward funding agencies, laboratories, etc.
These measures will reveal a variety of processes used by groups and in response to the simulation, responses that could be used by participants and researchers afterwards to analyze what happened in a particular version of SIMSCI. Probably the result would be more provocative new questions than answers; some of these questions would certainly lead to new case-studies. Experimental simulations have provided frameworks for the study of scientists like Faraday and inventors like Bell . Similarly, SIMSCI could generate frameworks for studying how cognitive and social factors interact in scientific groups.
To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of a complex in vitro simulation, let us consider an example of a SIMSCI focused on a complex issue: evidence ambiguity. Evidence is rarely unambiguous; debates in science often revolve around what constitutes 'good' data and what should be dismissed as error. SIMSCI allows us to manipulate different types of error and note their effect on consensus formation and on the construction of order in domains where the level of randomness is high.
(1) Error on an experimental task:
In Chapter 2, I discussed attempts to simulate possible and actual error in psychology experiments. Suppose the 2-4-6 task were one of the problems participants could elect to work on. To conduct an experiment, each student would have to pay a nominal fee to get access to a calculator or computer, which would give them the result. One could add a high level of error to this task--say, 40%. One could add the possibility of paying to use better equipment in order to reduce the possibility of error. Participants would then have to decide whether to spend more on a few good experiments, or run lots of relatively cheap ones, replicating to check for errors.
Again, laboratories with more resources will have substantial advantages on such a task, though those with less resources will still be able to make substantial progress if they design their less expensive experiments cleverly.
High levels of ambiguity, or error, also give more room for participants ton construct rules and negotiate what constitutes progress on the task. Rules could be complex enough to allow for different hypotheses and constructions, especially on more complex tasks like the artificial universes created by Mynatt and his colleagues . One could even introduce a very complex task that had no rule, to see what rules participants would invent, especially if they suspected there was a lot of error in the task. SIMSCI therefore allows one to explore the relationship between resources, rule ambiguity, level of error in the data and research strategy.
(2) Error on an observational task:
This sort of a task often involves resolving perceptual ambiguity through careful observation. Examples include the relationship among geological strata, or resolution of terrain features on a distant planet.
Consider, for example, a SIMSCI task based on the controversy concerning the canals on Mars. Percival Lowell developed a theory and a set of supporting observations concerning the presence of canals on Mars. These canals were seen by other prominent astronomers, but still others remained skeptical. Interestingly, several critics conducted experiments to determine whether the canals might be an optical illusion, illustrating that even practicing scientists can turn to simulations to settle controversies. Eventually, more powerful telescopes established that there were no canals, but until the advent of this new technology, the controversy raged .
Participants could be allowed to select computer screens representing satellite images of terrain features on a distant planet; they would be told that the satellite is not functioning well, and therefore the resolution of the images is poor. Again, access to the computer screens will require commitment of resources; well-funded labs will have considerable advantages.
In addition, information on conflicting hypotheses could be made available to participants, along with evidence that proponents claim support each hypothesis. One hypothesis, for example, might argue that there were terrain features which suggested the presence of intelligent life; another might argue that these were all just natural features. The papers describing these hypotheses could originate from competing laboratories. At the beginning of this SIMSCI, each lab could be assigned a participant director who would have to decide whether to continue to support the lab's past position, or take a different tack. The risk of change would be losing funding from stable sources dedicated to a particular theory. For example, one of the funding sources might represent a space agency that wanted proof of intelligent life on other worlds. A lab that stuck with that agenda would increase its chances for funding.
One could use this sort of a SIMSCI to study under what circumstances data plays the largest and smallest role in determining the outcome of scientific discoveries. The SIMSCI might begin with enough ambiguity that teams could argue persuasively for their perspectives, but gradually introduce new equipment that gradually improved the quality of the data. One could vary the extent to which this improved data pointed towards a genuine discovery or simply showed no evidence of a pattern. One could even try to create paradigm shifts by introducing anomalous results. Then one could watch the negotiations that went on between groups.
The kind of deep commitments to research programs seen in science are hard to simulate, but social influence studies like Zimbardo's prison simulation and Milgram's obedience experiments show that subjects can quickly identify themselves with arbitrary roles assigned by an experimenter. We might be surprised at the extent to which participants in SIMSCI become committed to different theoretical positions.
These three main manipulable domains and the manipulable features within them will allow SIMSCI to be adapted to explore relationships between social and cognitive variables. For example, one could study minority influence in science by introducing a trained confederate into the simulation, who would vigorously and persuasively promote a hypothesis at variance with the positions taken by the dominant labs on a particular task. One could train this confederate to adopt specific persuasion strategies to see which worked best.
Similarly, one could introduce a confederate who deliberately used fraud in an effort to bolster his/her career. (Note that SIMSCI does not automatically exclude the possibility of fraud--a student can always misrepresent the results he or she has actually achieved, and others will have to check by replicating).
I have outlined SIMSCI in a way that makes it ambiguous whether it is primarily a research platform or a teaching device. That ambiguity is deliberate. Clearly, this kind of a simulation, properly done, could teach students a lot about the way social and cognitive aspects of science blend in actual practice. It could also allow researchers to manipulate and measure factors that might affect the resolution of scientific controversies, as well as simulate different models of scientific progress. I think the research/teaching dichotomy should be transcended, whenever possible. A SIMSCI could be set-up in a class, such as the one I teach on scientific and technological thinking, and the student participants could be major players in conducting a post-mortem that would evaluate what we could learn and generalize from the experience. For example, student participants could discuss the conditions that promoted discovery and creativity, and those that did not.
Science education rarely includes much about the relationships between cognitive and social factors in science; typically, students learn about the context of science in separate courses on history and/or philosophy of science SIMSCI could complement these courses by making students active participants in science, allowing them to experience a small part of the joys and frustrations of a scientific career. Indeed, SIMSCI could be incorporated into a variety of such courses, and the tasks used in the SIMSCI environment could be linked to, and enriched by, a variety of case-studies.
SIMSCI need not be limited to science and engineering students. Indeed, it is a perfect platform for teaching non-science students how science really works. SIMSCI can become a platform for studying issues in science policy and education; it can be used in classrooms and research laboratories. It cannot replace case-studies and thick descriptions; instead, it would complement these approaches. One could, for example, take the approach advocated by Dunbar and iterate between a study of an actual scientific laboratory and a SIMSCI that allowed manipulation of variables that appeared to affect consensus formation in that lab. Data collected from SIMSCI could help explain the patterns of response seen in the actual laboratory and also suggest surprising new relationships to look for in case studies. SIMSCI could also complement historical case studies, as the canals on Mars example suggests, and computational simulations modeling the effect of the same variables on a multi-agent network.
Simulations like Civilization and SimCity suggest that a computer SIMSCI could be created and run over the internet. Consider Civilization. In this simulation, or game, one plays the role of a civilization-builder, from 4000 B.C. to the present, making all decisions about where to build cities, what structures to construct in them, which technologies to create and what relations to have with other civilizations. One has to maintain a simple economy, balancing taxes with expenditures and providing luxuries to keep people happy. One can compete with other computerized opponents or human opponents over the internet. Judging from the number of Web-sites and books of hints available for Civilization II, this kind of simulation is engrossing to the point of addiction.
In a computerized SIMSCI, the virtual world of laboratories, tasks and simbucks could be enhanced by graphics and other features that motivate players to spend hours mastering Civilization. For example, just as one has to accumulate resources to pay for civilization advances in Civilization and urban improvements in SimCity, one could pay to improve laboratories in SIMSCI, buying research equipment, technicians, and even try to entice top-level researchers to leave others’ labs and join yours. Part of a laboratory’s income could come from users outside of the lab who pay for the use of its equipment. Labs could compete to offer the best facilities and services, while also competing for grants.
In Civilization, one simply buys technological advances and scientific discoveries. In a computerized SIMSCI, funding from foundations and agencies could depend, in part, on results achieved with the equipment--on discoveries and accomplishments. The funding agencies could be represented by internet participants assigned those roles. Newsletter journals containing results and theories could be formed and distributed over the internet. Laboratories would have to gain reputations for expertise and quality. One could even simulate the kinds of negotiations that lead laboratories to collaborate on ‘Big Science’ projects like the Superconducting Supercollider, and introduce events that could affect their decision to stay with or abandon such projects.
In this manner, a computerized SIMSCI could simulate the complex relationships between basic and applied research and technological innovation. For example, Stokes talks about what he calls Pasteur’s quadrant. If one thinks of benefit to basic science as one axis on a graph and applied benefits as another, then the quadrant corresponding to high potential for both is the area in which Pasteur worked: he created the field of microbiology and at the same time his work had immediate pay-off for brewers One could set up the funding agencies in a SIMSCI so that one encouraged basic research and another applied, and see if a lab emerged that could connect the two. One could also give a lab a ‘work-in-Pasteur’s-quadrant’ heuristic and see how it managed to translate this idea into action.
One of the advantages of a computer SIMSCI is that the participants could actually create highly complex technologies, like a new weapons system. This capability could be used to set-up ethical dilemmas. Should the ‘work-in-Pasteur’s-quadrant’ heuristic lab use creating weapons as a justification for its basic research?
From an educational standpoint, these computer simulations are highly motivating--indeed, one would have to be careful that students not spend too much time on them! From a research standpoint, they are highly manipulable, if programmed properly--one can introduce all kinds of contingencies as the simulation progresses.
One could, for example, introduce ethical issues. The possibility of producing fraudulent data and publishing it is always present. One could simply watch to see if this ever happened, and note the circumstances. Or one or two students could be given instructions to engage in forms of fraud, to see how the system responded. Similar opportunities exist for conflicts of interest, e.g., sitting on a panel that reviews a proposal from a competing lab.
One of the advantages of Civilization II is that participants can buy sustainable technologies like recycling and solar power, which helps them avoid local pollution effects. It is probably too much of a stretch to simulate this kind of sustainable technology in SIMSCI, though one might give participants the option of choosing a problem that promised to pave the way for sustainable technologies. Then one could experiment with how such attempts fit in with the shifting agendas of funding agencies, perhaps contrasting it with scientific developments supported by a military agency.
The point is, the possibilities are endless. Even just having a class try to design a SIMSCI would be a useful exercise in thinking about how science really operates.
As noted in Chapter 2, recent research in cognitive psychology supports the view that experts learn from cases . Specifically, I think they learn that crucial aspect of judgment I call wisdom: when to activate a particular combination of knowledge and skill.
I would argue experts can learn aspects of reflective judgment from simulations. For example, one can learn tools for thinking about the costs of different career choices from SIMSCI. From simpler tasks, one can learn to be aware of the heuristic potential of confirmation and disconfirmation and use that awareness to decide how to employ these strategies.
But SIMSCI cannot provide the sort of existence proof or proof of failure that a case can. Nor are simulations as inspiring or depressing as stories about real practitioners who have succeeded or failed.
In science and engineering, reading about invention and discovery is not sufficient: students should be confronted with a problem that is open-ended enough for them to display creativity, but constrained enough so they can accomplish a solution; they should be encouraged to ‘step outside of the bounds’ of the normal process. As Roth et al. argue, "When we advocate open-inquiry laboratory or design activities for elementary and secondary students, it is not because we believe it (sic) to be a better way of learning the same content. Rather, we have strong reasons to believe that students will develop a new relationship to knowledge: many students no longer consider knowledge as something foreign that they need to acquire just to take the next career step but as something that they construct for themselves, and they see themselves not only as reproducers of cultural knowledge but, more important, as producers of personal knowledge." .
Such active learning modules can be based on historical cases as well as contemporary ones. History creates a great opportunity for vicarious apprenticeship--for working on a problem solved by a master designer, or one in which a designer failed, and comparing one’s processes with those of the historical figure. Historical designs typically involve equipment and concepts that are considered relatively simply, by modern standards--you don’t need an oscilloscope, or a laser. But once students try to emulate or improve on these apparently simple experiments, they will find that these ‘primitive’ devices and manipulation embody a great deal of sophistication.
For example, one could take the exemplary work by Ryan Tweney and David Gooding and use it to create an active-learning module based on Michael Faraday’s discovery of fields of force. More specifically, one could turn Faraday’s invention of a prototype electromagnetic motor into a module, giving students simple equipment similar to that which Faraday had. They could even be asked to construct alternate ways of demonstrating a similar phenomenon, like those generated by Faraday’s contemporaries . Faraday’s notebooks and Gooding’s problem-behavior graphs could be used to help students get a deep understanding of Faraday’s way of making discoveries. Students could use Gooding and Addis’ CLARITY program (see 1.3.3) to simulate alternate paths to Faraday’s discoveries, thereby suggesting possibilities for future experiments.
Can invention be taught? The only way to find out is to try Again, apprenticeship with a master inventor would be ideal. One way to have students experience science and engineering in-the-making is to have them apprentice with mentors--working scientists and engineers. It would be great if we could give significant numbers of students the opportunity to work with Alexander Graham Bell, or Susan Lyons, or Al Rich. Barring that, we can create a kind of virtual apprenticeship via the use of active learning modules, where they are confronted with open-ended problems like designing a portable shelter for the homeless; to solve such problems, they will have to conduct original research and build prototypes .
Like a module based on the first electromagnetic motor, a module based on the telephone would involve hands-on activities that are within reach of most students, even those without strong technical background. Readers of Chapter 3 will remember that most of Bell’s experimental devices were made out of simple components, in part because of his lack of electrical knowledge and in part because of his limited resources. Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison built more complicated devices but some of their principles can be adapted by students, e.g., Edison’s use of carbon as a resistance medium.
Bell's case is suited for science education as well as invention because he tried to be scientific in his approach. At the same time, his knowledge of mathematics was limited, so his process is accessible to students from a diversity of backgrounds. Modern students can reconstruct Bell's experimental prototypes using modern batteries, wire and magnets, though reconstruction is no guarantee that they will see the underlying theory. Bell also left extensive records, so students can compare their experiments and results with those of the master.
Vicarious mentoring is facilitated by the fact that Bell’s notebooks are full of his own reflections on his problem-solving efforts. Donald Norman distinguishes between experiential and reflective cognition. The former is exemplified by the expert in a domain, who does not need to reflect--the 'obvious' solution emerges from her experience. The latter is exemplified by the expert moving into a new domain, where her previous experience does not produce a solution; she will have to reflect on her problem-solving strategies and ways of representing the problem in order to come up with a new way of reaching her goal. Indeed, as a result of reflection, the goal itself may change. Bell's primary area of expertise was in speech and audition; for him, electricity was a novel domain, and as a result he reflected constantly on the best way to proceed. Students can see this reflection and learn from it, because they are in a similar situation--thrust into an unfamiliar problem area, and asked to come up with a novel solution. As note, "if the eventual objective of instruction is to provide the additional capability to flexibly adapt various forms of thinking when they are appropriate, then it is important that instruction not end precisely at the point where it should begin. All science teachers can tell anecdotes in which the classroom demonstration is completed, and two weeks later children recall the 'magic effect' but not the associated principle...interest in generating effects may help engage children in the reasoning process, but sustained effort is required for progress beyond that to a model of scientific inquiry oriented toward achieving understanding" (p. 878). The best discoverers and inventors are those who engage in the 'sustained effort' of reflection, improving their group or individual approaches to novel problems.
When I created a module based on the telephone, I had three major goals:
(1) To permit students to compare their own invention processes with those of a master inventors working on the same problem. Students' reference materials included sections from Bell's notebooks, his original patent, Gray’s caveat, and additional material which we put on the Web (http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/classes/tcc315).
From this kind of virtual apprenticeship, I hoped students would learn the following skills:
(a) how to keep an invention notebook
(b) how to reflect on, and modify, one’s own invention process
(c) how to write a patent
(2) To encourage students to experience the invention process first-hand, from idea to device to patent, thereby increasing their appreciation for the way in which human beings have transformed the world we live in.
(3) To promote the idea that invention is not mysterious, that it can be studied and taught.
In their packet of materials, students read the following problem statement:
You will enter the competition between Bell and Gray as a third party, similar to Edison whose Menlo Park team succeeded in making a major improvement on Bell's invention. Your goal is to design an improvement or variation on the Bell and Gray devices that you will first caveat, and then try to patent. You will also have to build and demonstrate an actual device that illustrates the claims in your patent.
In order to establish that your invention is independent, you will have to demonstrate that even though you are aware of the Bell and Gray materials, your invention goes significantly beyond them. In order to do this, you will have to document your processes, and be ready to describe them in detail. The bolder and more innovative your approach, the less likely anyone can argue that anyone versed in the art of the time could have done the same.
Because the increasingly cooperative aspects of scientific discovery and invention are well-documented students were assigned to groups of three or four to work on the telephone module. This meant that the module could help fulfill an additional important goal: teach students how to work in teams, a goal that is receiving increasing emphasis in engineering education. For example, the new "Engineering Criteria 2000," which will be used to accreadit Engineering programs, allows students to be able work in multi-disciplinary teams .
In a book on using cases to teach Pascal, Michael Clancy argued that, "Using case studies, students help design solutions to problems they could not solve alone. The concepts of design are illustrated in the context of large complex programs where these ideas make sense. The case studies engage the student as a team member who contributes to the program design. Students learn aspects of design that apply to real-world programming where teamwork is prevalent" .
We were careful to mix majors in groups, though a stronger approach would have been to mix cognitive styles, as well. Two of these styles, for example, are visual and mathematical. During the development of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg developed a purely mathematical formulation of the way in which electrons changed orbits. Schrodinger’s developed a visualizable alternative formulation "based on a wave imagery of electrons in which atomic transitions were continuous and visualizable like the transitions between the vibrational modes in a drumhead" . Similarly, Freeman Dyson showed that a visual approach by Feynman and a mathematical approach by Schwinger were formally equivalent . The point is, either visual or mathematical cognitive styles could lead to discoveries on these sorts of problems.
Howard Gardner has identified other kinds of cognitive styles as well, including verbal and kinesthetic . Watson, for example, had a kind of kinesthetic style--he was best at building Bell’s ideas. An optimal invention team would have a mixture of styles: a good visualizer, to draw and imagine, someone who liked to write, to keep the notebook and do the patents, someone who liked to build and someone who could work through the mathematical implications of Ohm’s law. I tried to get some kind of balance among styles by making sure the majors were mixed and telling group members to utilize multiple talents--an English or Art major could be as useful on the telephone module as an Electrical Engineer.
Each group was allowed to select what it needed from a set of simple materials, including batteries of different voltages and several types of wire. Students were also encouraged to scrounge for materials like cans and nails, but they had to submit a proposal before purchasing any equipment. Their objective was to patent an electrical communication system potentially capable of working over long distances which:
(1) could transmit information rapidly and cheaply.
(2) represented an improvement on Bell's design, and those described in other materials the students were given in their packets. These materials included Gray’s caveat.
In short, it would not be enough to build a replica of Bell’s telephone; students would have to patent an improvement. The written and oral assignments for this module were structured around the patent process. Students first prepared a caveat, a document used in the 19th century to signal an intention to test and perfect a new invention. (The patent office now allows prospective inventors to file a disclosure document that fulfills a similar function). Students are given Gray's caveat for a speaking telegraph as an example to study (see Chapter 3).
The caveat allowed students to signal the direction of their research. Students gave oral presentations of their caveats to the instructors, outside experts and their classmates, and demonstrated a prototype of the device they hoped to patent. After receiving feedback on their caveats, students began the testing and revision necessary to transform a caveat into a patent. They had Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent as an example, along with detailed instructions on preparing a patent. Their patents were presented to the class and an outside judge, usually a patent examiner, who decided which claims were worth granting. Students also submitted a written patent. In addition, students kept group and individual notebooks which included both details of their invention processes and comparisons with the work of actual telephone inventors.
This module emerged out of my desire to derive an educational pay-off from my research on the invention of the telephone. It wasn’t clear how such a module would fit into the required courses that I taught, so I invented a new course.
The process of inventing this new course modeled the process I would take students through, except that instead of a caveat, I built a team and wrote a grant proposal to the Leadership Opportunities in Science and Humanities program, a creative effort jointly funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education. This program funded development of the course and its initial evaluation. There were design courses in Engineering and Architecture at the University of Virginia, but nothing on invention. I made it clear we would recruit students from a variety of majors; to make this easier, I was able to get the course cross-listed in psychology.
My three co-teachers were Larry Richards, a psychologist who specialized in design and manufacturing; Bill Scherer, a systems engineer who was an expert at supervising complicated team projects and Julia Pet-Edwards. Each of us agreed to do a module, but also to try to attend each others’ modules, so this would be a real team-teaching experience. My module was the telephone, the first one the students did. I also took over the job of coordinating the class, with our teaching assistant, Julia Kagiwada. Our two consultants, Eric Bredo and W. Bernard Carlson, provided valuable expertise in the areas of educational evaluation and history of invention, respectively.
We intended the course as a kind of teaching laboratory for trying out new ideas. For example, the first time we offered the course, I piloted my rough ideas for a telephone module, refining them as we went along. We attracted 18 students: seven in their fourth year, seven in their third, three in their second and one in her first. There was a broad distribution of majors, with eleven students from a variety of Engineering disciplines and seven from liberal arts, including three from Psychology and Cognitive Science, and one from Architecture. Therefore, some students had extensive technical and mathematical backgrounds, while others had much less. The male/female ratio was roughly 60/40.
The breadth of student backgrounds was excellent, from our perspective; we wanted the modules to be usable in a wide range of settings. To accommodate differences in background, we placed background readings on reserve (see http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/classes/tcc315) and sent students with specific questions to these sources. We also carefully balanced expertise within groups, so that a political science student might be working with an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a psychology major.
We have since offered the course four times. We have not always been able to maintain this kind of student diversity; there were semesters when we had almost all engineering students, and then the course did not go as well, because the engineering students needed to be challenged by students who did not share their disciplinary paradigms and exemplars.
The best way to understand what students learned from the telephone module in this course is to follow the method we have used throughout this book and look closely at a fine-grained case study.
Consider, for example, one of the groups in our most recent iteration of the Invention and Design class. Initially, this group, which included a third-year Cognitive Science major a third-year Computer Science major, and a fourth-year Systems Engineer, had to choose between three major alternate paths, as shown in Figure 3. Two paths were ones actually used by Bell, who developed a liquid transmitter (see Section 3.9.1) and also a device called the photophone that translated light into sound. Students were also given information on a carbon transmitter developed by Thomas Edison .
This group elected to work with Bell's photophone, on the grounds that it had the most room for improvement, resembled modern ideas like fiber optics and might be easier to manage than messy liquids and ground carbon. Their initial information about the photophone came from a brochure describing a December 1976, exhibit at the National Museum of American History entitled "Person to Person"; page 6 showed how one could build a simple photophone using a flashlight, a tin can, a solar cell and a couple of batteries (see http:repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/classes/tcc315/alm/telephone/exhibits/build.html). They could also look at examples from previous classes; several groups had tried to improve the photophone, with varying results. I encouraged students to build off the work of previous students, whenever possible, treating the earlier student work as part of the ‘state of the art’ they would have to go beyond.
This group knew they had to treat the "Person to Person" exhibit as part of the state of the art; they would have to improve on it. But it did suggest how to use modern materials to achieve Bell’s goal. The group decided to build and test a photophone in which a paper cup served as the speaking tube, with a piece of plastic serving as the membrane. To this they attached a piece of a compact disk, which served as the mirror; a beam from a flashlight bounced off this mirror onto a solar cell. When they spoke into the cone, they hoped the mirror would vibrate enough to cause that famous undulating current of Bell’s to emanate from the solar cell. They decided their major innovation would involve the use of magnifying glasses to increase the intensity of light reaching the mirrored surface and the solar cell. Figure 19 shows this design.
Figure 19: First design by a group trying to improve on Bell’s photophone in an invention and design class.
The initial arrangement caused a small fluctuation in the needle of a multimeter when someone spoke or blew into the cone. I told groups that they could use a multimenter to test the effectiveness of their designs. Bell, of course, did not have this kind of tool available to him, but he did use crude galvanometers of various sorts. The fluctuating needle suggested that this group’s photophone might indeed be producing an undulating current, albeit a weak one.
The group was concerned that this marginal effect might be due to ambient light and instability in the set-up. Like Bell, whose processes they were studying as the worked, the students focused on slots in their mental model that seemed especially likely to improve the quality of transmission. Initially, they worked in a reflection slot, trying to accentuate the fluctuations in the light by substituting a variety of reflecting materials. The most promising result was obtained with a piece of a CD. Then they experimented with the way in which the reflector was mounted, attaching it to the can with rubber bands and finally mounting it on a rubber membrane. They also came up with a kind of container slot, enclosing the apparatus in a cheesebox in an effort to stabilize it and minimize outside lighting. This set of changes produced a positive result, though students were careful to note that some of the fluctuation might be due to factors other than the voice.
Overall, the group concluded that there was still too little fluctuation. They worked for a while in a magnification slot and found that still did not make a significant improvement. Despite their reservations, they had to submit a caveat, signaling their intention to invent a photophone, and they felt the design still had potential. A real inventor would not have to submit a caveat before it was quite ready, but would be under enormous pressure to submit as early as possible.
I had a former student, Greg Morse, who was a patent examiner, come down and review the students’ caveats. He brought with him a copy of Bell’s original photophone patent. The group discovered that their main claim to novelty, concerning the manipulation of magnifying glasses, was also claimed by Bell and therefore was part of the state of the art.
The day Elisha Gray submitted a caveat for a 'speaking telegraph' he had an experience similar to this student group: he learned that another inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, had just submitted a patent covering spoken transmission. The patent office declared that Gray's caveat and Bell's patent were in interference, meaning that Bell could not be granted a patent until it was clear that his claims were either prior to, or different from, Gray's. Bell learned from the patent examiner that the point of interference concerned a clause Bell had inserted at the last minute in which he claimed the possibility of using variable resistance to create an undulating current. Elisha Gray had featured a variable resistance transmitter in his caveat, and Edison would base his successful carbon transmitter on the same principle . After several weeks, the interference was declared invalid, on the grounds that Bell's patent had arrived in the office earlier. But Bell's conversation with the patent examiner may have suggested a change in his research direction and led to his first experiments with the liquid transmitter (see Chapter 3).
The students in the photophone group had to make the same kind of change in direction after they submitted their caveat, revising their original intentions in the light of their interference with Bell's actual photophone patent. They decided the solar cell simply could not detect the small vibrations of a mirrored surface. Instead, they removed the reflection slot altogether and they tried shining the light directly on the cell, jiggling it and varying its intensity. The most positive results were obtained when the intensity of the light was changed, rather than when it was merely vibrated.
They now had a new goal: to "find some way to vary the intensity of the light rather than just vibrating it." They brainstormed, then hypothesized "that somehow the vibrations of the membrane could be used in a circuit to intermittently open and close the circuit. This should cause the light to flash in a pattern corresponding to the vibrations." They were considering what Bell called an intermittent current--a succession of on-off pulses. Bell's first telephone patent described why such a design would not work--why one needed an undulating current instead. The group apparently did not recall Bell's analysis, and plowed ahead. This point in the photophone group’s process was described by a member as follows:
Many times, the inspirations for what can later be seen as a breakthrough come from changing the perspective of your efforts. In this case, when confronted with the Bell patent obstacle, we had to change our entire focus. ‘Stepping outside of the system’ could be a good way of describing this action. We had to step out of the ‘classroom’ system which we following in thinking that this was an assignment, and not an actual ‘inventive process’. We also stepped out of the ‘historical’ mode, and looked at our problem form a modern, multi-disciplinary vantage point.
To approach this goal, the group created a new contacts slot that resembled one Bell had created in his March 8th experiments with the liquid transmitter (see Chapter 3, Figure 17). They began a series of experiments in the contacts slot, beginning with a device that included a piece of aluminum foil on the membrane that was connected to the negative lead on the battery by a length of solder. The solder was put as close as possible to the foil without touching it. They tested this arrangement by shouting "Testing, 1, 2, 3" into the mouthpiece, and obtained a negative result, which they attributed to the fact that the foil was not rigid enough. So they replaced it with a tack pointing upwards, which made enough contact with the solder to cause the light to shine, but not enough to activate the solar cell. This was a somewhat positive result, promising enough to suggest that their current goal deserved further pursuit.
But it did lead to a change in their hypothesis. Instead of making the light flash on and off, they decided to let it stay on. Now they were back on Bell's idea of creating an undulating current, in this case by somehow varying the intensity of the light source. They found that the vibrations of the membrane caused the light intensity to fluctuate, but not enough to affect the readings from the multimeter.
They hypothesized that if the two contacts had more surface area, the signal would be improved (see Figure 20). They tried two tacks, with their flat surfaces facing each other. They then achieved a dramatic positive result: "a seemingly nice, reproducible fluctuation in light intensity was made. On checking the resistance of the solar cell (and thereby the current) we saw that resistance did change proportionally to words spoken into the mouthpiece." Similarly, Bell’s first telephone had not produced distinct speech sounds, but a mumbling that Bell treated as a positive result--so positive that he went to patent on the basis of it.
Figure 20: Final design of a student group improving upon Bell’s photophone. Scanned pictures are from the group’s notebook.
The group then moved to stabilizing this arrangement, adding features like a platform that would make their experimental set-up into something more reliable. I permitted students to hook their devices into modern amplifiers and tape-recorders for demonstration; using the latter, this group was eventually able to obtain a scratchy recording of speech. They also produced a patent, which included the following summary of the design:
In response to sound sent through a cylindrical mouthpiece, a diaphragm stretched over the opposite end of the mouthpiece vibrates. This undulation alters the flow of current between two closely spaced metal contacts, one of which is attached to the taut diaphragm. When touching, the two contacts complete a circuit containing a light and power source. The intensity of the light depends upon and fluctuates with the amount of current supplied to the light source. These variable emissions from the light are received by a means for transforming solar energy to electrical current. The means for transforming has analog output based on the variable intensity of the light. This output can be sent to a generic receiver.
This detailed account of one group's progress shows the way in which students' invention processes can parallel those of a historical inventor, but still be original in important respects. For this group, there did seem to be elements of virtual apprenticeship. They were not explicitly aware of the close parallels between their invention processes and Bell’s, but the way in which they systematically experimented in slots and re-discovered the importance of the undulating current suggests a tacit influence. Similarly, student teams could learn different patterns and styles from other scientists and inventors.
This group was not typical--indeed, there was no such thing as a typical group. Other final designs included a system that coupled a carbon transmitter with a photophone which amplified the signal, the combination of a resonant chamber with a carbon rod, which acted as a sliding resistor, several variations on the liquid transmitter and on transmitters that worked by electromagnetic induction. Not all groups followed processes that resembled Bell’s; many tried to take short-cuts by hacking together an initial prototype and sticking with it, even when it didn’t work very well. Students do not have the commitment of an inventor; therefore, many are not motivated to study the invention process in detail and follow it through all the unavoidable twists and turns.
Overall, students in the course learned:
(1). How to work in groups--particularly interdisciplinary groups. There was a kind of 'culture clash' in the Invention and Design class, which drew from two populations--students in a school of engineering and students majoring in other fields, including psychology, cognitive science, and architecture . In the latest Invention and Design course, several students commented that the engineering students were more bottom-up in their approach, whereas the students from outside of engineering were more top-down. Students from fields like mechanical and electrical engineering were more likely to jump into building a working device, while non-engineering students were forced to take a larger view of the project, trying to figure out the overall goals. This difference was far from universal, however; the course attracted a large group of systems engineering students, who were trained to adopt a top-down approach. As groups worked together, disciplinary stereotypes gradually disappeared and were replaced with a recognition of the advantage of taking multiple perspectives on a problem. The photophone group described above provides an example of the kind of close, multi-disciplinary teamwork that could emerge.
One-third of the students in a recent class emphasized that learning the strengths and weaknesses of individual group members and allocating work accordingly were two of the most important things in successful group work. Open communications and respect for group members were also considered extremely important in group work by the students. One student summed it up: "Every group is different, one person can radically affect a dynamic, delegation is important, but communication of expectations and ideas is most important."
(2). How to invent:
By the end of this module, students knew how to keep invention notebooks, write caveats and patents and revise them, based on comments from an examiner. They also knew how to build a prototype and demonstrate it. Naturally, some students acquired higher proficiency at these skills than others, but all experienced the invention process, first-hand.
We also tried to instill wisdom by asking students to reflect on their own invention processes and compare what they did with Bell and Gray. The photophone group described above is a good example of how students could unpack their own processes.
Comparison with the inventor was hardest, as the photophone group again illustrates. They followed a process very similar to Bell’s, but were rarely conscious of that fact. I had to point out the similarities, in order to make them explicit. I did the same for other groups. I wanted them to see that they were adopting one style of invention; they could also study and follow the styles of other inventors. Bell, for example, was very verbal, adopted a conservative focusing heuristic and worked with one collaborator. I also talked about Edison, who was much more visual and kinesthetic than Bell, preferred a focused gambling heuristic and ran the first real R&D lab at Menlo Park. That’s how Edison could afford to be a gambler; he could have members of his team construct several very different prototype telephones at the same time, and compare them.
I thought this kind of active learning module might inspire secondary students to take a greater interest in invention before they had decided on majors and made career choices. With support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, I set up a summer course for gifted students from 9th through 11th grades, collaborating with two colleagues in the Education school and a high-school physics teacher, who agreed to run the class .
Using student test scores, responses to essays, and teacher recommendations, we selected 15 male and 16 female students entering grades nine through eleven to attend each of two three-week sessions. One-quarter of the students were from ethnic groups traditionally under-represented in technical fields.
The university course lasted for a full semester. The summer enrichment course lasted for only three weeks. (It was given twice, with sixteen students in the first iteration and fifteen in the second). But in the former, students were distracted by dozens of competing assignments, whereas in the latter, their sole focus was this course. In the former, we had grades to motivate students; in the latter, we had to rely on their intrinsic motivation and whatever inspiration we could give. We planned the telephone module to last for about ten days.
The students were eager and enthusiastic on their first day of class. They were immediately faced with a challenging set of materials similar to those I used with university students in my invention and design class, including detailed information on the challenge they would face, samples from Bell's patents and notebooks, and a workbench covered with batteries, wires, containers of different shapes and sizes and other materials they could use as they tried to create an improvement on Bell's patent (for a complete set of these materials, see http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/id/id_sep/id_sep.html).
As with the college course, when we assigned students to groups, we tried to achieve diversity as much as possible. We mixed students according to sex, and ethnic background. Over one-half of the students were from groups traditionally underrepresented in science and engineering, so we were able to achieve good diversity on that dimension. We tried to infer learning styles from short essays the students had written to get into the program, looking for evidence of interest in mathematics, writing, building, and/or drawing. We tried to balance these indicators of different styles within groups.
The group experience was probably the most difficult and yet rewarding for the students. Most had the confidence that comes from considering themselves gifted; many were used to being the leaders in their groups in school. But now each talented student had to work closely with at least two others who were different in important respects, all of them collaborating intimately because the task was far too complex for any student to complete on his or her own. Students learned that invention is a process that requires numerous abilities or talents (e.g., building, sketching, writing, public speaking) and is enhanced by the engagement of persons exhibiting a variety of intellectual skills and styles.
The classroom was often noisy and chaotic. At any given time, one group might be building a prototype, while another group argued about who should do what. In a third group, only one student might be working while the others appeared to daydream and disengage from the task. We quickly found that we had to play an even more open role than teachers in traditional guided discovery experiences . In guided discovery, the student knows the goal of the activity. But in our case, we could only tell them when they were violating basic principles of physics and supply them with examples of similar designs completed by 19th century inventors. We could never be sure whether a particular alternative would work -- we had to wait breathlessly with the students to see.
Despite--or perhaps because of--the absence of grades or other contingencies, most groups rose to the challenge. One group successfully demonstrated that they could transmit speech using a photophone, a result that was as good as that achieved by the university group described above. The secondary students relied on the mirror approach favored by Bell and did not include the innovations in the contacts slot done by the college students; nonetheless, their final device worked as well. They achieved this result by careful and systematic testing of each component. One female student was the leader, but eventually, with our help, all group members became involved in some aspect of the task. For example, one member who distanced herself from the group throughout much of its activity showed initiative when it came time to write the patent. As facilitators, we spent much of our time encouraging groups to take advantage of the talents of all members, especially groups with a strong leader who tended to want to do everything her or his way.
In another group, the three students had trouble interacting from the second day of class. By the end of the first week, a communication barrier had grown between the two male students and the one female. For example, in a discussion following the film Mosquito Coast and other movies about inventors, one of the male group members noted that in many of the films the inventor was male, was seeking to satisfy a dominant father figure, and was driven by a dream. He continued by saying that the female group member could have definitely filled that role as an inventor, especially since she had such good ideas. But she perceived this as an insult, while the course instructors felt that the male student was attempting to give her a compliment.
At the beginning of the second week, each group conducted a "group progress discussion" in which they went over disagreements like the one above and tried to learn how to communicate better. As a result, the members of this group felt they "worked out" many of their problems, and they did not perceive any major difficulties during the remainder of the telephone project or the solar energy project that followed.
On the telephone module, they began with the idea of a button the speaker could press that would open the listener's phone and fire a bagel at her. This playful, silly idea actually got them involved in thinking about multiple telegraph circuits. Next, they considered having the speaker press a button to display a sign to the listener: a smiling face, or a frowning face, or a heart. The group sketched a workable circuit to implement this design, but abandoned it for a more conventional telephone transmitter, in which a coil would be attached to a diaphragm and move through a magnetic field. Individual group members appeared to contribute equally to the telephone project, with each person working on all aspects of the project design, construction and trouble-shooting.
Not all groups were successful. One group spent much of its time designing an elaborate phone with an elongated speaking tube. When they demonstrated it in front of the class, it worked poorly, and they had trouble describing how their design was an improvement over Bell's patent. The embarrassment of failing so conspicuously in front of their peers drove this group to work harder on the second project, which we will discuss later in this chapter.
Many of the final designs resembled those created by historical inventors. For example, one group put their diaphragm between two transformers without realizing this design closely resembled a polar relay Bell tried to transform into a telephone transmitter. Many of the problems encountered by students also resembled those encountered by inventors. For example, one group came up with a design that resembled one of Edison's in which the vibrations of a diaphragm compressed carbon, thereby alternately increasing and decreasing the current. They found that the carbon gradually lost its friability, and the current no longer changed. Edison had a similar problem; he eventually created a compact carbon button which he put right on the diaphragm . These instances of re-invention suggested, again, that students were experiencing a kind of virtual apprenticeship.
I was concerned that these gifted secondary students would see the telephone as an antiquated technology and conclude that any lessons they learned from building it would not apply to modern inventions. Therefore, I invited Duane Bowker, one of the inventors of TrueVoice at Bell Labs, to come talk to my students. Duane Bowker is one of the inventors of AT&T TrueVoiceSM. The following is an excerpt from an AT&T hand-out provided by Duane describing his invention:
AT & T TrueVoiceSM is a method that greatly improves the quality of long-distance transmission by a) selectively amplifying lower speech frequencies to compensate for the low frequency attenuation introduced by typical telephone transmitters and receivers and (b) increasing the overall loudness of the voice to a level more typical of local telephone calls. The low frequency emphasis makes the person's voice over the telephone sound more like the way that person's voice would normally sound in a face to face conversation. The low-frequency emphasis, in essence, widens the bandwidth of the end-to-end telecommunications channel at the lower end of the spectrum where many talkers have significant amounts of speech energy. The increase in overall loudness makes the speech easier to hear on long distance connections and brings the speech level of typical talkers much closer to that which is considered optimal by most people. The loudness compensation is only applied to softer connections and will not make already loud connections too loud. (http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/classes/tcc315/alm/telephone/advice)
At Bell Labs, where Duane Bowker works, every successful project eventually becomes a team effort. Duane created the idea for TrueVoice with his colleague, Jim James. They knew each other well, had worked together for a long time, were both cognitive psychologists, and did not need to divide labor. But when it came time to implement the idea, Duane became the product champion--he sold the idea to the rest of the company and helped organized the teams that took a rough prototype and turned it into a new technology. For example, Duane and Jim initially thought that the way to improve transmission was to work with the transmitter and receiver, but a group working on long-distance lines convinced them that was the place to make improvements, and then set about doing it.
Duane discussed the importance of keeping an invention notebook. AT&T owns his, and keeps it under lock and key. He also noted that he and his colleague had received several patents, which were held by AT&T. He was very careful not to tell us too much about how the technology was developed; hence the hand-out, which had been cleared by the company.
What he did talk about was how to work in teams, information that was especially salient for the secondary gifted students, who were not used to working together on projects of this complexity. Duane talked about six aspects of team invention.
(1) Goals: Typically, a group project begins with a set of goals like the ones described in the packet the students were given at the beginning of the telephone module. However, the goal is usually very general and leaves room for innovation. In Duane’s case, the goal was to selectively amplify low speech frequencies. He and Jim James came up with this goal based on their experience as cognitive scientists; their unique expertise enabled them to identify this as the main problem with distortion over long-distance networks. But this goal could be attained in a number of ways. They started out with improving the telephone and ended-up focusing on long-distance lines, which required experts from other groups at Bell Labs.
In the students’ case, the goal was to improve on Bell and Gray’s designs, which left a wide range of alternatives open. Groups still had to decide which direction to take.
Duane suggested using brainstorming, in which group members write down and discuss ideas without any criticism. No one can say anything negative. Brainstorming creates a climate where people can listen and share freely. My colleague Bill Scherer adds brainwriting to this--writing whatever ideas come into ones head before the brainstorming session, without trying to discriminate the good from the bad.
Eventually, these ideas need to be focused, most eliminated, some combined. Most of the university students found this brainstorming the hardest; they wanted to jump into an immediate solution, to guess the right answer, the way they would in a laboratory exercise. The secondary students were generally more willing to brainstorm, as exemplified by the group that came up with the bagel telephone, above.
There is no handy technique like brainstorming for the winnowing and focusing phase of invention. One benefit of brainstorming may be that it instills an attitude of mutual respect among group members, teaching them to really listen to one another. This kind of atmosphere is more likely to produce the kind of constructive criticism that must follow brainstorming.
(2) Resources: Groups also typically begin with limited resources--in this case, a set of materials. If a group in a corporation like AT&T needs to get more, they have to work together to persuade management. A group that has a strong consensus makes a much better case for additional materials than one where some members don't know what is going on, or disagree with others about the group's direction.
(3) Division of labor: In a bad team, nobody knows who does what. A good team divides the labor into micro-tasks. These tasks should be suited to the expertise and interests of individual members, as much as possible. One of the unrealistic things about the module in the invention classes is that students do not get to select their additional team members, based on expertise. This kind of top-down assignment often happens in companies, but most really creative teams organize themselves. I suggested to student groups that they do an expertise assessment right at the outset, to see what their strengths were. On an open-ended project, they could evolve a design that played to their strengths.
(4) Schedule: Groups often begin with a schedule imposed from the outside, but effective groups also develop an internal schedule that sets goals for the completion of micro-tasks. For example, while two people are building a transmitter, another two can be writing a caveat. Our schedule on the telephone module included only general deadlines, like caveat and patent. We deliberately refused to manage each group’s internal deadlines--they had to generate their own set of smaller steps to achieve this goal. Interestingly, I felt the college students had more trouble doing this, in part because of other, competing assignments that had rigid deadlines.
(5) Rules: Groups often find that they need to set-up a set of rules or guidelines for participation and decision-making. For example, one of the dangers of dividing labor is that an individual working on one part of the device may get out of touch with an individual working on another--and the components will not work together. One way around that is to get the group together at regular intervals and discuss progress. Again, we encouraged groups to do this on their own, giving them advice and help.
(6) Leadership: Having a leader like Duane who serves as a product champion is great, provided the leader listens and makes sure the rest of the team is 'on board'. A group can make it a rule that everyone gets a chance to talk at meetings, to avoid one member becoming too dominant; groups can also pick a moderator who is not the champion to ensure that alternatives are considered, but the discussion does not bog down--one has to make decisions about what to do and move ahead.
An outside evaluator with expertise in gifted education made the following comment after seeing groups present their telephone projects: "[The groups] clearly reflected an understanding of what they had done, its meaning, its reasons--why things work and don't, where their theory falls short of being realized and the steps necessary to span the gap--and the relationship of whole and part. It was clear they have read and heard much complex information which they can translate into practice and that they have a sense of where their inventions are relative to Bell's early work."
Duane Bowker commented that he was "surprised how well some of the experiences the students related mapped onto the way things often go in an existing engineering organization like AT&T Bell Laboratories... The students showed a great deal of insight into the process and team issues their groups ran into. You and I appear to be in agreement that exposing engineering students to these process and teamwork issues, and giving them opportunities to develop those skills that make the effective team participants, can really enhance their long-term career success."
From the telephone module, both post-secondary and secondary students learned more about how to function in design teams and also about how the invention process really works. This knowledge consisted in a combination of information and skills. To help students develop the wisdom to know when and why to apply this new knowledge, I wanted them to have an opportunity to create a new technology of their own. In section 5.5, I will describe a module that tries to accomplish this goal. Before students experience that module, however, they have to work on cases like DesignTex and Dow Corning to understand how ethics is can be integrated into invention and design.
The case-study approach is being used increasingly to teach engineering design and engineering ethics . In this section, I will talk about new kinds of cases that need to be created to complement those that already exist.
Most case studies of creative individuals and entrepreneurs focus on the successful individuals. For example, has interviewed over two hundred creative individuals and attempted to make generalizations about what makes them creative, including the fact that they experience something called ‘flow’ when they are working at peak potential. The problem with this interesting set of cases is that there is no control group, no set of cases based on individuals working in the same areas who are considered less successful.
Robert K. Merton identified the Matthew effect, named after a passage in Matthew:
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath .
According to Merton, "the Matthew effect consists of the accruing of greater increments of recognition for particular scientific contributions to scientists of considerable repute and the withholding of such recognition from scientists who have not yet made their mark" . Merton saw this effect in the careers of some of the scientists he studied; when they started out, they had trouble getting credit for discoveries, especially if one of their collaborators was an eminent scientist. Later in their careers, after they had established their reputation, the reverse happened--they received credit for work done by junior collaborators, even when they tried to share. A classic case is the discovery of penicillin. In most accounts, Alexander Fleming is given virtually all the credit, but the actual refinement of this mold into a powerful antibiotic was due to Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and others .
Many of the successful individuals in Csiksenmihalyi’s studies, and others like Covey’s Seven Habits of Effective People , will have benefited from the Matthew effect. Like Fleming, many of them will be given more credit than they deserve for their discoveries and inventions, and others laboring with them will have received less. One of the generalizations one can make about being labeled creative or effective is to be successful--success can be a cause, not an effect.
Allof which is not to disparage post-hoc cases of discoveries like electromagnetic induction and inventions like the telephone. These are valuable and important aids to education, and this book is full of examples of them. But we need at least some case-studies that focus on discoveries and inventions in the making, before the winners are known. In the telephone case, for example, Bell apparently kept better records than his rival Elisha Gray but Bell’s records are also better preserved because of Bell’s subsequent fame. We might still have Elisha Gray notebooks if Gray had received more credit for his successful telegraph inventions.
Most engineering ethics cases focus on moral failures like Bhopal and the Challenger and the Pinto rather than on successes like Climatex Lifecycle. The converse of the Matthew effect, evident in some of these ethics cases, is the tendency to blame the victim. The Dow Corning case is an example; because the company was sued successfully, it must have done something wrong. Again, one way of correcting for this potential problem is to study emerging designs with a strong ethical component.
A related problem is that few cases studies show how ethics can be integrated into the earliest phases of the invention process. For example, the Challenger and Bhopal cases focus on what to do late in the design process, when students or managers have to decide what mistakes led to these disasters. The equivalent would be a Frankenstein case in which one has to deal with the monster after it had been given life and labeled a monster--a valuable case, but one should add an earlier dilemma-point in which one looks at whether it was ethical to create this being. Similarly, in the Challenger case, it is useful to look at the original decision to create the shuttle and what constraints were accepted at that time. Cases of moral lapses late in the design process need to be complemented by others that raise ethical issues at the invention stage, when one can still consider whether bringing a human being to life makes sense, as well as how one might go about it.
In introducing cases into the engineering curriculum, in many instances ,( students are presented with short hypothetical scenarios or truncated vignettes from real events. These short cases are useful in pinpointing ethical issues. The danger of only using short cases is it might encourage students to attack the particular issue, while neglecting the actual context and practical constraints in which any decision process is imbedded. It has been shown that longer, real-life cases that describe actual ethical and engineering dilemmas are also very effective teaching tools . If so, then there is a role far longer, more detailed cases that are based on real-life events and include multiple decision points for which there is no one simple "right" answer.
At the University of Virginia, we have created a Web site (http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/ethics/home.html) which contains a series of such case-studies. This Web Site was awarded first prize in a competition sponsored by the MIT’s Ethics Center for Engineering and Science. The site features primarily cases that have been researched and written by students, with faculty support from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Darden School of Graduate Business Administration. The website consists of a collection of cases that focus on ethical considerations in the early stages of the invention and design process, rather than as aftermath of a completed design. Because of the growing use of cases in engineering courses, and because it is difficult to separate out design issues from those in ethics and in the environment, we are developing cases that encourage students to think imaginatively about design in light of the increasing concern for the environment and other issues that will be challenging to them in their work as engineers. We hope to produce engineers who will be better able to make ethical decisions about creating and marketing new technologies .
Gioia, in his discussion of the Ford Pinto case, makes the distinction between ethical decisions, which accord with accepted professional standards and codes of ethics and moral decisions, which stem from a higher conviction about what is 'right' . Similarly, in Kohlberg’s scale of moral development, the most advanced stage involves this kind of ‘higher conviction about what is right’ . Gilligan argues this kind of conviction ought to emerge from a deep sense of compassion for others . If Gioia had really been able to put himself in the shoes of a parent whose child was driving a Pinto, as well as looking at the problem from Ford’s perspective, he might have arrived at a better decision.
Codes, like algorithms, are helpful. But codes cannot cover all possibilities, and must be tempered by compassion. Creativity requires going beyond what is known. Similarly, to apply ethical guidelines like the McDonough/Braungart protocols to novel situations, one must grasp their spirit. Lyons and Kaelin were particularly well suited to do that, because of their previous experiences trying to make environmentally-intelligent decisions. Students need to be taken through a series of case dilemmas in order to get a vicarious version of the same experience. In the section that follows, I am going to describe the dilemmas we use for each of the cases we discussed in Chapter 4.
When we first used this case with students, we told them the story up to the point where the dye manufacturers resisted letting the EPEA inspect their production methods. The purpose of multiple dilemmas in cases is to allow students to think about problems that require wisdom for a solution. This dye dilemma is too late in the process. Now, we begin by asking students to evaluate the four options Susan Lyons considered before she brought McDonough in as a consultant, including Foxfiber, organic cotton, PET and Climatex. Which would be best, if one considered criteria like cost, availability and aesthetics?
From a cost standpoint, Susan Lyons saw the options as relatively equivalent. From the standpoint of availability, Climatex had an edge because she knew Kaelin and trusted him to deliver. From the standpoint of aesthetics, Foxfiber had a very limited range of colors, organic cotton was better, but still had limited colors. The range of dyes available for PET was uncertain. Climatex again had an edge.
Which of these options would be best, if one put environmental sustainability first? In order to answer this question, students have to consider what environmental sustainability means. Sally Fox’s product looks best from many environmental perspectives--there are no toxic chemicals used in treating or dyeing, and it is grown organically. Climatex is certified by Eco-Tex as human ecology safe; it has to be incinerated, instead of recycled, so students have to decide whether incineration is an acceptable alternative. If one values turning existing wastes into products, PET is particularly attractive, because it makes soda bottles into fabric. In the end, the choice depends on having a framework for deciding what counts as environmental sustainability. Students typically realize this in class discussion. They also have to think about the extent to which sustainability ought to take precedence over other design criteria.
After McDonough supplies a framework, we ask the students to re-consider Lyon’s choices. Climatex fails because incineration does not fit waste equals food. Chemicals are required to dye organic cotton, so one must check each carefully for potential toxins. McDonough also points out that cotton is frequently grown under oppressive conditions, so one must check whether the cotton is grown by poorly-paid migrant laborers. The question of organic cotton illustrates how sustainablity involves looking at the whole process by which a technological system is created and implemented.
PET may be made from recycled fabric, but cannot itself be recycled because it mixes organic and technical products in a way that prevents their separation. Foxfiber fits the McDonough criteria, raising the question of whether one pick a fabric with limited colors and availability because it is the best environmentally. Is it more important to make a statement or sell a product?
The solution is a new design. Students need to see why adopting a novel sustainable framework forces Lyons and Kaelin to come up with a new alternative. One cannot make a statement without creating a viable, marketable product--the statement is the product. As McDonough says, "It exists, therefore it is possible."
Now students are ready to try our initial dilemma, at the point where the dye companies have refused to let Michael Braungart and the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency inspect their manufacturing processes. We ask the student what to do next. Typically, we put them in roles---one group pretends to be McDonough, another Braungart, another Kaelin at the mill, who will have to pay for Braungart and the EPEA, another a fictitious group of customers who get to indicate whether they care about the extra environmental benefits--this customer group can be sub-divided into mainstream and ‘green niche’ consumers. Depending on the size of the class, we sometimes add other roles.
In one memorable class, both McDonough and Braungart came and talked to the groups that filled their roles. Naturally, these groups suggested no compromise--persisting until they found a company that would make the dyes.
When asked to give their personal opinions, over half of the students typically elect to market Climatex and keep doing research on dyes. A smaller group tries to argue that Kaelin should become a dye manufacturer, but we point out how nearly impossible that is. Then we bring in the fabric and show them that sometimes you can succeed by sticking to your principles.
Then we shift to the Rohner Textil mill and put the students in Albin Kaelin’s shoes. He has to create a network of suppliers who will agree to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the EPEA’s protocols.
The first dilemma involved the twisting of the yarn. After the wool and ramie had been harvested, combed, blended and spun into a single yarn onto cones, the two or more single yarns needed to be twisted about one another in order to make the yarns strong enough to be fed through the loom. If the yarns were not strong enough or nonuniform, they would break, forcing the weaver at Rohner Textil to stop and repair them. This process kept the loom down for a while, obviously reducing productivity and quality of the product.
The problem that Kaelin faced was eliminating a coating chemical from the twisting process. It was a normal procedure to apply a chemical to the yarns as they were twisted. This process greatly improved the strength of the twisted yarn. The EPEA rejected the chemical, since it did not meet the design criteria.
The EPEA had approved a procedure that could be implemented at the same company that spun the yarn in Germany. Instead of the original chemical used for twisting, this company could use potato starch. First, potato starch was dissolved in ordinary water, and it was sprayed on the yarns as they were twisted. The twisted yarns were then dried, making the bond stronger. Finally, the excess starch was removed in another water bath. The yarns were again dried and wound on cones.
The technological capability of this company was such that these operations could be completed at a rapid pace. They had already agreed to submit to the EPEA all information on the spinning of the yarns, and they were willing to cooperate for the twisting as well. This company was medium-sized, consisting of about 270 full-time employees. Having both the spinning and twisting done at the same place was an attractive situation, since this agreed with Albin Kaelin's philosophy of "keeping the number of players in the pool as small as possible."
Another option was to give the twisting business to a small, four-person operation in Switzerland, located halfway between Rohner Textil and the spinning
factory. This factory had also worked previously with Albin Kaelin and Rohner. Its entire business consisted of twisting yarn. This mill used older machinery that operated at lower speeds from newer machines, such as those located at the spinning mill. Because the machinery was slower, the price of twisting here was higher than at the spinning mill; however, this slower speed afforded two advantages. First, the yarn could be twisted in such a way that they were strong enough for the loom without adding large amounts of chemicals and washing them out after weaving. Second, the slower winding on the cones made the yarn rest more uniformly on the cones. The small company worked exclusively with all-natural yarns and used no chemicals in any of its twisting operations, except for lubricants for the machinery. The EPEA also approved the twisting procedure of this company.
Students are asked which company and procedure Kaelin should choose. They tend to favor the first, or larger company because it is more likely to stay in business and also because it combines operations, limiting the number of players. In fact, Kaelin decided to work with the smaller company, because he wanted to fulfill the spirit, not just the letter, of the EPEA’s protocol. No chemicals was better than one that used potato starch. Also, Kaelin liked the fact that the smaller company would be more dependent on Rohner Textil’s business, and therefore more likely to make future modifications in order to continue to make Climatex Lifecycle even more environmentally intelligent.
Even though you have the product, the project is not finished. (Albin Kaelin)
In 1994, Steelcase consisted of a $2.3 billion company, employing 17,700 worldwide. Between 1986 and 1990, Steelcase averaged a dominant 21 percent of the United States office furniture industry, and in 1989, it purchased a series of design-oriented companies to bolster their dominance, which they feared was threatened by innovations being made by smaller, nimbler companies. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was this sort of innovation; the fledgling Bell Telephone Company took on the corporate giant Western Union, and eventually outstripped it.
To avoid being surprised in this way, Steelcase bought small, innovative firms like DesignTex and formed them into the Steelcase Design Partnership. The goal of this effort was to add creative products to Steelcase’s overall market profile. The William McDonough Collection, based on Climatex Lifecycle, could deliver what Steelcase wanted.
Therefore, Steelcase wanted to leave DesignTex the maximum room for creativity, and so did not interfere with its daily operations. One downside of this is that DesignTex had to sell to Steelcase like it would to any other company. There is no guarantee Steelcase will use fabrics like Climatex Lifecycle on its furniture.
The McDonough design protocol was paying off for Albin Kaelin. In March of 1994, Lyons, McDonough, and Kaelin signed an agreement giving Rohner Textil the patent rights for the manufacturing of Climatex Lifecycle. In exchange, Kaelin agreed to pay the cost of the EPEA and granted Lyons and DesignTex exclusive use of the fabric in the United States until the end of 1996 after its planned release in July of 1995 under the trade name, "The William McDonough Collection." The product was not set for release in Europe until December 1995, so this arrangement gave DesignTex and McDonough a big head start in the market. Possessing the patent and trademark, however, gave Rohner Textil a great deal of flexibility over the projected long term product life of Climatex Lifecycle.
In the fall of 1994 Susan Lyons made arrangements to use the McDonough Collection fabric on Steelcase's Sensor chair, which won an award from the Industrial Designers Society of America. Steelcase sold over one million chairs from 1986 to 1990. The Sensor chair had become a benchmark for the industry by 1994, and it presented an opportunity for the McDonough Collection to reach a large customer base quickly.
Before Climatex Lifecycle could be used on this chair, it needed to undergo rigorous testing to meet a number of different performance standards, including International Standards Organization (ISO), Swiss textile standards and the standards set by the Association of Contract Textiles (ACT), of which DesignTex was a member.
By the middle of November, it appeared that the testing goals were in reach. At that time, however, Steelcase introduced a new test required of all fabrics to be used on its furniture, because the company intended to automate its manufacturing processes. As Albin Kaelin later reflected, "as this test was new at the time, we were not able to get sophisticated details. The only parameters we did know was that it was a test to ensure that the newly introduced robots could upholster the chairs easily, so that the fabric does not slip out of the grips of the robot."
The result of the introduction of this test at the end of November 1994 was a disaster. As Lyons wrote to Kaelin, "Well, this is an adventure--everything failed on Steelcase... The reason for failure was cited as a lack of stretch in the filling direction. I am thinking that the ramie may be too rigid... We have found that fabrics with higher wool content perform better on molded seating. I know that dropping the ramie content may compromise the Climatex features, but frankly, I think it is more urgent to get the molded seating pass."
At Rohner, Kaelin and his team worked out changes to the finishing procedures to make the fabric less rigid. They came up with four different finishing chemicals that made the fabric pass the Steelcase robot test. The EPEA approved only one of the four chemicals, and this chemical could pass the EPEA protocols only if Rohner committed to eliminating it. Plus, the fabric would now have to be re-tested according to all of the ISO and ACT standards.
McDonough, Braungart, Lyons and Kaelin had fought an uphill battle to make the product as environmentally intelligent as possible, and they had overcome overwhelming odds. Should they compromise the "waste equals food" standards in order to please one major customer?
I use this dilemma to talk about satisficing versus optimizing. According to Herbert Simon, most managers are satisficers ; they would look for an option that satisfies the constraints, but not worry about optimizing. In the previous dilemma, Kaelin refused to add chemicals in order to accommodate a larger twisting mill, even though the EPEA had approved the chemical. In that case, Kaelin was acting like an optimizer, not a satisficer, trying to exceed requirements.
Again, we continue to use role-playing in this case. Because Kaelin acted like an optimizer on the last case, those students who play his role typically argue that he would optimize again on this case. Lyons, of course, wanted to compromise. McDonough and Braungart are generally portrayed as resisting compromise, like Kaelin. Some students in these groups argue that Steelcase ought to bend its rules, given that the company does have a strong environmental record. Their model is the earlier case of the dye companies, where persistence paid off. We let the group that role-plays Steelcase decide on this issue, then tell them that the actual company would not have considered compromise. This dilemma provides an interesting lesson in how manufacturing standards affect environmental design.
In the end, Kaelin and Lyons compromised and added the chemical for Steelcase. But it was only a temporary satisficing strategy. He and the other members of the network retained a commitment to continuous improvement. Optimization is a moving target.
The case of Paul Flückiger, the dye-master at Rohner Textil, was discussed in Chapter 3. Recall that Flückiger substituted a dye that fulfilled the EPEA’s requirements and was cheaper than the alternative supplied by Ciba-Geigy. However, he failed to follow the ISO 9001 standards and to consult the EPEA.
The dilemma for the students is what to do with Paul--reprimand him? fire him? compliment him on taking initiative and not being bound by procedures? We typically do not use role-playing on this case; we want the students to tell us what Kaelin would do, and what they would do. Some end up on the side of disciplining or reprimanding Paul. After all, he did not follow procedures. Others counter that the codes and procedures should not be taken too literally. After all, Paul was right--the new dye was cheaper, and just as environmentally benign.
We then explain that Kaelin blamed himself for not making sure all of his employees thoroughly understood why one had to follow this process. When building a sustainable network, one has to make certain that all of the members buy into the core values, because at some point, they are going to have to make independent decisions.
This process never ends. (Albin Kaelin)
Albin Kaelin was not surprised when the Ramie spinning mill closed its doors in early 1996. The textile industry worldwide was changing with the opening of markets in Eastern Europe and the continued expansion of production in Asia. The Swiss textile industry, with its tradition of stability and high standards for wages, was suffering from these structural changes. Overall, Swiss textile industry sales were down 9.5% between 1994 and 1995, and the trend was continuing.
The close of the spinning mill could not have occurred at a worse time for Kaelin and his team of thirty at Rohner. They could not afford to be cut off from their supply of ramie yarn when Climatex Lifecycle was new to the marketplace. Rohner Textil was weathering the recession rather well, because Climatex Lifecycle had been well-received in the United States through Rohner's large, important customer, DesignTex, Inc.
Initial sales reports from DesignTex and Rohner were very positive. Swiss TV dedicated seven minutes of the business news to highlight the operations of the Rohner mill. The product was introduced to the European Market in January of 1996, and because of all of the good publicity about the product, Kaelin had little trouble attracting customers.
Kaelin needed to act quickly, since his team of thirty did not have a significant stockpile of ramie yarn. Unfortunately, the mill that was spinning the wool fibers for Climatex Lifecycle did not have the machinery for preparing the ramie for spinning. Not every spinning mill was capable of processing ramie fibers because very few firms processed ramie fibers and not one manufacturer made machines suitable for stretching ramie. Kaelin explained "For most cases manufacturers can use linen and cotton as substitute materials for ramie, so ramie is not a popular fiber." This was not an option for Kaelin, since ramie and wool were the materials the EPEA approved for Climatex Lifecycle.
The spinning mill that had just closed overcame this problem when one of its machine operators was able to modify a wool worsting machine so that it could handle ramie fibers. The operator moved the rollers farther apart and knew how to modify the speed of the machinery so that the ramie fibers would not break. The process was highly dependent on his skill at operating and maintaining the modified machinery, in contrast with wool spinning, which was highly automated.
Kaelin and Designer Lothar Pfister, also responsible for product development, canvassed Europe to see if there were other mills which may have modified its equipment accordingly. They found none, but they did find four spinning mills that were willing to purchase the equipment from the recently-closed spinning mill and transfer the equipment to their locations. Each mill said it would be willing to finance the cost of purchasing and transporting the machinery.
Knowing the state of the industry, Kaelin and Pfister were not sure if the mills could afford to finance the machinery. They wanted to avoid repeating this process by choosing a spinning mill in danger of bankruptcy. They were not even sure if the machinery, once transported, could be reassembled to deliver high quality ramie fibers. They gathered as much information about each alternative as they could.
The students are given all the information Kaelin had on each of these choices, and asked to guess what he would do, and what they would do in the same situation. In order to evaluate Kaelin’s decisions, they had to be able to exercise enough moral imagination to put themselves in his shoes and really understand his perspective. Then they would be free to disagree with it in a thoughtful way.
The first mill was located less than 100 km (about 60 miles) from Rohner. It was a large company and possessed several other spinning mills in Europe. It had the technological know-how and financing available to acquire the ramie equipment from the closed spinning mill. The management of this company seemed very committed and ethical, although it was difficult for Kaelin and Pfister to judge because the company was large. The financial condition of the company seemed stable and the risk of failure unlikely. At the time, they had little experience with producing ecological projects, but the company met all environmental legal limits and indicated that it would be willing to cooperate with the EPEA. Since the company was large, it was unlikely that they would modify their processes to adopt Rohner's quality standards; however, Rohner had worked with them in the past without notable problems.
The second firm owned its yarn dyeing and spinning mills in Northern Europe, about 1000 km (600 miles) from Rohner. This was a medium-sized company that was willing to purchase the equipment from the bankrupt spinning mill. Rohner had used a few samples of their work in Rohner's products. The company had proven to be highly flexible at meeting Rohner's demands for producing these sample lots, showing that they valued Rohner's business. Because this company was located in Northern Europe, Kaelin and Pfister were not sure if this company was meeting all environmental legal limits; however, the company indicated that it would likely cooperate with the EPEA inspections.
The third alternative possessed yarn dying and spinning facilities about 100 km (60 miles) from Rohner, which had ten years of experience working with this small company. The owners were the managers. The company was putting out one ecological line of products at the time and was in compliance with local environmental legal limits. It was likely that they would cooperate with the EPEA inspections and would be flexible to Rohner's quality demands. The firm had the technological expertise to handle operating the ramie spinning equipment, and the company was willing to purchase the equipment, but Kaelin and Pfister were unsure if this investment was too great for this struggling mill.
The last mill they considered existed 300 km (190 miles) from Rohner. It was a medium-sized company with experience in spinning for the fashion industry. This was a very old, family-owned company with highly committed family members managing the operations. Since the company worked in the fashion industry it was very flexible and adaptable to rapid changes in customer demands. They were also willing to take risks in developing new products, a necessary condition for survival in the fashion industry. Rohner had worked with this company in the past, producing successfully a few sample trials. The mill did not have an ecological line of products; but, it indicated that they would try to cooperate with the EPEA inspections. The company was willing to purchase the ramie spinning equipment from the closed mill, but because this was a family-owned company, Kaelin and Pfister could not glean information about the financial condition of this company.
This dilemma is difficult to present to students unless they do homework and come in with a list of pros & cons for each company, derived from the paragraphs above and additional information in the published version of the case. Another strategy is to divide the students into four groups, each one representing one of the companies, and have them come to class prepared to argue for their alternative.
For Kaelin, as always, the choice was obvious. He had anticipated the problem, and was already making the transition to the third, or smallest mill. Rohner's business would be more important to them: therefore they would be more willing to modify their procedures to adapt to the EPEA’s requirements. This decision flies in the face of the assumption by many of the students that a larger mill closer by would be better, because its size would make it less likely to go out of business and its proximity would save transportation costs in terms of both money and environmental damage. But for Kaelin, the network was the key: he could most easily integrate this mill into his existing network. He hired experts from the spinning mill that had gone out of business to teach everyone at the new mill how to fulfill the spirit as well as the letter of the design protocols.
Al Rich is an ethical entrepreneur whose company fails; therefore, his case fills a dual gap for students: it is a case where an inventor took environmental ethics seriously, right from the beginning, but failed as an entrepreneur. Was he any less creative and committed than individuals in Csiksenmihalyi’s studies? Students are plunged into a series of dilemmas that raise these questions before they know the outcome and can judge him from 20:20 hindsight.
Currently, the first dilemma focuses on whether Rich’s design would fit the McDonough/Braungart protocols or The Natural Step. Rich’s design is not motivated by either of these frameworks, but using one or both of them provokes deep discussion of what is meant by environmental sustainability. Clearly, his design follows the principle of running on current solar income, but is it really cradle-to-cradle? How long will its components last, and what will happen to them after they wear out? Students can try to figure out how the EPEA would classify Rich’s technology. It might be considered a product of service, and therefore would have to be owned by ASN, which would lease it to homeowners and recycle all components. Would this kind of strategy have improved or hurt ASN’s shaky bottom line?
One of my colleagues, Edmund Russell, used the ASN case in his class. Student groups did research on alternatives to Rich’s technology, then each student had to decide whether she or he would invest venture capital in Rich’s company, given these alternatives. I did something similar in one of my classes. The alternatives the students came up with included:
1) Installing on-demand heaters that heat water only as it is needed. Typically, these use natural gas, which is a fairly clean source of fuel. Students have to consider how much it violates the ‘run off current solar income’ principle. One solution is to combine gas heat and solar. Then students have to look at the payback period for this steep initial investment, which depends on a variety of factors, location being the most obvious--in the southwest, where there is plenty of sun and one is not far from natural gas, the pay-off is shorter than in the northeast.
2) Adding a timing mechanism to the water heater. This option is similar to the on-demand heat, but substitutes regular times at which the hot water would be turned on, say at 6 AM so it would be warm enough for morning showers, then off during the middle of the day, perhaps on in the evening and off at night. A simple timer could result in significant savings, depending on patterns of household use.
3) Adding insulation the water heater. This is a relatively inexpensive option which can reduce the water heating bill by as much as 20%. Students concluded that a solar water heater would save more over a long period of time, but there were significant savings from insulation alone. Again, these two technologies could be combined to shorten the payback period.
Eight of the eighteen students in my colleague Ed Russel’s fourth-year engineering class decided that Rich’s system would be worth investing in. These students were generally impressed with Rich’s character and determination. They added a number of caveats to their decision. Several pointed-out that Rich’s system would produce about a five-year payback when used with electric water heat, but a much longer payback if used with cheaper natural gas--again, depending on location. Others suggested design modifications in Rich’s system, including using the existing hot water tank instead of installing an additional one and combining his system with other technologies: on-demand gas heating of the water, insulation for the tank and using excess energy from a heat pump to pre-warm the water.
Those students who favored investing in Rich’s system were also clearly motivated by environmental concerns. As one said, "Eventually we may reach a point where everyone will be forced to recognize that we cannot keep taking from the earth and only return waste." Those who opposed it based their arguments primarily on economic grounds, but were clearly less impressed by the ethical underpinnings of Rich’s technology. For example, one student wondered why those in the U.S. should worry about saving energy, since we seemed to have enough to supply our population? This sparked a debate on the global nature of energy and environmental concerns.
Almost all the students complained about insufficient data. Engineering students are used to having data given to them as part of a problem; they were not comfortable having to look it up themselves, and were clearly nervous about drawing conclusions from less-than-perfect information. In other words, they expected that knowledge would dictate the decision; no wisdom in the form of engineering judgment was necessary.
This is a common response to our cases--if only I had more information, the answer would be obvious. We deliberately try to supply more information than a student should need, in cases like DesignTex, Rohner Textil and Dow Corning. In the ASN case, we like them to find out a bit more for themselves.
Another dilemma that focuses on the marketing aspect of ASN concerns what should happen after sales do not pick up in Virginia. Should Rich move, and if so, where? Students are given a table of tax credits and subsidies available across the United States, and asked to choose among them. This dilemma can be used to raise the issue of whether ethical inventors like Rich ought to be encouraged by subsidies or tax breaks, or whether they ought to be left to survive or fail in the marketplace.
Once Rich moved to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, we give students another dilemma, focused on the salesman who gets Rich into trouble by recommending replacement of functioning systems. This dilemma can be connected to the Fluckiger case, where Kaelin failed to get every member of his network to understand the rationale for a procedure that ensured environmental intelligence. Similarly, Rich did not make certain the salesman understood the procedures involved with assessing, documenting and selling solar designs.
This dilemma can be used to discuss the difference between adversarial and partnership models for environmental enforcement. The EPA is a regulatory agency; the EPEA is an agency contracted by a company to help them improve their environmental intelligence. The former typically operates in adversarial mode, whereas the latter had to depend on partnership with a company. SMUD was theoretically a partner with companies like ASN, but it treated Rich like an adversary, penalizing him before discussing the problem with him.
The partnership model assumes that both parties are virtuous--they really want to improve the environment. The adversarial model does not want to depend on virtue. Rich saw himself as a virtuous practitioner; for whatever reason, SMUD did not.
Students are given three dilemma points in this case. The first concerns what technology SELF should promote: hydro, clean coal, or solar. Like many of the first dilemmas in other cases, this one raises the whole issue of what counts as sustainable. One can ask the students to guess what Williams would prefer and also what they would prefer. The case provides relatively good information on these options, but again, if one wants to take more time with this case, one can ask the students to look up more information about each.
For Williams, solar represented the only real choice. Students typically agree with this. One or two want to add nuclear as an option, and that can lead to an interesting discussion.
One can also raise the issue of whether people in the developing world have a right to electrical power, in the same sense that they have other rights. One of my student discussion leaders did a clever exercise to bring the problem home to his peers. He had about two-thirds of the class put on blindfolds, to simulate their role as a rural community without electricity at night, and the other third sit opposite them in their role as members of developed nations. He asked the two-thirds who were blindfolded whether they felt they had a right to take the blindfolds off, and what it would be worth to them.
This was a good way to segway to our second dilemma, in which we asked students how SELF should finance the purchase of solar units by the village of Magiacha in China. Should SELF compromise its reliance on the individual and allow either the Chinese government or NGOs to partially fund the purchase? If so, which of these options should it choose? One of our students even proposed yet another alternative--having the U.S. government foot part of the bill.
This dilemma forces students to revisit the issue of subsidies and their consequences, this time on a global rather than just a domestic scale, and this time from the standpoint of what they do for consumers rather than inventors. Will the villagers maintain the technology if they do not own it? Will local entrepreneurs be less interested in servicing and selling units? Williams thinks the answer is yes.
Students can also debate the relative merits of government versus NGO funding. The former implies the village will be beholden to the government of China, which is friendly to capitalism but repressive regarding any sign of political freedom. NGOs are independent of any government, by definition, and therefore pose less political threat, though some may have their own agendas.
Our engineering students do typically agree with SELF’s philosophy, once they better understand its system of financing. Basically, if villager A fails to pay off his loan from SELF, villager B cannot get a loan to put a system on his house. Williams’ notion of individual responsibility is intimately tied up with local, communal responsibility.
The third dilemma concerns Maphephethe, in South Africa, where solar technology apparently has to be introduced in a way that reinforces the social stratification within a village. Engineering students like to refer back to Star Trek’s ‘Prime Directive’ when talking about culture and technology. The idea is that one culture should not interfere with the practices of another. Is SELF operating in a way that is consistent with this directive? If so, is that right? As of this writing, we have not tried this part of the case on engineering students, but we expect some lively debate when we do.
We are currently working on a series of cases involving ESKOM, the major utility in South Africa, which is extending the grid to some villages and even providing solar technology to others. This large corporate model stands in contrast to Williams’ model of small, local entrepreneurs taking up the solar challenge. We expect some interesting future discussions on this topic.
Perhaps Eugene Hargrove best articulates what we can learn from cases like this:
...our environmental ethic, when we really have one, will be a collection of independent ethical generalizations, only loosely related, not a rationally ordered system of ethical prescriptions. People who want to understand and follow this environmental ethic will have to study the application of these generalizations to specific situations, as if they are learning to apply rules, but in fact they will be internalizing these rules or generalizations and in this way learning to see the world aright from the standpoint of environmental ethics .
In this chapter so far, we have discussed using active learning modules to teach invention and cases to teach the role of ethics in invention. An obvious next step is to create active learning modules that put ethics at the center of design. Had I been proceeding in logical, hypothetico-deductive fashion, that is exactly what I would have done. Instead, I tried to develop environmental invention modules before I had a set of cases that would show students how different practitioners decided what was meant by sustainablity.
Right after students in the secondary course for gifted students completed their telephone module, we gave them a second module that we hoped would allow them to apply what they had learned about the invention process to an invention of their own choosing. But we wanted to constrain their choice to technologies that might help make the world a better place.
We told them their task was to invent an energy-saving system that employed alternate technologies like solar, wind, waves, and/or bio-mass. We reminded them that they were not expected to solve the world's energy problems, but that any use, however small, of a renewable, non-polluting resource would help in the overall scheme of aiding our global environment. We told them that the technology or system they designed should potentially be marketable, i.e., not rely solely on regulations--ideally, people or corporations should be motivated to buy it both because it made both economic and environmental sense.
We gave them the kind of ‘no emissions’ zone created by Chattanooga as an example. According to William McDonough,
In 1968, Chattanooga's air was declared the worst in America. A councilman back then said the city had a "civic heart attack." So, city government went to local businesses and said, "Don't pollute." Period. Not pollute less, but don't pollute at all. Businesses said okay. Now Chattanooga has a 120 block area planned for zero emissions.
The hope of cities like Chatanooga is that companies will elect to move into these kinds of areas, intending to make a profit when the rules, to use Milton Friedman’s phrase, favor sustainability. We told the students this example was borrowed from William McDonough and referred them to other materials that explained his philosophy. But we left them a lot of room to come up with their own interpretations of what it meant to create a ‘renewable, non-polluting resource’--in part because we hoped building would lead to debates about what technologies were really helpful to the environment. Is more energy used in manufacturing solar cells than they save over their lifetime? We wanted students to consider questions like this.
At this time, the only one of our cases that was even partly done was ASN, so we used Al Rich as an example of an ethical inventor and told the students that one of their options was to consider how to reduce the pollution produced by power plants in the developed world. What about the possibility of energy-independent homes that use utilities only as a back-up? Here Rich’s technology would be part of the kind of overall design suggested by Amory Lovins and others . Could one develop solar power plants, or ones based on wind, or bio-mass? We also gave them the sort of option that led us to develop the SELF case. We told them they could imagine a remote village in the third world, where there was plenty of sun and steady wind but little fuel for cooking or heating, no refrigeration for vaccines or food and water had to be pumped from a deep well. Propane could be trucked into the village over a long distance on roads that were periodically interrupted by guerrillas. The villagers were considering migrating to a forested area they could clear-cut to build a new village; such a move, multiplied by hundreds of such villages, would increase the danger of the greenhouse effect and destroy an important natural habitat--where villagers have left, there is now a virtual desert. The students were challenged to develop technologies that would help the village survive and prosper.
We encouraged them to create scenarios of their own to illustrate the advantages of their technological innovations. We did not yet realize the importance of providing a larger set of such scenarios to illustrate the possibilities.
We tried to scaffold their learning process by providing suggested steps to follow, building off what they had learned on the previous module:
1) Discuss within your group potential project ideas. Any work on this topic done as a group should be recorded in a group invention notebook, following the other guidelines for group entries given in the telephone case.
2) Library research is an essential component of this module. Random searches are inefficient; you need a search plan, a careful division of labor, and it is important to stay in touch with each other as you explore.
3) Decide as a group on the path you wish to explore, what kinds of tests you may want to do, and what materials you will need.
4) Design a model or prototype that will illustrate the feasibility of your idea, as well as its potential benefits. You will not be able to prototype an entire system, but you could construct a working model or an aspect of it, or provide an experimental demonstration of the feasibility of a key component. The point of such a demonstration is to convince skeptical backers that this is not a 'pie-in-the-sky' solution which could never be implemented.
5) Submit a proposal, including a list of materials you plan on purchasing. Your proposal should be similar to the caveat you prepared for the telephone module and must include:
How might your system benefit the local or global environment?
A description of what you plan to build, including preliminary sketches.
A brief description of how you arrived at your idea, including what alternatives you considered.
6) Test your ideas.
Build as much of your model or prototype as you can.
Test aspects of its functioning. Record numerical data in your group notebooks, what conclusions you can derive from each experiment, and what the next experiment ought to be.
7) Use experimental results to illustrate the potential and the limitations of the total system you would like to design. Data from the tests of the prototype should suggest how the system could actually be built or implemented.
8) Marketability: Determine the approximate cost of the total system. Show how you arrived at these costs. Who will use the system? Will likely users be able to afford it?
9) Environmental benefits: Include an analysis of the environmental benefits of your system. For example, if you are building a solar water heater, discuss the anticipated reduction in power demand and acid rain from utilities. Don't forget to include the environmental costs of the technology you are designing! What, for example, is the environmental cost of manufacturing solar cells?
10) Present your system to the rest of the class. Your presentation should include:
(a) The rationale for your system--who will use it? How will it benefit the local or global environment?
(b) A description of your system, with visuals that illustrate it.
(c) A demonstration of a prototype or model that illustrates the potential for your system and its feasibility. The prototype should get the audience excited about the idea--you're looking for that 'wow' effect that Bell got with his early telephone demonstrations. Regarding feasibility, include marketing considerations.
(d) A brief description of how you arrived at your system--what your initial goals were, what steps you went through.
11) A written report that includes:
(a) The rationale for your system
(b) The detailed description, with visuals--similar to what you would put in a patent, focusing on its unique features
(c) Experimental data obtained from your prototype
(d) A narrative of the process you went through, including sketches of intermediate stages and alternatives you considered but decided not to pursue.
12) A brief individual paper in which you analyze and compare your group's processes to those of other groups and to A.C. Rich's processes. Your entry should include:
(a) The goals and steps your group followed, and your sense of how well this process worked. In hindsight, are there times the group should have done something differently?
(b) The goals steps other groups followed, and how they differed from yours.
(c) The goals and steps Al Rich followed, and how they differed from yours.
(d) What lessons did you learn from considering 1-3 above?
(e) What will you do differently next time, when you work with a group on a new invention task?
This was a ridiculously ambitious schedule, considering we only had about ten days to do this module. But it was the only class the students had to focus on, unlike those at the university, and we wanted to see how far they could get. If they made progress, I could try the same module in my university course.
Participants focused almost exclusively on solar. One group came up with a solar speedboat, designed for recreational use; still another came up with a solar hairdryer; another designed a solar airplane. Each included interesting prototypes. For example, the solar speedboat had to make innovative use of a combination of series and parallel circuits. The solar plane could actually fly for a short distance. But these students gave little thought to the global problem of sustainability; instead, what they created were electronic toys. They learned a lot about design, but little about environmental intelligence.
Two groups took the developing world mission seriously. One designed a solar oven, adapting a design we provided them with. Another had a very creative design: a "Solar Tent" which could be floated on a balloon to allow villagers in a rain forest to get power without cutting down trees. This design was probably not practical, but the students put some thought into it, figuring out how to mount the panels at an angle where they would get sunlight even though suspended under a balloon.
Of the 31 participants in this course, which was offered in two three-week segments to half of the students each time, 25 felt that the course exceeded their expectations in almost every area, one believed that the course did not meet her expectations ("I expected to have more instructional time and guidance"), and one did not express an opinion. Representative quotes from students who felt the course met or exceeded their expectations included:
I have gained a greater knowledge and understanding of the process of invention.
This sure met my expectations because we strained to work hard and work together toward one goal.
Yes, [the course] was more than I had expected. It was fun and challenging.
[The course] went beyond my expectations. I did not think I would get nearly this much out of three weeks. I learned more in these three weeks then I learned all year in science class.
The course passed my expectations. It was inspiring -- I plan on doing more in this field.
I found [the course] to be challenging and very interesting. The hands-on learning gave you a personal experience with inventing and learning in general.
I enjoyed this very much. [It was] challenging, which means more exciting. Thanks for doing this.
It's a lot better than filing papers like they make me do when I'm finished or bored at my school.
One student wrote us about six months after the course and indicated that he is still working on the solar airplane. He is now focusing on a solar-powered launch system that will power the plane's battery. At the end of his (unsolicited) letter, he said, "I thoroughly enjoyed the class last summer. It was challenging, yet fun, and I got a lot out of it that has already been applied to school."
At the outset, we hoped this course might help students during the school year. We conducted a one-year follow-up evaluation with a little less than half of the students. The selection process favored those who returned for a different enrichment course in the next season, so we most likely interviewed the students who were most eager and enthusiastic. Only two students reported no effect on their school performance; the other eleven cited improved ability to work in groups and/or increased creativity in problem-solving. Several even mentioned improved building skills.
We also hoped the course might influence students’ future majors and potential career decisions. When asked about this, only four of the students felt the course had any effect on these choices. Three said they were more likely to choose engineering, including one woman who was looking at early entrance college programs for women in engineering. The fourth student said, "During the course I learned that science is not something only super geniuses can do. But I also realized that I don’t want to go into those areas--they just aren’t for me." We count this as a positive result--this student learned that invention and discovery are not mysterious, and that she could make a contribution in this area, but didn’t want to.
One of the other ideas we had really hoped to get across was that invention includes a combination of reflection and experimentation. One student put it best when she said, "You have to reflect on your tinkering and tinker with your reflections. This way, you can see what works, what doesn’t, and how to use experiences to improve your invention." This sounds very like Bell, who would follow up his experiments with hypotheses and ideas for future experiments. He often seemed to tinker more with reflections than devices, perhaps because of his limited resources and expertise.
Students generally saw reflection more as a tool for evaluating results than as a way of evaluating and improving their thinking processes. But one student noted that, "A conscious effort was made to take into account the mistakes made in the telephone project when working on the solar project."
Students certainly reflected on their group processes, and worked together to improve them. For almost half of the students, the most valuable experiences in the course had to do with learning how to work with others. One student said she learned to "COMPROMISE!! You have to let some ideas go for the good of the group." Another student remarked that, "Unless a very specific goal is agreed upon, everyone will work toward their (sic) own specific goals. Splitting up the workload was one of the most difficult things in getting my group to work well."
Students also liked the active component of the modules. One student said that the most valuable experience was "the actual inventing--the chance that we had to actually spend time to create something from our own imagination."
My colleague Larry Richards and I had been playing with environmental ideas in our university Invention and Design course as well. One year, for example, we had the students design an environmentally-friendly house. They learned a lot, but we found we had to give a primer on architecture as well as environmental design--too much! Another year we tried a more open-ended environmental module similar to what I used with the gifted secondary students. Only one group produced what I thought was a viable technology: a system to keep the tires in a car inflated at just the right pressure, which could potentially produce major energy savings if installed in thousands of cars.
About this time, I became involved with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), created by the Lemelson Foundation at Hampshire College. The inventor Jerry Lemelson wanted to invest money he had earned from patents in a program that would encourage students to become both inventors and innovators. The term innovator is often used to refer to entrepreneurs who take an invention and transform it into a marketable product. Jerry Lemelson not only wanted to student inventions; he also wanted students to create start-up companies that would contribute to the U.S. economy.
The initials ‘NCIIA’ are deliberately similar to NCAA (National College Athletic Association); Greg Prince, the President of Hampshire College, wanted to suggest that this invention alliance was as important for the future of universities and colleges as athletics--radical thought!
From my standpoint, the great thing about this program was that it provided money to purchase equipment for student use. I had been trying to get an equipment budget for my Invention and Design course The NCIIA also emphasized team invention and design, which fit in well with my courses. I attended a conference sponsored by the NCIIA in Washington, D.C. and came away with an idea for modifying the environmental module.
What if I made the end-product a draft of a real patent, something the very best student teams could go forward with? The NCIIA would also fund student teams that intended to continue work beyond a course, provided their goal was a marketable innovation. Therefore, conceivably a student team from my course could get most of the way towards a patent for a new environmentally sustainable technology, then apply for funding to finish the job and take it to market.
At this time, I had only the ASN and an early version of the DesignTex to illustrate the kind of thinking that goes into environmental design--and Al Rich’s design had significant market problems. But I hoped the students would at least make use of McDonough’s framework.
I applied to the NCIIA for a small grant that included equipment costs for both the telephone and environmental modules. I received the funding, and used part of it to take the students to the patent office. Rodger Flagg, President of Express Search, Inc., donated his time and that of his expert staff of patent search specialists; they taught each team how to look for patents similar to their invention idea. Before the trip to the patent office, with help from Rodger’s son Cris, we had students prepare by writing patent abstracts and identifying search catagories. We faxed the abstracts and categories to Rodger’s group, who were ready when the students arrived.
Final projects included:
(1) A system that stored the energy from braking a car in flywheels.
(2) A system that would generate and store energy from the motion of waves.
(3) A method that would substitute recycled tires for carbon in certain kinds of filters.
All of these were potentially patentable, because the student groups had crafted them so as to avoid any conflicts with existing patents. But I wasn’t sure any of these would be marketable; the group designs showed little concern with cost and manufacturing. They also showed too little concern with sustainability. For example, the regenerative braking design would add 400 pounds to the car, reducing fuel efficiency and adding considerably to the cost.
Still, I asked if any students wanted to pursue further funding for their designs. One stepped forward--Jeff Wang, an environmental science major who spearheaded the regenerative braking group. He had done great research and come up with a patentable design, but not a practical one. The course was valuable for him because it enabled him to stop before he went too far down a blind alley.
He had a new idea. He wanted to create a windmill-based system that could be used to regenerate anaerobic soil in places like the Everglades, where the normal organisms in the soil can die from lack of oxygen. This kind of technology is especially appropriate form the standpoint of The Natural Step, which emphasizes that photosynthesis is the main method by which the sun’s energy is stored on Earth. Jeff’s use of portable windmills could also save energy over conventional sources of power, and allow his system to be operated in remote locations.
Jeff recruited another student from the Invention and Design class and they wrote a proposal to the NCIIA. They ended-up receiving one of the first Level III grants, designed for entrepreneurial teams like Jeff’s. He built a prototype of his system, demonstrated it at an NCIIA conference held at the Smithsonian, and as of this writing, is obtaining patent protection and planning to make his first sales. (For a complete description of Jeff’s system, see http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edu/ ~jyw3y/wind/windmill.htm).
I liked the NCIIA goal of having students do projects that had a real impact--not just assignments for school. Students were expert at being students--doing whatever was necessary to get a good grade, and not going above and beyond. I wanted to turn them into creative professionals. It seemed to me my goals and the NCIIA’s coincided, though I thought more about educational benefits and they about commercial.
My new idea was to focus the environmental module on a proposal to the NCIIA. Instead of thinking solely about potential patent conflicts, I wanted the students to being to think like ethical entrepreneurs. I now had the Rohner Textil and SELF cases I could use. I decided to begin with the telephone module, then introduce a series of ethics cases while the students worked on an environmentally-intelligent technology of their own choosing. I even gave them the option of bringing another inventor’s technology to market. There were usually three modules in the course, but I convinced my colleagues to let me cut back to two for this experiment. Maybe we just hadn’t been giving students enough time to really think about new technologies that might transform the world.
You’d think an experienced teacher like me would have known better. In the end, the students put no more work into this module when it was only one of two than when it was one of three. There were some clever ideas, including:
(1) Treating the oil in a tanker with bacteria the moment it begins to spill. This group adapted an existing, patented technology used for fire-fighting on the tankers and proposed mixing bacteria with the water in the event of a spill. Then this bacteria-water mixture could be sprayed onto the oil to promote rapid bioremediation.
(2) Creating an environmentally-friendly doll whose composition and manufacture embodied the principles it was designed to teach.
(3) A complete system for accelerating decomposition in landfills by aerating the soil with oxygenated water and periodically mixing the waste. Their system included a vented grid through which the water seeped, a way of trapping and recycling the water and genetically-engineered bacteria that would accelerate the process.
The last two resulted in proposals I thought were especially worth sending on to the NCIIA. The ‘Enviro-Doll’ had real promise as an educational tool. The group’s research revealed one bio-degradable doll made of tobacco leaves, which they felt provided no clear environmental message. The group’s doll would have a story attached to it, explaining its environmental theme. The Captain Planet action figures have such an ecological story, but they were made of the same plastic as any other action figure, and therefore they did not embody environmental intelligence.
This group researched a number of potential materials for a doll, including Climatex Lifecycle and Foxfiber, and decided on a PET cloth, made from 100% recycled plastic bottles. McDonough would not approve of this decision, but the group was able to locate a PET fabric manufacturer they felt they could work with, and this consideration outweighed others for them.
I was initially a bit skeptical of the landfill proposal. It sounded far too complicated for practical use in landfills with limited budgets. But this was a hard-working group. I had already nixed one of their earlier ideas having to do with streamlining and fins on automobiles, on the grounds that automotive engineers had thoroughly researched this kind of technology, with far greater resources than this group could bring to bear.
So they decided to focus on the problem of landfills. Most suffered from the NIMBY syndrome--no one wanted them in their neighborhood! The students decided their goal was "to turn solid waste into marketable compose, using a cyclic landfill system that increases the decomposition speed." In other words, they wanted to accelerate the process of turning waste into food. So I encouraged the students to continue working with this problem.
We took the usual trip to the patent office and this group identified and ordered a series of patents, which came within a week. Two of the group members approached me in alarm several days later. It turns out that another inventor had patented virtually the same invention about a month earlier.
The group was discouraged. I was elated. This case of re-invention confirmed my notion that a group of undergraduates could create a new, environmentally-friendly technological system. I told the group to get in touch with the inventor and help him market his idea. They did so, and the inventor was enthusiastic about cooperating.
As noted in the beginning of this chapter, one of the best ways of transmitting wisdom is through mentoring and apprenticeship. I thought the students could teach the inventor as well as the inventor teaching the student. But this potential collaboration emerged late in the course, barely in time to submit the proposal.
In the end, neither of these proposals were funded, in part, I think, because despite all the extra time allotted in the course, the two groups still had to rush to complete their proposals by the deadline. A proposal of this sort is not just a document describing an invention--it is itself an intimate part of the invention process, where a group describes its technology in provocative detail and establishes that they know who might need it. I say ‘provocative detail’ because a good proposal leaves the reader convinced the group has a good idea and is qualified to carry it out, but also that there is a great deal to be done--or else why write a proposal? I tried to teach this to students, but they had trouble imagining how an audience that included entrepreneurs and academics would respond. This is not just a question of coming up with the right rhetoric; it is honing and refining the idea and anticipating potential questions. Bell was a successful inventor in part because he wrote a great patent and he provided a powerful narrative of his invention process. Writing is part of invention.
In my next invention and design class, I intend to create more opportunities for students to work with actual inventors, right from the beginning of a module. What I need to determine is whether I can assemble a stable of willing inventors and entrepreneurs--this may take several years, but I think the potential benefits are enormous. So are the pitfalls--many students are not yet ready for this kind of professional relationship. I know I wasn’t at their age. I have to offer this kind of collaboration as an option, only, and find a graceful way for either the inventor or the students to terminate a relationship that is not working.
What can the students provide? They will have all done the telephone module, which means they will know how to keep an invention notebook, write a patent and work as a team. They will still have a great deal to learn about entrepreneurship, but the cases would help with this. Hopefully, the students will supply energy , enthusiasm and a willingness to learn and I can find inventors who will take joy in mentoring. Stay tuned.
I am also trying to develop new tools that will make it easier for students--and inventors--to keep detailed notes on their invention processes. A team of systems engineering students and I are developing a kind of electronic inventor’s notebook. The goal is to distribute at least some of the knowledge and wisdom involved in reflection into a set of tools. Reflection is the hardest skill to teach; it must be learned by doing, and the doing needs to be facilitated and prompted.
As a student or inventor or discoverer writes in her notebook, she can highlight text and tag it. For example, if a piece of text were relevant to a patent, she could use a series of patent tags; if it were relevant to a grant proposal, she could use a series of proposal tags; if relevant to a scientific article, an article tag. Each of these types of tags would have sub-tags associated with it. For example, one might have introduction, methods, results and conclusion tags for a scientific article that would sort text and images into the right section; similarly, for a patent, one might have preferred embodiment and claims tags. This kind of system would allow an inventor or scientist or student (these categories are not mutually exclusive) to record ideas in a continuous stream and have them sorted into a variety of reports. All sketches and ideas would also be categorized in a format that made it easy to search.
The tags would also serve as prompts, or reminders, for the kinds of material the students ought to be recording. For example, we have a set of tags that remind students and practitioners how to document an experiment, including a starting hypothesis, sketch of any apparatus used, brief note on procedures, results and implications. Much of this may be obvious to experienced practitioners, but it is not to students. We are also exploring tags for aspects of the invention process that would not be obvious to practitioners, like reflecting on what they are doing--what kinds of strategies they are following, whether and what sorts of mental models they are using and what kind of impact their invention might have on society and nature.
To make such a system creative, it should be customizable--a scientist or inventor should be able to create his or her own tags and organizational system. But the initial defaults should be useful enough so customizing could come later. The default system should also embody a lot of the best knowledge gained from studying the processes of practitioners.
My hope is that these cases and modules can be used in a wide variety of pedagogical settings, including corporate ones. They should not be limited to special courses like Invention and Design or Engineering Ethics. But these cases and modules do not fit easily into the current structure of university education. As Barry Commoner noted:
The prevailing philosophy in academic life is reductionism, which is exactly the reverse of my approach to things. I use the word holism in connection with biology and environmental issues. But the academic world has changed a great deal since I was a graduate student. It has become progressively self-involved and reductionistic. And I find that’s dull and I’m not interested in doing it.
I had a recent conversation with one of the brightest students I had ever taught. In her first year, she did a brilliant paper for me on the Indian mathematician Ramanujan and Hindu philosophy, showing that there was a connection between his mathematical style and his religious beliefs and practices. By her fourth year, her primary educational concern was publishing a paper so she could go to graduate school in computer science--a noble ambition, but it seemed to close off any interests or projects that would deviate in the slightest from that path. She explained the heuristic a successful computer science student should follow--attach yourself to a lab in your second year, and focus on a set of publications in that domain.
This kind of heuristic is not limited to computer science. I have seen it in psychology graduate students, who identify closely with the dominant paradigm in their laboratory and learn to publish in that area. Working as an apprentice in a lab is one of the best ways to learn the exemplars characteristic of a scientific domain. I think we ought to be producing students who are capable of publishing in fields like computer science and psychology. But I hope this can be done in a way that encourages students to use their expertise in novel ways. Consider Alan Turing and Herbert Simon : the former had the idea of using what we would now call a computer as a model for human problem-solving, and the latter working with teams to create a range of programs that simulated aspects of thought--including discovery. I hope the modules outlined in this chapter show how one can introduce materials that encourage students to work in multi-disciplinary teams on problems that do not fit into current disciplinary pigeon-holes. This sort of work at the boundaries is what leads to new discoveries and the creation of new disciplines like computer science.
There is one sense in which the careers of all creative individuals are similar: They are not careers in the ordinary sense of the term. Most of us join an organization at an entry level, perform a prescribed role for a number of years, and leave at a higher level...In contrast, creative individuals usually are forced to invent the jobs they will be doing all through their lives. One could not have been a psychoanalyst before Freud, an aeronautical engineer before the Wright brothers, an electrician before Galvani, Volta and Edison, or a radiologist before Roentgen. These individuals not only discovered new ways of thinking and of doing things but also became the first practitioners in the domains they discovered and made it possible for others to have jobs and careers in them. So creative individuals don’t have careers, they create them. In addition, these pioneers must create a field that will follow their ideas, or their discovery will soon vanish from the culture. Freud had to attract physicians and neurologists to his camp; the Wright brothers had to convincer mechanics that aeronautics was going to be a feasible career. Because careers can take place only within fields, if a person wants to have a career in a field that does not exist, he or she must invent it (.
I hope the ethics cases encourage students to see themselves as independent moral agents who can create a better future-- or a worse one. Computer scientists have to face issues of enormous ethical complexity. In the heyday of the Strategic Defense Initiative, there were serious proposals for software that would determine, based on satellite information, whether the Soviets had launched missiles and respond immediately, with either limited or no human intervention . Students and practitioners need to be able to think through the implications of this kind of a Frankentstein.
Organizations like the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are calling for radical reforms that sound much like the pedagogy embodied in these cases. For example, in a 1994 report, the ASEE called for changes in the curriculum that would include more emphasis on:
(1) collaborative active learning
(2) multidisciplinary perspective
(3) ethics
(4) communication skills
According to the report, "Coursework should feature multidisciplinary, collaborative, active learning and take into account students’ varied learning styles" . I read this report after I was well along in designing active learning modules, but I found it very encouraging.
Similarly, John Prados, editor of the Journal of Engineering Education called, among other things, for placing environmental, health, and safety concerns at the ‘front end of design’, including issues like zero discharge and life-cycle costs. Again, I heard Dr. Prados after my student team and I had designed our environmental ethics cases, but I was gratified to find that others were thinking along the same lines.
A thorough discussion of the management of innovation lies far beyond the scope of this book--it would take us into more detailed studies of R&D labs, corporations, government agencies, foundations, and would involve many different types of managers. The innovation process cannot be described by the sorts of flowchart models so frequently pandered by consultants (Bucciarelli, 1994), nor can the task of managing innovators be reduced to a list of dos and don’ts that will cover the wide range of management situations. But we should be able to discuss a few myths, recalling that myths always embody truths:
1) Innovation depends primarily on selecting creative people. There is an obvious element of truth to this--if you can select someone who is creative from the start, it makes your job as a manager much easier. That is why I spend so much time thinking about ways of producing students who could become discoverers, inventors--and creative managers of discovery and invention. A remark like "waste equals food" will be enough of a spark for someone who is prepared to understand and act on it.
But Terese Amabile’s research on R&D firms suggests that the scientists in these labs view the environment as having more effect on creativity than personal characteristics . This was probably a relatively homogeneous sample of intelligent people; still, Amabile’s points out the essential role of the environment. Even if a manager selects creative people, he or she can turn them off quickly--witness cases like William Schockley’s first corporation: he hired the best minds in the burgeoning transistor business, but couldn’t manage them .
Participants in Amabile’s study mentioned characteristics that stimulated and inhibited creativity. Here they are in order of importance, with those high on the list having the highest priority
| Stimulate creativity: | Inhibit creativity: |
| Autonomy in terms of how one does one’s work | Infighting, red tape, organizational structures that got in the way of communication |
| Good project management in determining work assignments | Constraints on what sort of work one could do |
| Sufficient resources | Apathy towards projects |
| Encouragement | Unclear project goals and/or too much control over work assignments |
| Organizational structures that facilitate open communication, cooperation and collaboration | Evaluation pressure |
| Feedback and recognition | Insufficient resources |
| Enough time | Insufficient time |
| Challenging work | Emphasis on standard operating procedures |
| Urgent need for a solution | Competition, especially within the organization |
The inhibit and stimulate lists are in agreement on several categories:
(a) Autonomy was preferred by these scientists over constraints on what they could do. The case of TrueVoice is instructive. Duane Bowker and Jim James chose the project, but they were operating within a larger constraint: that projects be of commercial value to AT&T. The kind of freedom that produced the discovery of the background radiation of the Big Bang no longer existed at Bell Labs after the break-up. So in their case, there was a mixture of freedom and constraint that is typical in entrepreneurial situations.
(b) Sufficient resources & time: This is kind of a ‘motherhood and apple pie’ issue. What constitutes sufficiency? Students working on my active learning modules never thought they had enough time--but I found that giving them more time produced no better results. Similarly, the entrepreneur Steve Wallach , when interviewed by a group of my students, said tight deadlines and scant resources can even stimulate creativity.
(c) Open communication vs. red tape and infighting: The Manhattan project is a classic example. Military officers at Los Alamos wanted to organize decision-making along military lines; civilian scientists preferred more flexible organization that facilitated open communications. The group that eventually developed the implosion method was initially hampered by bureaucratic infighting between a scientist and a military officer. George Kistiakowsky, an outsider brought in to advise this project, worked with Oppenheimer and others to completely reorganize this effort, sidelining the two original project leaders. This kind of bureaucratic flexibility bruised egos, but made possible a successful, all-out crash program to develop a successful implosion method . Scientists still had to deal with a fair amount of red tape and barbed-wire regarding their relations to those outside of Los Alamos. These security precautions completely failed to protect against the successful espionage of Klaus Fuchs and others .
Standard operating procedures are another inhibitor of creativity. These procedures exist to automate decision-making, which is fine in some situations, but not in cases like the dropping of a bomb on Nagasaki, a decision that should have been reviewed at a higher level. But once the first bomb was dropped, the decision to make further drops was handed-off to subordinates. The date of the second drop was picked because of weather, only three days after the first--too little time for the Japanese to process what happened at Hiroshima.
(d) Encouragement versus apathy: This is another ‘motherhood and apple pie’: it seems obvious that encouragement would be better than apathy. But how does one show encouragement? For the most part, inventors and discoverers are motivated to the point of obsession, but they can be seized by doubts and also by a feeling that their vision is not appreciated by others. Like all generalizations, this one holds for only some inventors or discoverers. Edison never had any doubts, at least in public; the only kind of encouragement he seemed to need in the early part of his career was money. In later years, he delighted in the adulation of Henry Ford and others, but these were not managers. Edison himself managed his own career. After all, he was director of the first R&D lab.
Similarly, Einstein seems to have had no real manager, and therefore needed no encouragement of this sort. His ‘annu mirabilis’ was 1905, when he wrote three papers that shook the foundations of modern physics while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. He had a small group of colleagues with whom he exchanged ideas, but he was not part of a major university or R&D facility until after 1905 .
Gardiner Hubbard was Alexander Graham Bell’s principal backer, future father-in-law and the closest thing he had to a manager. Hubbard’s way of ‘encouraging’ Bell was to remind him that Elisha Gray and others would be getting ahead if he didn’t move quickly to patent a system of multiple telegraphy.
On March 1st of 1875, Bell went to visit one of the truly great men of American science, Joseph Henry, the Director of the Smithsonian Institution. Bell described his telegraph researchers to date. What most intrigued Henry was Bell’s description of an unusual musical sound he had obtained from a coil of wire. Henry wanted to see a demonstration immediately. Bell saved the elderly gentleman a carriage ride by promising to bring the experiment to him the next day.
Overall, Henry thought Bell had the ‘germ of a great idea’ and when Bell complained about his lack of electrical knowledge, Henry told him to "Get it!" A few days later, in a letter to his parents, Bell said, "I cannot tell you how much those two words have encouraged me" .
Joseph Henry’s firm advice was a kind of back-handed encouragement: to say "get it" implies "you can do it". Similarly, the Eagle team at Data General would give its new employees daunting open-ended tasks because they didn’t know enough to see them as impossible .
Amabile’s list of inhibiting factors includes both unclear goals and too much control over projects by management. Perhaps this gets at the kind of balance Kaelin had to strike in the Fluckiger case, between adherence to a set of goals reflected in a protocol and allowing employee autonomy. A related factor on the good side is project management in determining work assignments. This item is hard to square with the fact that too much control is an inhibiting factor and also with employee autonomy.
Finally there is an emphasis on challenging work and an urgent need for a solution, both low on the list of factors that stimulate creativity. They get us into our next point, about motivation.
(2) Creative people are primarily motivated by intrinsic rewards. Terese Amabile’s research suggests that, "People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and personal challenge of the work itself--and not by extrinsic motivators such as tangible reward, evaluation concern, deadlines, and external dictates" . Amabile’s emphasis on intrinsic motivation is a mythic oversimplification that contains an important element of truth. I hinted at this under the previous point when I talked about how inventors are motivated to the point of obsession but still need to be encouraged.
Einstein is perhaps the archetype of the intrinsically-motivated discoverer, working without any visible external rewards in the Swiss patent office when he made three of his greatest discoveries. Edison, in contrast, is considered the archetype of the shrewd inventor who thought always about tangible, monetary rewards. But even Edison pursued projects in part because of the pure joy and delight. His attempt to develop a profitable system that would use magnetism to separate iron from rock was certainly motivated by profit, but it was animated by delight; he referred to the mine he build as his ‘baby’ and virtually lived at it for ten years . He was so wrapped up in this exciting work that he missed the improvements in mining technology made in places like the Great Lakes; his techniques for recovering iron from low-grade ore could not compete, efficient though they were.
For most inventors and discoverers, there is a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. Indeed, a sociologist might ask how one can distinguish between the two, since intrinsic motives frequently reflect the internalized values of others. The stuents in my summer course for gifted studentrs had not grades or prizes to motivate them, and yet they worked with more energy and enthusiasm than most of the University students! However, they did have extrinsic motivation in the form of peer pressure. They had also internalized a perception of what it meant to be gifted, and wanted to fulfill that role.
Consider Bell. He was intrinsically motivated to solve the problem of transmitting speech, but this intrinsic motivation certainly reflected, in part, his father’s emphasis on teaching elocution and developing new methods for teaching the deaf. In other words, he had internalized his father’s values. He also wanted fame and fortune and knew those would come to anyone who developed a system of telegraphy. These two motivations fueled his research into a speaking telegraph.
There is a similar mix in the case of ethical inventors like Al Rich and entrepreneurs like William McDonough. They want to do well by doing good. One might refer to the ‘doing good’ part as an intrinsic motive, but the doing well part shows their concern with external rewards as well.
One of the most important rewards for scientists and inventors is priority. The team that designed the Eagle computer for Data General is an example (Kidder, 1981). The Eagle team was doing a kind of ‘skunkworks’, or underground operation, not officially sanctioned by the company. A competitor team in North Carolina was the one officially charged with creating the next generation of Data General computers, and the company had sent its ‘best’ engineers down there. So the team that remained behind in Massachusetts worked underground and overtime, spurred in part by the desire to show that they could do more with less. They were too young and inexperienced to know when they were given an impossible task, so they forged ahead. Their reward was the promise that they would get to ‘play pinball’ again and work on a project of similar scope and autonomy. In this case, challenging work was a stimulus to creativity. It was also a problem that needed an urgent solution. Competing companies were coming out with newer, faster machines; if Data General didn’t, the company would probably fail.
The Massachusetts team succeeded in getting their product out first. Similarly, the skunkworks that produced the Sidewinder missile was working against an official team, and had the satisfaction of beating them in open competition .
A concern with priority inevitably involves deadlines. Bell’s primary backer Gardiner Hubbard continually confronted his future son-in-law with deadlines, forcing Bell to submit the patent that made him famous and also to demonstrate a prototype of his speaking telegraph at the Centennial in 1876. Both the Eagle and Sidewinder teams were racing competitors, and so had to set Draconian deadlines.
This kind of competition is just as prevalent in science. The story of the discovery of the double helix reads like a race, with Watson and Crick constantly looking over their shoulders at the competition and using their results whenever possible. The great Devonian controversy was bitterly competitive. De la Beche had a strong economic incentive--his job was on the line--but for Murchison, the reward was credit for making a major discovery.
Is the desire for priority an intrinsic or extrinsic reward? It is extrinsic in the sense that it is awarded by one’s fellows. Herbert Simon gives an entertaining account of the politics that go into receiving a Nobel Prize . Edwin Armstrong battled Lee de Forest for many years because the former wanted to be named the sole inventor of radio . Armstrong initially won in court, but kept the case alive because de Forest was not obligated to pay his legal fees. Was this greed, or a desire to make it clear to everyone that de Forest had no real claim to the invention?
As Freud said, human motives are overdetermined. Does a scientist seek a grant for the money or the prestige or out of scientific curiosity? Obviously, all of the above. The scientist needs the money to keep the lab alive. Considerable prestige and salary typically accrue to the top grant-getters at most institutions, who can move their labs to a competitor institution in a manner analogous to a ball team moving to a new city if the stadium and resources aren’t right. Last but not least, the problem has to be interesting to the point of obsession.
My colleague W. Bernard Carlson likes to tell about how Willis R. Whitney used to walk around one of the first research and design laboratories at General Electric, asking whether the research scientists were having fun . This is the same kind of ‘fun’ Joseph Campbell refers to as ‘following your bliss’. Bliss is the state of ecstasy that Csiksenmihalyi refers to as ‘flow’ . I enjoy reading articles about entrepreneurs in the Wall Street Journal. Many of the best are in their sixties or even seventies: they are starting companies because it is the most fun they’ve ever had, not because they need the money any more. This last sense of ‘fun’ comes closest to Amabile’s ‘interest, enjoyment and satisfaction’. But a behaviorist would remind us that fun can be learned, to--we tend to like the activities we are rewarded for. With the right kind of encouragement, managers can create the conditions for bliss. As Amabile says, "under certain circumstances, certain types of extrinsic motivation can add to rather than detract from creativity. We believe that investigations of such synergistic combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation will y8ield some of the most exciting new insights--and new questions--about creativity in the coming decades" .
3) Innovation means freedom from intellectual constraints, as well as extrinsic ones. The truly creative person thinks ‘out of the box’, blowing up the constraints imposed by others. Kepler is a classic example: he discarded the perfect circle constraint. But in fact Kepler still kept a broader constraint: that the planetary orbits observed some harmonic relationship centered on the sun.
Einstein is another classic ‘out of the box’ thinker. But like Kepler, he did not remove all constraints. In coming up with his theory of special relativity, he began with a new constraint: that the laws of physics should be invariant for all observers. He took into account the constraint that the speed of light was constant for all observers, regardless of their motion relative to one another. The result was an extraordinary set of conclusions, including the famous E=MC2. Einstein was more concerned with the constraints posed by his hypothesis-space than with results in the experiment space: witness his famous "Then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord" quote. This is not to suggest that he ignored data, but the one time he allowed an empirical result to change his theory was his infamous ‘cosmological constant’ he created to correct for the fact that General Relativity predicted an expanding universe. Subsequent research revealed the spectral red-shifts that pointed to an expanding universe . .
The point is that both Kepler and Einstein worked within constraints that they created. Going back to our second generalization in Chapter 2, they transformed the problem by transforming the constraints.
Similarly, inventors and designers create constraints when there are too few in the environment (Bucciarelli, 1994), to make the problem space they are working in manageable
. When confronting the problem of transmitting speech, Bell, imposed a whole set of constraints on himself, including focusing his search in the hypothesis space, in part because of his limited electrical knowledge and resources. Susan Lyons needed an environmental framework to constrain her possible choices. De Castro, the President of Data General, constrained the Eagle team by insisting that the new machine have ‘no mode bit’, meaning that it would have to run software from the older generation Data General machine without having to be switched into a special mode.
There is no algorithm for managing innovation, just as there is no algorithm for doing it. The first step is to realize that management can be helpful: rewards, deadlines and constraints are part of the creative process. To return to our earlier generalizations, managers can :
1) Help establish the importance of a problem. For example, the story of Climatex Lifecycle is more than that of a compostable fabric. William McDonough touts it as an example of a second industrial revolution. In this way, he serves the role of a manager or facilitator who makes a problem even more significant by the way she or he frames it.
2) Assist in finding and transforming data and devices. Here a manager can supply a combination of resources and contacts. The two are intimately linked. The director of a successful research laboratory usually writes the largest and most important grant proposals, and has the connections to know what questions the referees will ask. The director typically will also be in the closest touch with what competing laboratories are doing.
Similarly, the manager of a small start-up has to have the connections to know where to raise cash and also know what the competition is doing. For example, Gardiner Hubbard found the funding to hire Watson and also kept a close eye on Elisha Gray. Recall that it was Hubbard who managed to file Bell’s patent application just before Gray arrived at the patent office.
3) Create the necessary balance between flexibility and stubbornness through the use of teams. Most individuals cannot manage the perfect balance between the stubbornness necessary to promote a theory or invention and the flexibility to recognize when it is no longer feasible. A manager can create this balance by encouraging skeptics as well as promoters of a new idea within the organization. The trick is to keep this kind of criticism constructive. An evolutionary epistemologist might argue that the best idea would emerge from a Darwinian struggle in which the proponents and the skeptics were engaged in a life-or-death struggle over limited resources. Certainly, some managers think this is how their organizations ought to operate. Unfortunately, the skills it takes to win this kind of battle are frequently only tangentially related to the quality of the ideas. In other words, organizations like this tend to select for social skills, not intellectual ones. Admittedly, this is a fuzzy boundary; network-building is part of invention and discovery.
But organizational survival is a different goal than trying to create a market for a new technology. To survive, you don’t want to become wedded to a project until it has clearly succeeded; then grab all the credit you can. To create a market, you need the wholehearted commitment to a vision which is creatively modified as new allies are recruited. Aramis, the system that would have combined the efficiency of mass transit with the freedom of the automobile, attracted allies for all the usual reasons. For patriots, a chance to show France could develop and implement the most advanced public transportation in the world, for engineers and scientists, a chance to get research funds, for politicians on the left, a chance to embrace a ‘high-technology’ project that would benefit workers . What seems to have been missing is an inventor or entrepreneur who was wholeheartedly obsessed with implementing the technology--the kind of hero or champion that loved the idea, that had to see it realized.
4) Recognize that writing, visualizing and building are integral parts of discovery or invention. Therefore, instead of assigning technical writers to do the writing for the scientists and patent attorneys to do it for the inventors, create opportunities for them to collaborate closely. These other specialists are valuable additions to a project that can complement a scientist or inventor’s style. For example, an inventor who is most comfortable with building prototypes needs the right sort of specialist to help her translate her prototype into a set of claims. But the technical writer needs to work intimately with the inventor or discoverer because the hypothesis or invention will often be transformed in the course of preparing it for dissemination.
I think this is especially true for proposal writing, whether the proposal is for a research grant or funding for an entrepreneurial start-up. Proposal-writing is a license to dream, to think as boldly as possible about what one is doing. Professional proposal writers who know the format required by an agency or the rhetorical expectations of investors can be useful collaborators, provided they keep the invention or discover team focused on articulating their vision as well as the specifics of what they intend to do. The proposal stage is also a good time to think about long-term impacts, about whether the world will be a better or worse place if this potential discovery or invention is made.
5) Provide the vision that connects various enterprises within a laboratory or a start-up company into a network, each part of which can potentially facilitate the others. The right kind of network also spreads wide enough so that at any given time, at least one project or technology will be ‘hot’: fundable or marketable. Managers can help establish creative networks, based on complementary cognitive styles and disciplinary backgrounds.
The ethical dilemmas presented in the last chapter suggest another generalization:
6) Adopt an ethical framework and a process for communicating this framework throughout one’s organization. Like other aspects of management, there is no algorithm for ethical decision-making, but one can establish principles and heuristics. Examples in the environmental area include the McDonough/ Braungart protocols and The Natural Step.
I suspect the prevailing model in business is that ethics interfere with competitiveness. In contrast, I hope products like Climatex Lifecycle illustrate how ethical concerns can give one a competitive advantage, can even become the ‘secret weapon’ that allows a small company to create a new market.
Another standard myth is that regulations invariably interfere with creative entrpreneurship. Certainly, some kinds of regulations do. Ethical managers can and should fight for is the right kind of regulations, ones that level the playing field so that all companies have to meet the same standards, but each is free to exercise maximum creativity in reaching the goal. An example is the no-emission zones pioneered by cities like Chatanooga. This kind of regulation does not say how the goal is to be achieved, it merely gives companies an incentive to compete creatively for the opportunity to put their businesses in the zone. A company can get ahead of its competitors by anticipating the direction regulations will have to take, over the long term, and getting there early, exceeding all current regulations. One of our current research projects involves looking carefully at how one can show the impact of this kind of long-term ecological perspective on a company’s bottom line.
Studies on leadership styles have focused on three alternatives: autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire , where the former is dictatorial, the latter hands-off, and the democratic either consults with everyone before reaching a decision or leads a discussion that produces a consensus. No one style is superior to the others in all situations. But on unstructured problems a consultative or fully democratic style is best . Unstructured problems are ones that do not fall nicely into existing categories, and therefore call for maximum creativity. Indeed, creative people often turn problems everyone else thinks of as routine into unstructured problems. That is the nature of a paradigm shift. So democratic leadership is most likely to encourage creativity.
This style of leadership is even more important , when the team must share an ethical framework that cannot be reduced to an algorithm. The leader may the prime mover behind the vision, but it has to be endorsed by everyone, and everyone can contribute suggestions on how to translate ideals into practice.
A complementary essential characteristic for a leader of innovators is to be willing to take joy in the accomplishments of others and give credit wherever possible. Gary Tabor, a leading environmentalist, refers to this as the servant-leader, the one who leads from behind. Being a servant leader requires humility, a sense of humor and an ability to step into the shoes of others. It also implies keeping one’s eyes on the prize, putting goals like environmental sustainablity ahead of one’s ego. It means keep the administrative scutwork out of the way of the creative team as much as possible--the memos, reports and other documents that justify the team’s existence, the parts of the grant proposal that are not creative, the daily details of budgets and trivial correspondence. It does not mean becoming a martyr and sacrificing one’s career for the benefits of others, nor does it imply tolerating prima donnas who want to hog all of the credit, but it does mean letting others think they are the real leaders from time-to-time.
This question was the title of a speech B.F. Skinner gave at the University of New Hampshire when I was a graduate student there. Skinner, of course, was the most famous of the behavioristic of psychologists, who thought a science of psychology could only be founded on the study of behavior, because thoughts are unobservable. Skinner’s particular emphasis was on the contingency or relationship between response and consequences. If a response was rewarded, we would be more likely to make it again in the same situation; if it were punished, less likely. The theory becomes far more complicated and mathematical, but that simple idea is at the root.
Skinner was really an inventor. What he wanted to create was a technology for controlling human behavior. This led him into all kinds of ethical arguments with those who thought that controlling behavior was immoral. He countered by arguing that we are always controlling and influencing each others’ behavior anyway. There is no free will . So why not try to do it self-consciously and deliberately? Of course, Skinner thought the people who ought to apply this technology were the behavioral psychologists, sort of a modern version of Plato’s philosopher kings.
Skinner, in his speech, said saving the world was all about contingencies. He did not spell out how these contingencies might be altered, but perhaps he had these behavior-controllers in mind. A detailed consideration of the problems with this view lie beyond the scope of this book. Suffice to say that if there is no possibility of real human decision-making, if everything we do is the result of contingencies, then the behavior-controllers will not be any wiser or better than those they control.
William McDonough might agree with Skinner on the importance of contingencies. He wants to become a multi-millionaire by developing new environmentally intelligent designs. So does Al Rich. If entrepreneurs saw that they could make millions by making the world a better place, they too might act to save the world.
The whole system of regulations and tax incentives is designed to provide contingencies for acting in ways that are helpful or harmful to social goals. Hawken and McDonough and others want to alter these contingencies in ways that will encourage sustainable design.
But contingencies alone are not sufficient. For every multi-millionaire, there has to be someone--or some large group of people--who have less than what they need, or else affluence will cause negative environmental impacts. Also, much of what is needed is cooperative thinking--people have to be willing to share resources and rewards across a network, not fight over who gets the biggest bonus.
Recognition is another important contingency. It is the coin of science. Imagine an equivalent of the Nobel Prize for scientific discoveries and technological inventions that promote sustainability, poverty-reduction and peace. Imagine tenure and promotion policies that rewarded such activities. Would this hinder scientific progress and technological innovation? Perhaps, if progress is defined as the pursuit of knowledge, regardless of the consequences. But perhaps that is a poor definition of progress.
Recognition also suffers from the same potential problem as wealth--is there enough to go around? Does the recognition system only work if some people are willing to accept less than their share? One of the characteristics of good leadership is taking joy in the accomplishments of others. Could a system that rewards this kind of leadership, and provides stable employment for hard workers willing to stay out of the limelight, also accommodate competitive prima donnas? It would be interesting to experiment with these contingencies in a SIMSCI, to see what kind of system emerged.
What about priority in invention and discovery? The bliss of solving a problem can come with a re-discovery or a re-invention, but that is typically the only reward for coming in second. Does the reward system need to favor the first in order to provide enough urgency and incentive to take the risk involved in going where no one has gone before? As one scientist lamented,
Out there we have "competitors," who might see in our published names the great vile chance for self-aggrandizement. And the introduction of these new values--"competition," "me," "fame," "public image,"--into Western science is to a large extent the responsibility of this country. Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot: things that are so completely alien to my belief in the way of being human in a world threatened by natural and man-made disasters that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction, of little use in these new dimensions of human achievement--as no doubt some great television commentator would put it .
But she went on to point out that those who ‘run their own race’ can still win. Barbara McClintock is an example. She followed her own research direction, immersing herself totally in a problem of her own choosing, until the rewards finally came.
There can be multiple simultaneous inventors and discoverers, but these are rare and often represent subtle but important differences, as in the cases of the telephone and the microchip. These two cases, and that of radio and many others, resulted in long fights over patent priority. Are these really necessary? Bell spend much of his time in the decade after his one great invention defending it in court. Edison complained bitterly about patent battles . Would both have been more productive if they had spent less time defending their inventions? Did the battles over credit for the discovery of the calculus, and insulin and the invention of radio significantly advance human knowledge? They did leave us better records of the processes that lay behind these transformations. The eventual amicable settlement between Kilby and Noyce may be a better model for the resolution of patent disputes, as are the kinds of licensing and pooling arrangements practiced by companies in areas like microelectronics .
Of course, even such cooperative arrangements are often aimed at least partly at rivals. Apple and Microsoft recently agreed to abandon their legal struggle over whether Microsoft stole the look and feel of its Windows operating system from the Macintosh . Now the two former competitors have become partners. This partnership gives Microsoft an edge over its rival, Netscape, because Microsoft’s Web browser will be carried on every Macintosh.
Much of this book has been devoted to showing that it is possible to develop environmentally sustainable technologies. The Climatex Lifecycle network involves partnerships between former members of Greenpeace and CEOs of companies like Ciba-Geigy. The SELF network involves partnerships between non-government organizations, villagers and local and regional governments. These networks will have to change as they grow. For example, environmental regulators will have to become partners in promoting these positive models and freeing companies that adopt them from certain of the costs associated with regulation.
Success itself could be a threat to networks. Individual recognition is still a powerful motive for scientists and inventors, individual financial reward for entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, success can create tensions as each member of a network looks to make certain she or he is getting enough of the recognition and rewards. When you have nothing, everyone is struggling together; when the first rewards come in, haves and have nots appear, and the network threatens to disintegrate.
A servant-leader can be the savior in situations like this, someone who is willing to lead from behind, to put others forward and give them credit. But we may also need changes in contingencies. Why are there not more rewards for collaboration across an extended network, where it is no longer clear who the inventor or discover is--when the new technology emerges from the network, not from the individual?
Cooperation is essential to creating a better future. Moral imagination is an essential part of cooperation. True collaboration involves the ability to take another’s view and see it as one’s own, even if one eventually transcends it and replaces it with another.
This does not imply relativism--it does not say that all views are equally valid, or moral. It is worth trying to imagine how Pol Pot saw the world in order to understand how to prevent future Pol Pots. He went through a sophisticated Western educational system which failed to reinforce the most elementary sense of human rights.
The ‘information revolution’ put the Vietnam War, Tianamen Square, the bombardment of Sarajevo and famine in Ethiopia in American living rooms. It is easier to engage in moral imagination when one sees how others live and die, ‘up close and personal’.
The spread of information is helping the growth of democracy. Dictators can no longer hide the fact that people can prosper in free and open societies. Communism promised to eliminate the difference between the haves and have-nots; it was to have been the greatest experiment in cooperation and partnership the world had seen. Instead, in the Soviet Union, one group of haves--the Tsar and his nobles--were simply replaced by another--the Party. Ordinary people were still treated like dirt--or worse, starved and imprisoned in Gulags. The Soviet Union collapsed relatively peacefully, considering the potential for global war. Democracy’s rise is uncertain and unsteady--witness Tianamen Square--but capitalism has flooded into the Communist world, especially China.
The information arteries are clogged with movie stars and product advertisements, and even these played a role in the spread of democracy. It is hard to pretend that a totalitarian system is a success when people can see evidence of a better life in other societies. This image is partly a mirage, of course; citizens of former Communist states are discovering the painful truth that with freedom comes responsibility, and it is possible to end up poorer than one was under a dictatorship.
I have put all of our ethics cases on the Web, to make them accessible globally--to whoever has the technology. As the SELF cases illustrate, much of the world still does not have electricity, let alone laptops with internet connections. The risk is that the Web will simply exaggerate the differences between the haves and have-nots globally. My responsibility is to make certain my students--the haves--see this problem clearly, and are motivated to think of solutions. I also provide the cases in print form, and hope this book will be available in libraries.
I am writing this section near a lake where I went to camp for many years. There used to be as many sailboats as motorboats; loons lived at one end, and one could drink the water. Now the whine of jet-skis cuts through the ancient Adirondack silence and I am careful about swimming too far from shore--the jet-skis race at such high speeds that I am sure the operators would have trouble seeing a swimmer. One can no longer drink the water. I frequently smell oil on it. I haven’t heard the loons call at night in several years.
Technology greatly enhances my awareness of nature. I have a Kevlar canoe that glides easily over the water, and am beholden to the inventor Stephanie Kwolek for it. I have deep-sky binoculars that reveal the great spiral nebula in Andromeda. These tools help me gain a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, nature. I think it would be hard for someone on a jet-ski to experience this while ripping across the water with a whine like a buzz-saw. The place the jet-skis put-in is a scar visible from peaks that overlook the lake--an area where the forest has been stripped to make room for trailers and campers.
In defense of the jet-ski owners, there is no other way they can get access to the lake--even though the State of New York owns almost half of the shoreline, there is no public access. The man who owns the private entry has property taxes to pay, needs to feed a family and has no financial incentive to preserve nature. Moral persuasion is not enough; as Hawken, McDonough and others have shown, the system of contingencies must make ethics the natural course. Suppose the land-owner at the end of the lake could have his taxes reduced for preserving or restoring at least some of the land he owned.
But tax incentives are not enough, as we saw in the American Solar Network case: for every Al Rich, there will be half-a-dozen people who are in it only for the tax break, and look on it as a loophole they can take advantage of. Education is an essential complement to legal or regulatory contingencies. I experience this lake as a sacred place because I was taught to appreciate it by a group, in this case members of a summer camp. I started out hating it--cold water, unpredictable shifts in wind and weather. Gradually, like students in an active learning module, I had to learn to take advantage of the wind when canoeing and sailing, to experience the cold as ‘refreshing’. The key was converting nature from an enemy to an ally. Education was critical--an active education, full of challenges and mentors.
Another one of my favorite examples of sacred places are the American Civil War battlefield parks that dot Northern Virginia, where so much of the war was fought. In places like Manassas and Spotsylvania, there could be housing developments instead of these parks, which preserve the character of the landscape as it existed one hundred or more years ago. The Wilderness battlefield park is just that--acres of thickets and brambles and scrub growth. Where once blood ran in rivers, one can now experience nature. But this is a nature that includes lines of trenches, remains of trees mowed down by bullets, silent cannon--all reminders of the horror and glory of war.
Education is an important part of appreciating these battlefields. As Santayana said, "Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it." We must make certain that those on both sides who gave "the last full measure of devotion" did not die in vain, that "government by the people, of the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth." In the ballot-box, not the bullet, lies the best hope for a better tomorrow.
The problem with sacred places is that each group respects its own place, but not necessarily those of other people. Furthermore, groups have difficulty sharing sacred places--witness the centuries-old struggles over Jerusalem. To protect the environment and prevent war, the whole planet and all things living on it must be seen as sacred.
Once again, moral imagination is the key--in this case, the ability to see nature as part of oneself. Here homocentric and ecocentric come together. For me, the lake is a spiritual place, where I can experience that feeling the poet Robinson Jeffers described as "Not man apart" (in the politically incorrect language of his day). The ritual of return to the lake creates the opportunity for this feeling, but does not guarantee it, any more than the ritual of going to a battlefield can guarantee one will experience the horror and the glory.
At the lake, I become nature looking at itself; every senseless act of pollution, every waste of a precious resource, is damage to my own body. I can then take this wisdom elsewhere, and experience it in other places.
Here we come back to the role of moral imagination in invention and discovery. Could a team of inventors that experiences this kind of wonder and sacredness in the presence of nature create vessels that would fly down the lake without sounding like a dozen chain-saws and leaving a petroleum film on the water? Would they even want to? Perhaps--because such craft would create a positive alternative for those who wished to experience nature between exhilarating bursts of speed.
There would still be a need to integrate such craft into a network that included swimmers, canoeists and sailors who could still be hit by small, high-speed craft and would still have problems with the wake. Operators would need to be regulated by rights-of-way and speed limits, but they would also need that sense of courtesy, of looking out for the other, that is impossible to legislate.
The ability to see the other as oneself, where the other can be a person or the wilderness is the most basic kind of moral imagination and an essential first step in transforming nature. What would happen if each of us regarded all the children in the world as if they were our own, regardless of their race or ethnic background? Then war and poverty would become unthinkable. What would happen if we took an ecocentric perspective and saw Nature as having inherent worth? Then we would do all we could to restore the environment. What would happen if we really understood that we are part of nature? Then the distinction between ecocentric and homocentric would disappear and we would understand that one of the best ways to help a child now is to insure that her great-grandchildren will inherit a habitable planet. As William McDonough said,
When I was in Jordan in the early 1970s, I worked for King Hussein on his master plan for the Jordan Valley. I was walking through a village that had been flattened by tanks and I saw a child’s skeleton squashed into the adobe block and was horrified. A sheik looked at me and said, "Don’t you know what war is?" And I said, "I guess I don’t." And he said, "War is when they kill your children." So I believe we’re at war. We are at war with our own children. And we must stop. To do this, we have to stop designing everyday things for killing, and we have to stop designing killing machines .
A change in thinking is the necessary prerequisite to the development of new technologies that spread opportunity around the globe while restoring the environment. As Barbara McClintock said, pondering the acid rain that is an additional threat to Adirondack lakes, "Technology is fine, but the scientists and engineers only partially think through their problems. They solve certain aspects, but not the total, and as a consequence it is slapping us back in the face very hard" . These technologies will have to be part of networks whose members are willing to share credit. These networks, in turn, would be helped by contingencies that provide incentives for the restoration of nature. The Natural Step is a good metaphor, here. Take a series of natural steps, keeping continuous improvement as a goal. Another good metaphor is Second Nature, a foundation whose "sole purpose is to increase the capacity of higher education to make justice and sustainability ‘second nature’ in its learning, research, operations and community outreach".
My mission in this chapter has been to show that it is possible to turn students into ethical discoverers and inventors. My method has been a series of small, natural steps--begin with one or two case studies and expand, adding more and more detailed stories of attempts to understand the world we live in and transform it. Analytic frameworks and simulations can help us unpack the lessons in these stories. Students can become inventors, designers, discoverers and dreamers who help create a better world. They can plug into existing networks, or create their own. In the words of Walt Kelly, "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities."
This page was last edited: Wednesday, July 14, 1999