COVID-19 Implications for Research and Education on Engineered Structures and Services
ate the emergence of promising ESSs , particularly those which serve marginalized populations , while not compromising minimum performance expectations necessary for public safety . Such a delicate balance is essential at a time when structures , systems and even regulatory environments require unprecedented agility .
Research : Exploration of agile regulatory systems ; methods for defining minimum performance objectives for diverse ESSs .
Education : Enhanced capacity for risk communication ; training in policy advocacy ; understanding of interaction between regulatory and ESS design processes .
Conclusions
We are not alone in arguing that our fields ought to advocate for better ( or at least different ) social outcomes — we are simply being obvious about it . Implicit in much of contemporary research and practice in engineering is a belief — even a dream — that the forces of market-based capitalism will lead to a just and fair distribution of costs and benefits . COVID-19 has shattered those dreams ; we must find a new way .
Expanding the scope of our work is both a practical necessity and an ethical one , bound inextricably to the quality of the work we produce . We do not assert that a concern with these problems is absent in the research literature . Rather , we ask why have these and related problems – all of which bear directly on issues of social good and equity — have not become “ classic ” problems in our curricula , publications and the way we talk about our field .
We sometimes fail to account for the slow and steady evolution of the basic underpinnings of society , including value systems , economies and social fabrics , thus making historical relics of our models . As one of us has said , Estamos em prisão domiciliar por causa do ilusionismo científico que nós construímos . That is , we find ourselves in a domestic prison as a result of the scientific illusion which we ourselves have constructed . We can and we must question the degree to which this illusionism figures into our scholarship and our practice — and why .
And yes , we are taking positions here , or at least arguing for the relevance of a set of problems which appear incompatible with the current paradigm . We see no great difference in doing so than in , say , arguing that greater efficiency will benefit a particular subset of private enterprises . After all , the problems we and others have articulated are real , with real lives and livelihoods at stake . We emphasize that COVID-19 has revealed some of our most cherished assumptions to be hopelessly outmoded . We need an engineering discipline that is ready to learn from the errors of the past , respond to the challenges of the present , and shape the designs of the future .
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