COVID-19 Implications for Research and Education on Engineered Structures and Services
Q1 What is the nature and scope of the advances in basic science and engineering that bring “ our ” systems into being ?
Q2 How do we agree , as a community of systems engineers , on the rules for deciding which elements define a given system ( or lie outside of it ), as well as on the context within which a given system is embedded ?
Q3 What deeper assumptions — about societal values , the efficacy of regulation and the function of our economies and institutions — have we made or tacitly affirmed , and are these assumptions reasonable or merely convenient ?
Implications and Recommendations
This section explores the foregoing three questions by arguing for innovative , even contrarian , perspectives in addressing the following five themes :
• Tensions of scope arising from discontinuities between the temporal frames that our methods and data are prepared to handle and those which characterize the target phenomena observed in the world ( Q1 );
• Conflicting notions of criticality induced by discontinuities between the intended and actual uses of engineered structures and services ( Q2 );
• Uncertainty concerning the observed vs . expected ( or perhaps hoped for ) societal impacts
• that result from our work on ESS design and operation ( Q3 );
• Contested roles and responsibilities of public vs . private governance networks in ensuring quality of life under threats from hazards ( Q3 ); and
• The ambiguous role of regulatory frameworks in the midst of rapid decentralization of formerly centralized services ( Q3 ).
Through this section , we suggest potential avenues for productive , novel and useful research and education activities that , taken together , can help spur fundamental discoveries and the intellectual capacity to address them . We must , however , acknowledge two very real challenges to progress in these areas . The first is that , despite rising calls for research approaches that engage the disciplines implied by our three focal questions , the methodological and empirical points of connection between different disciplines are frequently insufficiently constrained or even ignored . The second is that , as a consequence of accreditation and licensing requirements for professional engineers , any discussion of wide-scale curriculum revision is likely to engender not only practical difficulties ( e . g ., in budgeting credit hours ) but also professional angst ( e . g ., reconsidering what it means to be a particular kind of engineer ).
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