TURNING IDEAS INTO ACTION: “I believe that engineers need to move away from a technocentric approach and adopt a sociotechnical mindset. By this I mean we need to start thinking about the ways in which the social and technical are always connected. These aspects should not be separated, with technical challenges going to the engineers and social challenges going to the sociologists,” stated Professor Gordon Hoople, University of San Diego (January 2022)
“Engineers spend much of their time absorbed in the technical aspects of problems, whether they’re designing the next generation of smartphones or building a subway. As recent news stories attest, this technocentric approach has some critical limitations, and the result can end up harming rather than helping society. We ask students to spend far too much time solving mathematical equations and far too little time thinking about the human dimensions of the problems they are trying to solve,” stated Gordon Hoople.