Engineering as applied imagination
Dr. Alon Eisenstein, Associate Professor of Teaching at UBC Okanagan School of Engineering, believes that the secret for great engineering is “applied imagination.” We talked with him about what that means – and how it connects to moon missions, a world of autonomous vehicles and the imaginative legacy of Star Trek.
You’ve said that the secret for great engineering is using applied imagination – what do you mean by that?
Engineering is the structured creation of one’s imagination – a purposeful process for turning ideas into reality.
There is a common way engineering educators think about the difference between scientists and engineers.
Scientists study the world that is using the scientific method, whereas engineers use scientific knowledge to create a world that is yet to exist.
This bold, purposeful creativity is essential for tackling some of the big issues facing humanity. If we hope to address the climate emergency, for example, we need a profoundly imaginative response that goes far beyond incremental improvements. We’ve faced other existential or seemingly impossible challenges in the past – and our applied imagination has enabled us to achieve things that weren’t thought achievable.
What are some past examples of how imagination has driven innovation?
Here’s an example from Canada’s shipbuilding industry. Before World War II, Canada had just over three dozen ocean-going merchant vessels and 13 ships in commission with the Navy. During the war, our shipyards scaled up in just a few years, ultimately producing over 400 merchant ships and 900 naval vessels. Just think about the engineering and manufacturing ingenuity required to achieve this level of production in such a short time.
Or consider the Apollo mission. In 1961, when President Kennedy announced the goal of landing people on the moon before the end of the decade, this target seemed both physically and technologically impossible.
But that ambitious goal prompted engineers to imagine what astronauts might need to complete their mission – and to then start designing and building those technologies and tools.
There are lots of everyday technologies that originated from NASA’s activities that supported the Apollo missions. Engineers had to imagine how moon rocks could be collected, which led to the invention of the cordless drill. Nowadays battery-powered devices are everywhere. Astronauts’ visors needed to stay clear during the mission, so anti-fog coating had to be developed. We see the same technology in commonplace products like sports goggles and car mirrors.
These are just a few examples that show how tackling grand challenges with creativity and applying one’s imagination can lead to innovations that shape our daily lives so many decades after.
Tell us more about Marvel versus Star Trek.
There’s lots of cool technology in the Marvel Universe, but it tends to be fantastical and beyond what is possible. I think that a series like Star Trek, on the other hand, provides a great example of operationalizing applied imagination.
Star Trek introduced so many technologies, like the communicators, tricorders, holodecks and replicators, that inspired some of the innovations we can actually see today.
It’s interesting to me that the show’s creators were known for consulting with scientists and engineers to ask them to imagine a technologically advanced future that was actually feasible.
They wanted to make sure their ideas were grounded in plausibility – even if it would be decades (in the case of the original Star Trek series) before these technologies became widespread.
Is all engineering an act of creativity?
I do believe that engineering is an act of creativity and that engineering design is fundamentally a creative process, even though not all engineering tasks are creative ones. However, when innovation is called for, we need to be able to apply our imaginations in structured ways to help build a future that was previously unimaginable.
