Civil Engineering Crisis

Globalization is a millennia-old process driving changes in our civilization, going back at least to the ancient times when the Roman Empire conquered many countries in Europe and Africa. Globalization is now, as it was then, a complex process of gradual cultural, social, political, and technological changes that are closely interrelated and affect all participants in often unpredictable and undesired ways.

Globalization is an evolving process in terms of its pace and focus. For example, in the Middle Ages globalization was relatively slow, mostly as a result of the social focus on the spiritual life at the expense of exploration. The Renaissance brought a rapid acceleration of globalization, mostly caused by the shifting focus of societies from a spiritual life to consumerism. This shift ultimately resulted in great geographic discoveries, in inventions, and, most importantly, in an entirely new cultural and political environment in which change and technological progress were sought. The Renaissance spirit is best reflected in the concept of the uomo universale (a Renaissance man or a “global” man). Such a person is educated with a good understanding of science and art, has both analytical and creative skills, and, most importantly, is always learning and ready for exploration of the world to learn about various countries and to acquire new knowledge. Leonardo Da Vinci is the best example of a Renaissance man. He was an artist and a scientist, a creative and analytical mind, and a man of various interests. The concept of the Renaissance man is still alive and we could adapt it for the benefits of our profession.

Globalization accelerates the process of change that equalizes technological advancement in the participating countries—a desirable benefit. Unfortunately, globalization also leads to the equalization of labor costs in various countries with often painful consequences for workers and professionals in more developed countries who enjoy higher wages and salaries. Therefore, many politicians and ordinary people would like to see globalization stopped. Unfortunately, that is not a wise option. It could be accomplished only by a complete isolation of a given country, and that is simply impossible in today’s world. Even more, if it were possible, the consequences would be most undesirable. Whenever we propose isolationism as a way to protect our lifestyle, we should recall the Chinese attempt to stop, or even reverse, globalization.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century China was a local Asian power and enjoyed the trade and exchange of scholarly thought with a number of neighboring countries. At that time, the third Ming emperor Zhu Di embarked on building a maritime global empire. He created the largest fleet in the world with thousands of ships, including 250 huge “treasure ships,” each with nine masts and capable of carrying about one thousand passengers. Interestingly, these ships were many times larger than the galleons used later by the European explorers, with approximately four stories of above-the-water structure. Next, a period of exploration began. The initial plan was to chart oceans and foreign lands, to conduct trade, to show the Chinese power, and, through diplomacy and intimidation, to establish Chinese rule over the entire known, or to be discovered, world. During the time period 1421–1424, seven large expeditions were sent under the leadership of Admiral Zheng Hi. They reached Africa, Australia, North and South America, and established Chinese colonies in many parts of the world. The exploration of the world resulted in a huge body of knowledge and creation of maps whose copies were used later by the great European explorers. However, in Zhu Di’s China, eunuchs and mandarins shared power creating a delicate political balance. Eunuchs were warriors religiously loyal to the emperor and they represented the adventurous spirit of the explorers. The mandarins were administrators and protectors of the existing order following the Confucius philosophy of preserving “Tao,” the existing social balance and order. They were concerned that Tao could be destroyed in the Chinese society by world exploration and resulting globalization. In 1424 the emperor Zhu Di died. His successor Zhu Gaozhi, a strict Confucius follower, identified himself with the mandarins and decided to entirely reverse the policy of his father. On the day of his inauguration, Zhu Gaozhi issued an edict to immediately stop the voyages of the treasure ships and to discontinue building new ships. Gradually, the accumulated records and reports were destroyed; foreign trade and even interactions with foreigners were forbidden, and China entered a long period of isolationism. Even today, nearly six centuries later, China is still struggling to recover her lost leadership in many areas of science and technology.

European countries never stopped their world exploration quest, and consequently Europe became one of the world power centers. Today Europe is undergoing the process of unification driven by the European Union (and by French and German political ambitions) and by many smaller European countries that want to joint the European Union in order to benefit from the access to the Union’s resources and to the large European market. It is a local form of globalization that seems to be unstoppable now. Ultimately, as expected in at least several European capitals, it may lead to the even greater world importance of Europe.

A comparison of the histories of China and Europe provides the best proof that globalization is, in our civilization, one of the most important processes. It is an irreversible process shaping our future. Also, it brings many long-term benefits that change countries, societies, and even entire continents by gradually building a global civilization. It is particularly important in civil engineering because of the economics of the large and global scale of operations of many design and construction companies.

I believe that three interrelated forces drive progress in engineering, and in civil engineering in particular. The drivers include engineering creativity, computing, and globalization. To survive, and especially to thrive, in the rapidly changing world, we must do much more than only be reactive and exclusively use our analytical knowledge and skills. We have to recognize the existence of these drivers and to make significant changes in our civil engineering education reflecting both our tactical and strategic objectives. By tactical objectives I mean such obvious objectives as satisfying the ABET requirements, educating employable engineers, or satisfying expectations of our friends from industry, especially in relation to various pragmatic skills. The strategic objectives can be described as related to the long-term success of our graduates and to their contributions to the society and to our profession. Obviously, they are much less quantifiable than tactical objectives, but are equally or even more important.

Today our civil engineering education is focused mostly on factual and analytical knowledge and skills, all directly related to our domain. The changes in education are slow, mostly incremental, and they are driven more by the ABET accreditation requirements than by our vision of future needs. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with such a reactive approach, which at least guarantees that the necessary body of factual and analytical knowledge is taught. Unfortunately, the present practice is insufficient to recover our lost position of leaders of the technological progress. In this context, ASCE’s initiative to “raise the bar” through the introduction of the Body of Knowledge (BOK) is a positive development that may ultimately change the present paradigm of quantitative and incremental improvements. It represents a good example of “out-of-the-box thinking,” since it changes the context of the ongoing discussion about education from the present focus on the B.S. credit hour graduation requirements to the BOK necessary and sufficient to practice civil engineering.

Unfortunately, many university administrators consider any extension of civil engineering programs only from the political and financial perspectives. Therefore, they strongly believe that the present minimalist graduation requirements (for example, only 120 credit hours at George Mason University) cannot be changed. In such a situation, we have to build a bridge to the twenty-first century above the existing constraints, and that can be done focusing not only on the expected outcomes of the civil engineering education, but also on the coming challenges. They may require the introduction of all kinds of new forms of education, closing the gap between the provided and needed knowledge.

Our long-term success requires civil engineers to be proactive—able to predict and lead changes. A proactive civil engineer—a twenty-first-century civil engineer and a leader—can be considered a modern reincarnation of the Renaissance man. Such an engineer should have an attitude of an explorer to meet challenges of the twenty-first century. In more pragmatic terms, I would argue that in the future our graduates should be equipped with a much more complete and well-balanced BOK in the spirit of our times than of today alone. Obviously, it still should contain the absolutely necessary traditional civil engineering factual and analytical knowledge and the related skills. However, a new BOK and skill set must supplement this quantitative knowledge. It could be called “qualitative knowledge,” as explained later. Only a proper balance of qualitative and quantitative knowledge will create a synergistic knowledge system required for our graduates to fulfill their leadership mission. Today they are mostly equipped with the quantitative knowledge focused on the quantitative aspects of problems. They can be also described as analytical followers who are without a good understanding of nonanalytical components of civil engineering. My vision is that our graduates will be creative explorers and leaders who are prepared to use computing and engineering creativity, and who will have a good understanding of the global dimension of their actions.

Qualitative knowledge can be described as nonanalytical or nonquantitative knowledge, which is necessary and sufficient to prepare our graduates for the challenges of the twenty-first century. Qualitative knowledge encompasses knowledge in the three areas mentioned earlier: engineering creativity, computing, and globalization.

I believe that the twenty-first-century civil engineer should be characterized by a BOK with five major components:

Only a balanced integration of these five knowledge components provides a foundation sufficient to understand the complexities of the world and to predict and lead changes. At the moment, the focus of our educational efforts is mostly concentrated on the first two components, both largely of a quantitative nature. We teach the factual knowledge about various civil engineering systems and the related analytical knowledge and skills, mostly in the context of detailed design (analysis of behavior, dimensioning, numerical optimization, etc.). The qualitative aspects of civil engineering are rarely addressed. My initial thoughts on the remaining three knowledge components are provided in the next three sections.

Engineering creativity knowledge is understood here mostly in the pragmatic context of design and inventive engineering (D&IE), a subject area I teach at George Mason University. It is possible, however, to develop an entirely different approach to teaching engineering creativity, and there are many ways to do it. My position is that the nature of implementation is of secondary importance. Most important is to start a dialog about teaching engineering creativity in civil engineering; the description provided below is simply an attempt to initiate such dialog.

D&IE is an emerging science, a BOK necessary and sufficient to develop and use as a class of engineering processes, called “design processes,” when both routine designs (design engineering) and inventive designs (inventive engineering) are sought. The distinction between routine and inventive designs is made in accordance to Sidney Gregory, the British founding father of D&IE. He describes routine designs as those based on routine design concepts—that is, on the known and feasible concepts—while describing inventive designs as those based on unknown yet feasible and potentially patentable concepts. In the case of D&IE, generic problem-solving processes are considered a part of the class of design processes. The entire focus of D&IE is on the qualitative aspects of design and problem solving in engineering, mostly in the context of conceptual design and creative problem solving when “out of the box” solutions are sought.

In order to explain better my understanding of teaching engineering creativity, a brief description of my course on D&IE at George Mason University is provided. The course begins with several introductory lectures describing Da Vincian principia, basic concepts of both system architecting and designing, and Koen’s engineering method. In this context, the use of heuristics and decision rules is considered. In the section on design engineering, two major design theories are discussed, including Suh’s axiomatic design theory and Michalski’s and my own inferential design theory. Next, various formal approaches to designing are discussed, including traditional and constraint search, evolutionary designing, and the formal design evaluation methods. In the section on inventive engineering, various heuristic methods and the related computer tools are presented, including brainstorming, synectics, morphological analysis, and the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ). The course also has a section called “Design Research Frontiers,” which covers design knowledge acquisition, both manual and automated, constructive induction, and chaos-based approaches to conceptual design. As a part of this section, leading design researchers and inventors from the industry are often invited to talk about their work share with our students their experiences and methodological reflections. In the course, students have three home assignments and work on individual projects, which are presented in the class, and the students compete for various awards. The course has evolved over the last seven years of teaching it. Presently it is offered as an undergraduate (Introduction to Design and Inventive Engineering) and a graduate course (Design and Inventive Engineering). The undergraduate course is mostly intended for civil engineering students and it is taught in cooperation with industrial experts. It is mostly focused on problem solving using various heuristic methods and it involves group projects addressing actual problems provided by the local industry. The graduate course is taught as an advanced course, which is mostly populated by PhD students in the areas of engineering, systems engineering, and computer science. This graduate course is a part of the Graduate Certificate Program “Discovery, Design, and Innovation” offered by the Information Technology and Engineering School at George Mason University.

At present, computing in civil engineering is often taught mostly as computer drafting and in the context of computer simulation of various mathematical models. In the first case, the teaching is usually focused on the use of AutoCAD or MicroStation. In the second case, the teaching deals only with the quantitative aspects of civil engineering. Again, such teaching provides useful practical skills and makes our graduates more employable, but it is insufficient.

The present situation is critical for two other reasons. Very often, civil engineers are merely the users of various computer programs, employed as black boxes without any understanding of the computing principles implemented in the software. Such a practice is potentially dangerous, since it may lead to the incorrect use of software with safety consequences. Also, such practice limits engineering creativity because it forces engineers to use their software only in the way specified by the software developers, who usually have limited understanding of engineering, particularly of its qualitative aspects.

If we want to prepare our students for future challenges, we need to teach them a fundamental conceptual understanding of computing and of its potential impact on all civil engineering activities. That can be accomplished only when we begin teaching computing fundamentals and incorporate the integration of computing with various civil engineering activities as part of the majority of our traditional courses.

One of the pioneers of computing in civil engineering, Ian Smith of the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, recognized several years ago the need to revolutionize the teaching of computing in civil engineering. Consequently, he began teaching a course for engineers on fundamentals of computing. In 2003, he published with Benny Raphael Fundamentals of Computer-Aided Engineering, which is a reflection of his computing teaching experience and of his background in computer science. The book provides a careful selection of thirteen computing topics, important in engineering, which have been adapted for an engineering audience. Smith and Raphael discuss such topics as fundamental logic, complexity, data structures, object representation and reasoning, database concepts, etc. At present, Ian Smith is leading the ASCE efforts to develop a modular course on “Introduction to Computing in Civil Engineering,” which is intended for a worldwide use. The course is being developed as part of activities of the ASCE Global Center of Excellence in Computing and Information Technology and the initial results will be reported as early as June of 2006 during the ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering in Montreal, Canada.

Future civil engineers must understand the process of globalization on several levels. Ultimately, they should have a fundamental understanding based on the theory of complex adaptive systems. This can be difficult to accomplish today considering the fact that the present civil engineering curricula are mostly domain focused and provide little space for the fundamental engineering knowledge. However, a temporary solution could be to teach directed evolution (DE) as part of creativity education, but encompassing the evolution of our civil engineering profession considered as a system. DE is a theory related to TRIZ describing a long-term evolution of engineering systems in the general terms of evolution patterns and of the lines of evolution. There are many domain-independent patterns that can be used to predict evolution of various engineering systems. DE has already proved applicable to many engineering domains. Learning DE would provide students with a rational, process-based understanding of globalization and its evolution.

Another important line of action, more pragmatic and easier to implement, is teaching globalization in the context of specific civil engineering areas. For example, it can be done in the context of environmental engineering, like in the course “Environmental Engineering around the World” taught by Mark Houck at George Mason University, or in the context of construction engineering in the course “Distributed Development of Collaborative Engineering Support Systems” taught by Feniosky Peña-Mora at MIT. Another good example of globalization in education is the “Computer-Integrated Architecture/Engineering/Construction Global Teamwork” course taught by Renate Fruchter at Stanford University, which engages universities from the United States, Japan, and Europe.

Unfortunately, at this time we know that globalization should be reflected in our civil engineering curricula, but we still do not know how to do it in the best way considering all constraints. I hope that the ASCE Global Center of Excellence in Computing and IT will address the issue of globalization in civil engineering, particularly in the context of computing. Globalization and computing are closely interrelated and progress in one area stimulates the developments in others. The center has a number of members located in Africa, Asia, Europe, and in this country. They are pioneers of computing in their countries and obviously are interested in putting computing in a more general context of globalization to be able to predict needs and to appropriately evolve their research.

I believe that civil engineering is in a period of a crisis. Civil engineers are no longer perceived as leaders and their impact on the society and on their own future is severely limited with all kinds of undesirable consequences. Even worse, under the present paradigm, which could be called “quantitative,” there is little chance that the situation will be improved. Therefore, I have proposed a significant paradigm change: moving from the present quantitative paradigm to the one that could be called “balanced.” The new paradigm would be based on both the quantitative (traditional) and qualitative knowledge, as described in the previous sections. I believe that the proposed paradigm change is absolutely necessary for civil engineers to again become the leaders of progress in technology and in our society.

Raphael, B., and Smith, I. F. C. (2003). Fundamentals of computer-aided engineering, Wiley, New York.