Opening up engineering formation

Engineering formation – the making of engineers – includes political contents. By this I mean that engineers acquire and generate specific value orientations as part of their expertise and begin positioning themselves for techno-careers that distribute benefits and costs in specific, uneven, discontinuous ways.1 Engineering expertise is value-laden and, hence, directional.2 It performs no absolute technical-social dualism.3 One gains glimpses of directionalities in engineering expertise and careers, for example, in the senior design projects that faculty offer to lead and others offer to sponsor – typically private corporations. Of the 43 projects carried out in 2014–2015 by mechanical engineering students at Virginia Tech, 8 focused on aircraft vehicles and 7 on land vehicles; 6 supported large-scale manufacturing; 5 each aimed at improving roads and medical devices; 2 each contributed to international development, robots, space travel, sports, and tobacco; 1 sought to improve specimen storage at the Smithsonian; and 1 reduced battery weight carried by soldiers.4 While the effects of technologies frequently flow beyond the fields they are designed to join, the planned, material directions built into technologies matter.5 Participating in a design team challenges its members to integrate into their lives and work commitments to some things and some people through some infrastructures, leaving out others. One can gain hints of directionality in engineering expertise when prominent makers of engineers announce that their countries are re-defining priorities and re-plotting directions of travel.6 The makers join together to propose changes in curricular infrastructures. They engage in never-ending, anxiety-driven struggles to keep the contents of engineering