ENGINEER AND SOCIETY

The engineering profession

Nature & Role
 ENGINEER AND
ENGINEER SOCIETY
AND SOCIETY

Content

The engineering profession

Nature & Role

ENGINEER AND SOCIETY
 ENGINEER AND SOCIETY
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ENGINEER AND SOCIETY
 ENGINEER AND SOCIETY
Engineer

•Technology, intelligently applied, is essential to finding ways to achieve social

and environmental improvement.

•We sometimes forget that people are better fed, better housed, and better
informed today than ever before in history, and we tend to overlook how vital
these things are in the total human environment. We do not want to lose our
grasp on these precious achievements while pursuing other goals, such as
cleaner air, cleaner water, and the preservation of wilderness.

•We want all of these things, and we want to find the ways in which technology
can best serve us in attaining our goals.

•Engineering is an enormous and a highly- diversified field.

•Therefore the engineering are treated in most detail are those of research,
design, and development, together with related environmental, ethical, resource,
and management issues.
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WHAT DO ENGINEERS REALLY DO?“

•A problem that besets most engineers is trying to explain to others just

what it is that they do.

•Some explain that civil engineers design bridges, electronic engineers

design computers, and mechanical engineers design machines.

•Some try to attempted to describing a hypothetical engineer’s typical

day: working in an office, coming up with new ideas, defining problems,
solving problems, working with others-customers, salespersons,
manufacturing personnel and probably doing lots of travel.

•The question now is whether you made a good decision four years
previously and whether engineering will prove to be a congenial lifetime
choice. No doubt the questioner is wondering whether engineering
practice will resemble engineering in college.
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SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

• During the 1960s, when the United States was trying to get its
space program going, engineers became bothered by the fact that
every successful rocket firing was hailed as a scientific
achievement, whereas every unsuccessful one was called an
engineering failure.

•Obviously, there was much confusion in the public mind regarding

science and engineering.

•Today there is greater public appreciation of the nature of

engineering, therefore as a result it has been the enhancement of
the status of the engineering profession.

•Most of the current definitions of these two words, science and

engineering, shed little light on the matter.
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SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
• For instance:
i. Scientists primarily produce knowledge.
ii. Engineers primarily produce things.

• This is based on what they has been producing. At one time the
scientists be producing knowledge and at another time be producing
things.

•This is because engineering and science are intimately related. In fact,

as our society grows technologically more sophisticated, engineering
projects tend to become a mixture of these two fields

•The basic task of the scientist is to perform research (create new

knowledge). While the basic task of the engineer is to perform design
and development (create new things).
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SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

•Engineers, on the other hand, are concerned with the creation of devices,
systems, and structures for human use.

• It should be noted that the output of an engineer may not always be

tangible.

•For example, many engineer are engaged in the design of intangibles, such
as processes and systems
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WHAT IS A PROFESSION?
Definition of the word profession has been prepared,
•Profession
.... A calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and
intensive preparation including instruction in skills and methods as well
as in the scientific, historical, or scholarly principles underlying such
skills and methods, maintaining by force of organization or concerted
opinion high standards of achievement and conduct, and committing its
members to continued study and to a kind of work which has for its
prime purpose the rendering of a public service.”
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•Engineering certainly requires specialized knowledge and intensive preparation, but the
degree of preparation is not so great as that in medicine or law, two professions with which
engineers frequently compare their own

•The engineering are required to meets the tests of high standards, continued study, and
public service. However, it should be noted that these three points relate more to the
behavior of the individual professional than to the group

• What engineering professionalism meant, the three most frequent responses were:
1. Technical competence and skill: high standards of learning and ability
2. Prestige for the profession: stature (figure), poise (self-esteem), respect
3. Become more like lawyers and doctors: raise standards as in medicine and law.

•However the engineers’ managers placed the matters of competence, responsibility, and
ethics at the top of their lists, while the aspects of prestige were well toward the bottom.

•Continued study

•Public Service
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Nature & Role

The engineering contains a very large number of relatively small fields, such as
industrial engineering, mining engineering, ocean engineering, systems
engineering, corrosion engineering, safety engineering, and traffic engineering.
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The Nature & Role

THE FUNCTIONS OF ENGINEERING
•It was observed earlier that the characteristic activity of the
engineer is design.
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Nature & Role

Research
• Research is the process of learning about nature and codifying this knowledge
into usable theories. In the common way of looking at things, it is supposed
that scientists first do research in order to provide a scientific basis for what
engineers will do later and that engineers then apply this knowledge

Design and Development.

•Design is often difficult to distinguish from a related activity: development.
•In practice, the term development is likely to refer to the early stages of a project, when
the various possible methods through which the project is to be accomplished are
analyzed, compared, and tested.
•Design usually refers more to the later phases of a project, when the basic method of
achievement has been decided.
•Generally, companies refer to the whole spectrum of their technical activities as research
and development, usually abbreviated R&D
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Nature & Role

Testing
•Some organizations have special test departments, organizationally separate
from the design departments. The reason for separation is so the test departments can be
more objective in their testing procedures than if designers
tested their own creations. Test departments not only test new designs but
may also conduct tests of new parts or materials and may conduct qualification tests of
products furnished by others.

Manufacturing
•Before a product can reach the public, it must be manufactured (in the case of civil
engineering, constructed). Many engineers are employed in manufacturing.
•Manufacturing engineers have been responsible for the product, rather than for the
people, and are daily engaged in solving the problems that inevitably arise in
manufacturing anything. They are also concerned with developing and improving the
production process.
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Nature & Role

Construction
•The civil engineering analog to manufacturing is construction. Construction engineers may
either be directly in charge of the construction personnel or may instead have responsibility
for the quality of the process.

•They are usually employees of the construction contractor, who may deliberately hire civil
engineering graduates for the purpose or may instead hire graduates of the increasingly
available construction technology programs.

•These individuals have the responsibility for the quality of construction, they are usually
employees of the consulting engineer firm that designed the structure.

• Resident Engineer meaning that they spend all their time on the construction site
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Nature & Role

Sales
•Many employers deliberately recruit engineering or technology graduates for this purpose.
•Many engineers move into activities that clearly consist of straight sales work and thus
completely lose contact with engineering, this is not what is generally meant by sales
engineering.
•Sales engineering is a province truly intermediate between sales and engineering and
occasionally involves engineering design. Such opportunities normally arise in enterprises
that sell and produce custom-designed systems

Consulting
•Consulting engineering is the activity that most closely resembles the mode of operation of
doctors and lawyers, but only a very small percentage of engineers are engaged in
consulting.
•It is erroneous to think of a consulting engineer as an individual who typically offers
services to the public for a fee, like a doctor.

Government
•The government is a major employer of engineers.
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Nature & Role

Management
•Statistics show that, sooner or later, most engineers go into management.
Some engineering graduates are actively interested in management careers.
Management is a major career destination for engineers, whether things are planned that
way or not.

Teaching
•Finally, we should note that some engineers become teachers. lf one wishes
to teach at the two-year community college level, a master’s degree and a
teaching credential are the usual prerequisites.
•Professional experience also is highly desired.
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Engineering tasks and possible problems
Tasks A selection of possible problems
Conceptual design Blind to new concepts. Violation of patents or trade secrets.
Product to be used illegally.
Goals; performance Unrealistic assumptions. Design depends on unavailable or
specifications untested materials.
Preliminary analysis Uneven: Overly detailed in designer’s area of expertise, marginal
elsewhere.
. Detailed analysis Uncritical use of handbook data and computer programs based on
unidentified methodologies.
Simulation’ prototyping Testing of prototype done only under most favorable conditions or
not completed.
Design specifications Too tight for adjustments during manufacture and use. Design
changes not carefully checked.
Scheduling of tasks Promise of unrealistic completion date based on insufficient
allowance for unexpected events.
Purchasing Specifications written to favor one vendor. Bribes, kickbacks.
Inadequate testing of purchased parts.
Fabrication of parts Variable quality of materials and workmanship. Bogus materials
and components not detected.
Assembly/construction Workplace safety. Disregard of repetitive-motion stress on
workers. Poor control of toxic wastes.
Quality control/testing Not independent, but controlled by production manager. Hence,
tests rushed or results falsified.
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Engineering tasks and possible problems

Tasks A selection of possible problems

Advertising and sales False advertising ( availability, quality ). Product oversold
beyond client’s needs or means.
Shipping, installation, Product too large to ship by land. Installation and training
. training subcontracted out, inadequately supervised.
Safety measures and Reliance on overly complex, failure-prone safety devices.
devices Lack of a simple “safety exit”
Use Used inappropriately or for illegal applications.
Overloaded. Operations manuals not ready.
Maintenance, parts, Inadequate supply of spare parts. Hesitation to recall the
repairs product when found to be faulty.
Monitoring effects of No formal procedure for following life cycle of products,
product its effects on society and environment.
Recycling/disposal Lack of attention to ultimate dismantling, disposal of
product, public notification of hazards.
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MINI PROJECT
Identify one disaster happen recently and discuss as follow:
1.Introduction
2.Brief about the case study disaster
3.Similarity of disaster
4.Rectification process
5.Future development
6.Recommendation
7.Conclusion
8.Reference

Team member : Maximum 3 students

Title submission : 20th April 2011
Submission : Week 4 (6th May 2011)