Engineers as Creators of Needs and Desires

I just completed an outstanding article in the current issue of The Chronicle - Building a Bridge Between Engineering and Humanities by Julio Ottino and Gary Morson, both of Northwestern.  From the article:

"Acquiring the habit of overcoming habitual perception is one process that brings engineering and the arts together.  It is how great writers impact human experience in new ways, and it is how engineers innovate.  Technology does not proceed along a preordained single path, as one might suppose from a textbook or problem-solving approach.  Like literature, engineering sometimes works not by satisfying recognized needs but by creating the needs it satisfies.  And that is also like literature: Tolstoy did not satisfy someone's need by a novel call Anna Karenina."