Balancing Paradoxes

Engineering is becoming more about balancing paradoxes than solving problems. Some of our paradoxes are associated with national and local fiscal constraints. Other paradoxes are embedded in resource constraints and our natural limits to growth. Finally, an increasing focus on sustainability issues places many of our current ideas and projects into a rather small paradoxical box.

Mobility and transportation improvements are a central theme in civil engineering. The historical goal has been the efficient movement of people and goods from point A to point B. The paradox of this goal is the carbon footprint of our current transportation system and energy insecurity in an era of resource constraints due to improvements in the developing world and global climate change. Is it truly in our best social, economic, and environmental interests to make driving a more pleasurable experience? We are faced with a double paradox on this particular issue - - additional capacity in the highway system encourages more driving in an era where we should have system controls and market mechanisms that encourage public transportation. For so many reasons, driving to work with one person per automobile needs to be a more unpleasant experience.

Housing development at lower and lower densities at greater and greater distances from urban centers is another example of our paradoxical relationship with society. We need to be thinking in terms of higher densities in central urban settings - - energy economics and constraints combined with sustainability goals will drive this requirement. Seeing no limits in a world subject to increasing resource constraints seems contradictory, unbelievable, and absurd. Is it our professional role to be seen as the public face and facilitator of the absurd?

Engineering needs to be thinking about our collective paradoxicalness. Solving our energy problems in the context of national security and climate change concerns is a huge problem without a silver bullet. It has a solution matrix with lots of silver BBs - - where the goal becomes addressing and balancing the various paradoxes. This balancing act can produce complexity and ambiguity - - where the most talented engineer and manager feels a loss of control. We need to work at not ignoring complexity and paradoxes by producing simple cause-and-effect relationships. The fundamental goal needs to be a richer understanding of the total system of interest and the interrelationships between sub-problems.