For the past several decades, policy statements, accreditation standards, and the mission statements of universities all refer to the notion of ‘interdisciplinary engineering education.’ However, the only result that has actually prevailed is a limited and comfortable form of interdisciplinarity. Mechanical engineers receive instruction in a bit of computer engineering; computer engineers are taught a bit of data science. These homogenous interdisciplinarities, moving within the vicinity of other associated technical fields, have contributed greatly. However, they are no longer appropriate given the world that engineers are expected to construct.

Interdisciplinarity as a means, not an end

Interdisciplinarity is not the goal in its own right. What engineering education should be concerned with ultimately is the production of young people of good judgment, people who can make wise decisions in the face of the uncertainties, the complex situations, the multiple value systems of the real world. And this capacity is created not through homogeneity but through heterogeneity.

What is heterogeneous interdisciplinarity?

What is needed in a future context is a kind of “heterogeneous interdisciplinarity” that places engineering not just alongside other technical disciplines, but instead embeds it in deeper and far more ancient intellectual traditions of philosophy, ethics, economics, sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology. Far from offering breath-taking breadth of knowledge and extension of scope, these disciplines also offer concrete insights into how human beings actually do, and actually do not, think, decide, cooperate and compete with each other, evaluate success and failure, and assign meaning to it all.

Bringing together epistemologically dissimilar disciplines

It brings a group of epistemologically dissimilar disciplines together. Engineering is built on modelling, optimisation, and designing with constraint satisfaction in mind. Philosophy examines the nature of meaning, values, and the boundaries of knowledge. Ethics concerns responsibility and harm. Economics investigates incentives and the trading off of one against another. Sociology and anthropology offer context provided by institutional arrangements and power configurations in human societies. Cognitive science and the biological/evolutionary behavioural sciences shed light on the nature of bounded reasoning and human behaviour available from thousands of generations of natural selection.

This is not about sprinkling a few “soft skills” courses as an add-on to mainstream education provision. This is about reframing engineering itself. Three reframings are of particular importance:

Reframing 1: Engineering as decision-making under uncertainty

First, engineering needs to be seen not just in terms of artifact manufacture but in terms of decision-making too. Decisions need to be made in engineering to balance between safety, economics, sustainability, performance, schedule, and social objectives. However, engineering decisions are often framed in decision theory in view that the decision makers are rational and the information available to decision makers is satisfactory. In most engineering failures, be they buildings, environments, or in algorithm design, suboptimal calculations are not really to blame.

Thus, the teaching of engineering in terms of decision making needs to expose the students to how actual people decide, rather than how they ought to decide. It is economics, cognitive science, and psychology that debunk the belief in perfect rationality; it is philosophy and ethics that introduce rationality under uncertainty and responsibility.

Reframing 2: Engineering as an art of excellence, not just problem-solving

Secondly, engineering as an activity would have to be understood as an “art of excellence” rather than an “art of problem-solving,” where most of the issues that plague our world today, such as climate change, traffic jams, internet security, and artificial intelligence, cannot be solved at all, but rather improved upon with every passing day. Excellence is by no means the same as perfection. Excellence is to be “better” than previously, and what “better” actually is cannot be defined by any particular set of rules that have any relevance to culture as such.

Intellectual humility and the limits of human cognition

At this juncture, the importance of intellectual humility comes to light. Critical thinking does not start from a position of confidence; rather, from a position of limitation in terms of models, data, etc., cognitions included! Evolutionary psychology points out how humans are naturally inclined to grab quickly attainable rewards and to favor in-group members relative to others. Technologies tend to accentuate these proclivities by default, unless deliberate thought is given to designing around these ‘reality checks.’ Excellence-seeking engineering indeed starts from this awareness!

Reframing 3: Engineering as a force shaping society and the economy

Third, the distinctive place of engineering within an economy and society has to be appreciated. Economists are trained to identify the costs and inefficiencies of growth pursued at the expense of distribution and externalities. Social scientists are equally mindful that the non-neutral interaction of technology with social systems always has significant consequences. Heterogeneous interdisciplinarity prepares engineers as critical thinkers able to ask the following five questions: How do the winners and losers change? Under what incentives do people operate in the new system? How and why do they use or resist the technology? What are the long-run social and psychological consequences?

Why this matters for India?

A country like India, diversified, differentiated, and rapidly evolving, requires that these are not optional questions to be avoided. An engineering education that ignores culture, cognition, and incentives may raise an army of technically proficient yet socially disconnected graduates. An education that adopts heterogeneous interdisciplinarity has the potential to produce engineering graduates of discerning taste, humble outlook, and profound sense of social responsibility.

Rediscovering Engineering’s human-centric purpose

The future of engineering education does not consist of more technology within the curriculum, but rather an enhancement of the intellectual base on which technical accomplishment is grounded. Heterogeneous interdisciplinarity does not cheapen engineering; it clarifies it. It builds up critical thinking grounded on intellectual modesty, rather than arrogance.

Therefore, in order that engineering might continue to enjoy a high level of relevance and acceptance in society in the years to come, it must first rediscover itself as a human-centric, excellence-seeking, decision-making profession deeply embedded in society, starting in the classrooms themselves.

The writer is Vice Chancellor of Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology (TIET), Patiala