Is Engineering an Art or Science?

We all know it’s both, but we don’t teach it that way.

In 1942, at the height of World War II, a German economist named Joseph Schumpeter popularized an oxymoronic neologism called “creative destruction” to describe the process of technological and economic innovation.

Schumpeter’s new term drew attention to what I call the Irony of Innovation, which was something that earlier scholars understood, too. It is the realization that every creative act puts the status quo at risk. That is, innovation is both the birth of something new, and risking the death of something old.

Given the risks of innovation, it behooves us to test our creative ideas in conversations because it is only by experimenting with them that we can obtain the real feedback necessary to improve them, and perhaps understand the broader ethical and systemic consequences. I wrote about the importance of this experimental innovation process in How Do You Know You Have a Good Idea?, and Pretotype, Prototype, and Protoproduct… . The whole premise for this “design thinking” approach is to create new knowledge that can be embodied in products, services, and technologies that solve important problems customers didn’t necessarily know they even had.