Wicked problems: how to engineer a better world
Our world is filled with pernicious problems. How, for example, did novice pilots learn to fly without taking to the air and risking their lives? How should cities process mountains of waste without polluting the environment? Challenges that tangle personal, public, and planetary aspectsoften occurring in health care, infrastructure, business, and policyare known as wicked problems, and they are not going away anytime soon.
Systems engineer and author Guru Madhavan illuminates how wicked problems have emerged throughout history and how best to address them in the future using a model mindset informed by flight trainers that revolutionized aviation, while demonstrating how engineering is a cultural choiceone that requires us to restlessly find ways to transform society, but perhaps more critically, to care for the creations that already exist.
Meet our speaker and chair
Guru Madhavan (@bioengineerGM) is the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and senior director of programs at the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. A biomedical systems engineer, he is author of Applied Minds: How Engineers Think and Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World. Some institutions that he is a fellow of are; the Institution of Engineering and Technology (UK), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.
Michael Muthukrishna (@mmuthukrishna) is Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE. He is also Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, Affiliate of the LSE Data Science Institute, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar in the Boundaries, Membership and Belonging programme at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Technical Director of The Database of Religious History. He is also a board member of the One Pencil Project.
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This event is part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2024, taking place from 19 October to 9 November with events across the UK.
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