I heard from students recently about how they approach this challenge: they “black box it.” Chemical engineers are required to specify the material from which they would build their reaction chambers: they select stainless steel. Why? They don’t really know, they are not sure it’s the best choice for their application, but stainless seems to be used a lot, so it’s a safe choice. They simply eat the extra cost in their economic analysis (although I have to wonder if they include long-term maintenance costs in that analysis). They don’t really have a solid approach to decide the issue of material for a reaction vessel. They are busy with developing their chemical reaction and process control ideas, and don’t have the time or expertise to think about materials selection. So they “black box it.”
Similarly, materials science students working on a project involving a coal power plant recognize that there is fluid flowing through those pipes, but they don’t know about that, so they “put it in a black box.” Because they don’t work with a mechanical engineer they know little about the fluid flow issues that might constrain or inform their materials selection and design. Temperature, pressure, velocity? Those are just givens, not subject to real consideration. They black box it.
Given a team of 4 mono-disciplinary engineering students, what do you suppose the business case for their designs look like? It’s a recipe for failure.
We have always known that this mono-disciplinary team approach to design classes is artificial, but our goal has been to teach the design process, so a bit of simplification might be understandable. But perhaps we have not realized that we are creating a careless attitude towards design. The students I spoke to described how they would minimize portions of their design in order to work around the black box gaps in their knowledge. Because they were strongly constrained in time to finish a project they had to hand wave over components of the system they were designing, and dismiss parts as unimportant, not because they were unimportant but because they were black boxes. Imagine if they were to approach the design of a real mission critical system in such a fashion.
The solution is clear: student design teams need to be multidisciplinary. But because we still assemble teams with insufficiently broad disciplinary expertise, what choice do the students have other than to design around the black boxes in their academic universe?
