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Engineering
has always been defined as a branch of "applied
sciences" in the past,
because engineers have to apply knowledge
from the sciences of the Nature to solve technical
problems. This traditional definition views engineers
as applied scientists, and has become the foundation
upon which we think, teach, practice,
and evaluate engineers and the engineering profession
to date.
But,
time has changed now!
Today's
engineers must incorporate many social, economic
and technical (S.E.T)
factors and deal with various technical, organizational,
and people (T.O.P.)
issues in order to make decisions that meet market
demands and support social
well beings. This is particularly true in the production
engineering professions where new products and services
are collaboratively developed and implemented by engineering
teams to drive the economic growth. Rather than computing
the
optimal
solutions
based on
natural
sciences,
engineers
must collaboratively negotiate with constraints
of the nature and preferences of the people
in order
to get their jobs done! . Therefore, from the viewpoint
of decision-making
style, rather than the type
of knowledge,
an engineer is
more a "negotiator" than
merely an "applied
scientist" in practice.
This,
by no means, suggests that engineers do
not need to know the natural sciences; but rather points
to
the
need
of broadening the engineering foundation from "Engineering
is Applied Science" at the present to "Engineering
as Collaborative Negotiation" (ECN)
in the future. This ECN paradigm encourages engineers to use various negotiation approaches
and techniques when making joint engineering decisions.
It has a fundamental impact on how we approach engineering
education, research, and technology transfer in
the future.
This
is why you should all be interested in studying and
promoting ECN.
Negotiation
has been a field of study in business, organization,
politics, communication, etc. Individuals, parties,
and countries negotiate in a collaborative or competitive
manner for all kinds of issues all the time. Whenever
there are limited resources and competing demands,
negotiation takes place. This is always true for all
engineering problems, especially under competitive
market conditions. Engineers negotiate with their competitors,
customers, managers, and fellow engineers. They spend
more time on negotiation with people rather than calculation
with computers.
Even when engineers compute some numbers and equations,
they must negotiate multiple constraints and competing
objectives within their own minds. In other words,
negotiation happens
all
the time and everywhere, regardless whether engineers
work in groups or by themselves.
Despite
of the fact that negotiation plays such an important
role in engineering, it has not been a subject of systematic
study in both research and education. The CIRP ECN
initiative tries to change that. Our goal is to initiate
interdisciplinary investigations on what is
collaborative negotiation in engineering and how we
can better support it with existing or new theories/tools,
etc. The result of ECN initiative can be:
- Different
ways of using existing theories/methods/tools to
negotiate engineering tasks that lead to better decisions,
- New
theories/methods/tools that are developed to support
better collaborative negotiation in engineering,
and
- A
significant evolution from "engineering as collaborative
negotiation" to "engineering is collaborative
negotiation".
For
those who are new to the general subject of negotiation
and/or the ECN concept, you may wish to first download
and read the article on "Engineering as
Collaborative Negotiation: a New Paradigm for Collaborative
Engineering
Research,"
by Stephen Lu, or visit the website section on "What
is ECN?". Additionally,
you may also find more background reading materials
from the Reading section of the website.
Welcome
to the new world of ECN. We hope you enjoy your visit,
and come back to see us again frequently.
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