The Engineering Mindset

Prominent articles from Computer create an interesting portrait of how engineers think and approach problems. A revealing example comes from two early articles that explained the new phenomenon of social networking to IEEE Computer Society members. The engineering mindset is not well understood. Engineers are regularly mocked as being out of touch with the greater society, even though that society relies on their very skills for vital services: food, shelter, energy, communications, and transportation, to name the more prominent. Yet, as the articles in this column—including the two discussed in this issue—have regularly revealed, engineers do not really build a wall between themselves and society. Instead, they try to balance the interests of society and its institutions against the things that they can control.