Imaginative engineers and science fiction

Society looks to engineers and scientists to help address existential global challenges, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, inequity, and global health. Yet, these challenges require ethical, imaginative approaches drawing on multiple disciplines. This project explores how to better leverage engineers’ and scientists’ imagination to address global challenges: how to move imagination closer to the forefront of engineering.

Specifically, we will study what happens when we connect engineers and scientists–students and professionals– to the literature of science fiction. Science fiction is a known rich source of imaginative thinking: a genre that deliberately imagines life lived differently, and, critically, while typically inspired by scientific and technological ideas, a creative literature that frequently focusses on the ethical dimensions of its imagined worlds.

Research Questions:

1. What literature, science fiction or otherwise, are engineers and scientists already reading, across the educational and professional stages of their lives?

2. How does reading science fiction—literature grappling directly with technological, social, and ethical issues— engage engineers’ and scientists’ imagination and prompt ethical thinking?

The project will innovatively provoke engineering and science students and professionals to go beyond the technical aspects and impact of their work, exploring through the novel use of creative literature how to better combine scientific skills with imaginative and ethical responses to existential problems. We’ll use a variety of creative methods to trace the thinking processes that shape engineers’ and scientists’ imaginative responses to reading science fiction, and how that reading may influence their work. The project will draw on a highly interdisciplinary research network connecting engineering to arts, education and social science.