New Book Explains How To Engineer 'Wicked Problems' With Social Responsibility

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 aspects—often occurring in health care, infrastructure, business, and policy—are known as wicked problems, and they are not going away anytime soon.

Wicked Problems reveals how engineers tackle complex issues. Through compelling stories of battleships and volcanic eruptions and many others, Guru Madhavan illustrates engineering’s profound impact and frames it as both a technical and ethical pursuit.

Here's an excerpt from Guru Madhavan's Wicked Problems

ON APRIL 22 , 1993 , INCANTON , OHIO , KE MING LI DROVE home in her Volvo 850. Her six-year-old daughter, Diana Zhang, was in the right front seat. A boxy Volkswagen Golf abruptly stopped ahead for a turn. Li stopped in a panic and rearended the hatchback. The low-speed collision triggered her Volvo’s front airbags. The 2,600-pound blow exploded outward in milliseconds, striking her daughter and pinning her to the inside roof. 

The young Diana died of severe head injuries three days later. Li survived with a chin scrape. She sued Volvo for product malfunction and negligence. The court sided with Volvo for two reasons. First, the company’s testing data demonstrated that its product was “safe” if used properly. Second, the daughter was not wearing a seatbelt. 

Airbags were first fitted in American cars in 1950. Even after their launch, engineers were uncertain about how the airbags worked in different conditions. Typically, the scope of the design process makes engineers operate in “partial ignorance.” They don’t necessarily have all the insights from the get-go or have the luxury of waiting for all explanations. At some point, constraints force engineers to forego additional tests and simulations for the sake of launching the product.

Therefore, final product testing is usually carried out by users of the product after it leaves the factory. Monitoring how others use the technology usually drives further product improvements. This iterative aspect of design has been called a “social experiment,” where “ongoing success in engineering depends on gaining new knowledge, as does ongoing success in experimentation.” 

But engineering experiments in the real world differ from laboratory studies in two ways. First, one can’t randomly sample customers buying cars with or without airbags. There isn’t a control group of people who don’t receive the treatment that would distinguish the effect of the experimental treatment on those who receive it. Second, obtaining informed consent from the public can be tricky, even though, as users of potentially dangerous technology, people should have a say in its development.

Through social experimentation, engineers eventually handled the “hard vagueness” of airbags. But as we’ll see, achieving an acceptable social solution took many lives and years, requiring a blend of public policy and public relations.

But first, let’s consider vagueness. The concept lacks a crisp definition; it’s imprecise. Philosophers love to use bald people as examples to describe vagueness. If someone has over half a million hairs, they aren’t bald, but with none, they are. But if someone has a couple of thousand hairs, are they bald? Without much precision to mark the boundary, how’s one to define who’s bald and who isn’t? Again, someone with zero hairs is bald. If you apply the “tolerance principle,” say, someone with n hairs is bald, then someone with n + 1 hairs is also bald. Then is a person with 1 hair still bald, or “less bald”? How about 2 hairs, or 7 hairs, or 13,287 hairs? 

In this line of thinking, even though the premise is valid, the conclusion comes out invalid. So vague situations are also susceptible to the sorites, or the heaper paradox. A contemporary of Aristotle, Eubulides of Miletus, asked: What’s a heap? Can 1 grain of sand create a heap, or does it take 100,000 grains? If 1 grain isn’t a heap, and adding an extra grain doesn’t make a heap, then by extension, 100,000 grains aren’t a heap either. Akin to sand, our words, too, can pile up vagueness. Where does one system end, and where does the other begin?

Such vagueness permeates our daily lives. Consider the paradox of mañana, which relates to an indefinite future that scholar Dorothy Edgington describes as “the unwelcome task which needs to be done, but it’s always a matter of indifference whether it’s done today or tomorrow.” These paradoxes are profoundly relevant in considering how gradual change affects us: increase in prices, pollution, population, and the planet’s temperature.

One scholar argued that it’s unproductive to think of vague boundaries as “a grid, a net, a system of pigeon-holes, a way of drawing a line, dividing a field.” Instead, we should visualize vagueness as “magnetic poles around which some objects cluster more or less closely and from which are more or less repelled.” Imprecision can be appealing with concepts like love, justice, beauty, and sustainability. When scrutinized, even our most simple ideas can become vague. H. G. Wells observed this problem with the definition of a chair. Chairs could be armchairs, reading chairs, dining room chairs, kitchen chairs, dentist chairs, thrones, and opera stalls, and could cross over to become sofas, bar stools, dorm sleepers, and park benches.

Given the variety, Wells wrote, one could “defeat any definition of chair or chairishness.” Ultimately, the philosophical puzzles of hairs and chairs help us formulate better problems. But while philosophers can debate definitions forever, engineers must deliver practical designs, even in uncertainty.

Extracted with permission from Guru Madhavan's Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World; published by HarperCollins