Engineering work contexts

From the work context window, the user may activate design tools for operating on the documents contained in the workspace. Here, the user invokes a flowsheet editor [21] in order to insert reaction alternatives into the flowsheet for the Polyamide-6 process. The flowsheet editor, which was also developed in the IMPROVE project, is based on MS Visio, a commercial drawing tool, which was integrated with the PRIME process engine [371]. 

In the importance played by the factor of context, this case recalls the Cadillac engine-control-chip case. Both involved contextual myopia. In the Topf case, however, a much broader context should have been taken into consideration by the engineers involved. The engineers should have paid careful attention not just to the local socio-technical-environmental system context, as happened in the Cadillac case, but to the macro political-economic-cultural-environmental context of the engineering work being carried out by Topf Sons personnel. 

The most important take-away lesson for engineering students and practicing engineers to absorb about context from these cases as a group is to avoid decontextualization and under-contextualization of engineering work. Put... 

In this chapter, we give an overview, in Section 1.1, of how the rules of thumb are presented in the rest of the book. Then, we emphasize the contexts in which engineers work the context for the process (Sections 1.2 to 1.7), the thinking used (Sections 1.8 to 1.16), the people dimension of our practice (Sections 1.17 to 1.20)... 

Engineering work teams are often made up of individuals with various areas of expertise. While it would be expected that someone with ergonomics expertise would frequently bring up issues of broad context (and indeed we did see that Sandra had the highest ratio of broad to close context comments), it is notable that all the members of the team brought up broad context in addition to close context. This is another area where it could be very useful to show students that as a practicing professional one cannot claim I m only an electrical engineer, I don t need to know context - everybody needs to do context - both kinds Just as importantly, everybody needs to know how to work competently as a member of a team. 

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