yesterday about research work combining ideas (both
new and historical) and engineering work (basically,
implementing ideas). Marion, who runs the PG forum,
suggested that science forms another distinct branch of
things to do. I liked that.
What's interesting to me is how these three things might
fit into one coherent frame. Seems quite philosophical
and a bit hard to articulate. But to be colloquial: ideas
suggest how things might fit together, science confirms
or denies (mostly denies) any particular idea, and
engineering actually creates something that fits together
the way the idea indicates.
The thing is, I wouldn't see these things as stacked on
top of one another, but rather, as intermixed. For example,
ideas can come from the way it feels to interact with some
"engineered system" (or anything else; usually "interactions"
include non-engineered components, like people).
We tend to get "credit" for any one of these things -- but
to make a really good dissertation, it's good to have
appropriate coverage of related things (any thesis could
talk about related ideas, related engineering projects, or
related experiments). What I was wondering about was
how we could tell just what sort of contextualization was
"appropriate".
0 comments:
Post a Comment