Engineering with an anthropologist’s heart

As engineers we love talking about being better than everyone else just for the fact of being engineers. However, most of the time we forget that a lot of traits we need in order to be proper engineers come form the humanistic world: a realm fascinated with human behavior and interactions. This is extremely noticeable in any type of human centered design or design thinking.

It is anthropology (or the study of human societies and cultures and their development) that gives us the precedents needed to know how to study a group of people, how to interview them, when to interact with them amongst other things. It is through ethnographic research that we learn everything and anything that could happen within a cycle of someone’s life. For example, in anthropological research the minimum time you need to invest studying a population is one year since that covers every type of situation that might be encountered, however, in engineering that might be modified depending on what’s of interest, however, there must be a define cycle that needs to be observed.

In my career as a neuroscience student I have always had a fascination for social groups (that’s probably the most extroverted trait in me considering that most of the time being around too much people makes me tired). There were 3 specific courses that have molded the way I see engineering: anthropology, ethnography for design, and design 101. At first, I thought that this classes were useless and kind of a waste of time… until I saw snippets of the information in my “really tough” engineering classes. Some teachers were not ashamed of linking what they were teaching to the actual place where it came from while others completely dismissed their origins and made us feel superior for being “the only field that used it”.

I honestly think that we need to stop being so tough on ourselves as engineers and start accepting that everyone has something to bring to the table, whether it be a new way to build something, solve an issue or implement a solution.

Innovation vs. Research

Getting the best of both worlds is taking me a little bit longer than what Hannah Montana made me think it would.

I am an innovation student who just started liking innovation-related stuff about one year ago. For most of my degree I thought the whole concept of innovation was something millennials used as an excuse to have brainstorming parties and to keep putting new names to concepts have existed for a while now. For this reason, I pushed myself as far away from it as I could: got myself into some film making projects, buried myself in all of the other classes I had to take, took onto myself to create a research project, found myself sculpting stuff out of bricks and building tree dimensional things out of cardboard, writing a book, among other things just to run away from having to innovate.

Of all my ventures away from it, I found myself inside the research world: a world where a lot of people find might find value in what you’re doing but very few are willing to give you money for it. It was in this world that I finally found something I didn’t mind waking up at 5 am to go to and that could keep me focused during hours. I was sure I was going to be a researcher for my whole life and that I just needed to put up with some more boring innovation classes until it was time for me to get my diploma and that was going to be it. And then I met Mr. R.

Mr. R is an engineer trapped between the startup industry and the neuroscience world…and he loves it. He has perpetual bags under his eyes and probably has forgotten what it’s like to sleep more than 5 hours a day, but he seems fine. Once, we were having a meeting about how we could implement engineering knowledge into my project (which from the outside seems like a sociological or psychological study) and he pulled out one of the many innovation tools I had seen in an innovation course one or more years ago. That’s when it downed on me: neuroscience research, the thing I’ve been in love with, is a form of innovation and, even, innovation is a form of research.

It has been a year since that was shown to me and ever since I have found one or more ways innovation methodologies have saved me from losing time and focus, from being frustrated.

Now days a lot of people want to work as an innovation consultant and the truth is that no one really talks about how miserably frustrating the process of innovation is. Maybe it’s because it’s the one process that requires you to knowingly break the rules without losing sight of why you’re doing it. Truth being said, not everyone can do it and you will probably be shamed for wanting to do it. I remember wanting to change career paths just because of the endless jokes about how useless we are. Maybe that’s why I preferred research: people usually have no idea what you’re talking about so there’s no jokes they can make about it.

Long story short, being an innovator is so much more than having a post-it war with your teammate and about who has the best set of ideas for solving obvious problems. Being an innovator is knowing how to do ethnographic research, how to put together a theoretical framework, having a love for fieldwork very few people can actually understand, having so much ideas that trying to get them done feels like trying to hold water. I can finally say that I like innovation and I like my degree and it’s all thanks to all the different paths I took trying to get away from it. It was through this hate that I found what I’m passionate about and through this passion that I’m finally proud of saying that I am an innovation student.

How to and why to checklist

Anxiety is a part of my day to day life, the type where I constantly feel as if I always have homework left even when I am on a break. It tends to stop whenever I am on another city or another country since I get this feeling of “it’s not as if I could solve it from here”, however, as soon as I get back home it decides to reappear. Another very fun part about it is that it tends to not mix that well with the fact that I can get distracted very easily which leaves me wondering if that sensation of having something left to do is because I got distracted or just because of who I am.

That was my life for a fairly good part of my high school and university years until I met a friend who we shall call “Type A”, which should not be mistaken with “Taipei”, Taiwan’s capital (ba-dum-tss). Type A is an excellent student, the kid every parent wants, and every scholarship committee whishes to meet. This friend adopted me, almost literally, since they are extremely outgoing while I am the equivalent of an awkward being. At first I was very nervous about being around this new friend since they had a lot of qualities I had abandoned as a child just to fit in with the “cool kids” such as an indescribable love for stationary, the will to take pretty notes in class with multiple colored pens, the need to have an organized space to work in, and an almost-sense-of-satisfaction by checklists.

Of all the qualities presented to me by Type A, the ones that have stuck with me so far are the open love of stationary (meaning that I officially have a queue of notebooks waiting to be used) and the need to make checklists.

Checklists have a lot of shapes and forms, but I do think that there are some things that need to be present in most of them:

The items in them should be simple and doable as one simple task. If you have stuff such as “preparing for meeting with sponsor” nothing will ever be done. It is better to break it down into smaller tasks such as: prepare a power point presentation, get dry cleaning, confirm catering company, practice speech, etc. This way you can actually cross things off your list (which being honest is the ultimate pleasure when there’s a lot of stuff to do) and you don’t get the feeling of not being able to get anything done.

Write down everything that needs to be done. As someone that tends to feel anxiety, I can recommend this since it allows your mind to focus on the stuff you are doing instead of the stuff you need to get done. Another perk of doing this is that it allows you to perceive something generally abstract as a concrete thing meaning that it isn’t that scary anymore.

Practice everything, even your checklisting skills. I know that making a checklist seems like a lot of work but on the long run it isn’t. You probably already do it for stuff such as the supermarket or when you write down in a document the information you need to cover for your homework. It’s all about realizing that by doing it more and implementing it into your day to day life will actually save you time since you won’t have the moments where you’re just staring at the wall wondering what you need to do next.

When you are done with it, you are actually done. The last perk I wanted to mention is that the best part about checklists is that once you have completed all the work in it you can relax and take a break since it means that there’s nothing left to do. At times your checklist will probably be endless but that’s okay, remember it’s all about crossing off one thing at a time.

Lastly, remember to have fun with them: eat a gummy bear every time you are done with something; paste them in your fridge or computer; take aesthetic photos of them next to a coffee mug; do as Patrick Star and do nothing so that you can cross it off your list. You can do whatever you want just break it down into smaller tasks so that you can keep moving and thriving without feeling the weight of the world over your head.