Pure Engineering: Decoupling Technical Innovation from Utility and Consumerism

The human need to create is elemental. Whether this is an inevitable, evolutionary consequence of being the descendants of tool-making ancestors, or the cultural means by which we serve memes much bigger than our individual selves, we are compelled to execute the designs concocted by our imagination.

In the context of technical innovation, however, there is a growing consensus that this drive to create has become increasingly co-opted by materialism; that consumerism has become the mother of invention, and faith in technology its father; that we justify this faith with the misguided belief that technology is THE solution to our unsustainable trajectory, and that we institutionalize it by indoctrinating our technically gifted young in formalized educational settings.

This talk explores a different model of technical innovation: one where innovation for its own sake is fostered and cultivated; one that encourages individuals to see innovation as a natural consequence of being creative and playful, rather than a means to utility; one that detaches technology from its current role, and frees us to explore what its new role could be.

Speaker: Raffaello D'Andrea, Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich