Pipe Dream interviewed the four speakers featured at this year’s TEDxBinghamtonUniversity event, themed “Refractions,” which centered around the exploration of unique ideas and new perspectives.
Guru Madhavan, MBA ’07, Ph.D. ’09 is a biomedical engineer and policy advisor serving as the senior director of programs at the National Academy of Engineering. He has made multiple contributions to public health through advising the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the E.U. Malaria Fund and has been named a distinguished young scientist by the World Economic Forum. His interview responses have been slightly edited for clarity.
Q: Would you like to give a short summary of what your speech this afternoon will be about?
A: “My talk today is going to be about rethinking resilience. How, for centuries, we have defined resilience as bouncing back like a rubber ball snapping to its original shape. I want to challenge that assumption and instead pose ‘what would it mean and what does it take to consider resilience as the act of bouncing forward to where we need to be.’
And, in making that point, I’m going to cut through a terrain of narratives featuring engineers and ecologists and how we have learned about designing systems that are not just stress-proof but also get better because of stress. And that has significant implications for human life, the very act that we try to apply to build new systems, products and services, could remind us ‘what does it mean to be a resilient human being?’’’
Q: You’ve written multiple books about applying principles of thought that stem from systems engineering and modular systems thinking to solve problems and create solutions that benefit society. What inspired you to go into policy advising and how do you feel these modes of thinking can be applied there?
A: “So over the past decade, I’ve taken a deep interest in engaging with not just the historical elements of engineering, but also the deeply philosophical messages that stem from the engineering practice. So what do you do with that and how do you communicate with broader audiences who are affected by engineering in one way or another? So naturally, I’ve taken character-driven narratives as an approach to pursue that agenda.
My first book centered on basically elaborating, including for myself, about how engineers think, because there is no one kind, but the work that engineers do is so consequential. Perhaps it’s an act greater than even democracy, or maybe at least on par in terms of the impact it has, not just over the present generations but many to come. Engineering is our oldest cultural act, oldest cultural choice, far before we even had the sciences to inquire about them. So engineering as a cultural instrument is something that we need to deeply appreciate.
So I’ve gotten into the realm of plumbing systems engineering principles from historical case studies that are left to explore, that have been forgotten, that have been ignored. So naturally, I’m very interested in engineers who have largely vanished from public conversations, including Ed Link from Binghamton, whom I worship, and I wrote an entire book featuring him and ‘Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World’ is dedicated to Binghamton. There’s a lot of Binghamton that comes into play there.
I am also interested in trying to remind myself and others that the engineering we practice now is largely influenced by the definitions of Silicon Valley. But what would happen if we go back to the engineering defined by the Indus Valley, or even later on, the Susquehanna Valley? So I think these are the different kinds of frameworks that we need to constantly be probing to better understand engineering, to better shape engineering so it is not just rigorous but also responsible.”
Q: You received your MBA in health care management and leadership and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Binghamton University. Since you’ve dedicated your book to the city, how do you feel like your experiences here, not just at the University but in the community, have impacted your understanding of engineering and how you go about the world?
A: “I wish I could fully credit the University for making me a better systems thinker, but I’ll give enormous credit also to the community. Binghamton as a community, not just as a university, has so many insights, perspectives and experiences. We have had a tremendous industrial legacy that’s now almost forgotten, and we are also trying to resuscitate Binghamton as an industrial power to do the kind of work that’s most relevant to contemporary problems. Binghamton is not alone; there are many other cities within the United States that have had similar legacies and around the world.
So I think each of us should just constantly be asking a question within ourselves or among each other on why certain systems are there and what’s the interesting story behind them, and I think that will provide us a richer perspective on the world we live in and the choices that we make to improve the world.”
Q: You seem to have a very positive approach to engineering and a passion for it that isn’t solely technical. How do you think young engineers can cultivate an appreciation for the human impact of engineering and apply it to their work?
A: “Positive in the sense that I take failure analysis very seriously, so any serious engineer or anyone affected by engineering, should think of all the failures engineering has been involved in. So, engineering is a perfect blend of wonder and worst case, imagination, and it is up to us to translate that so that it doesn’t cause greater harm than good. Yet we live in a society where public values are squarely conflicting with the engineering systems at play that we don’t even understand, we don’t even control, and we don’t even know what happens with the information we give to those systems.
So such is the level of monstrous complexity to do that. I have taken history and philosophy as guiding forces, and I seamlessly cut across arts, business and culture in seamless ways, mainly because of the preparation I’ve had from Binghamton, it could have been very easy for me to be a superspecialist engineer elsewhere, but Binghamton made me fearless. And to that, I owe my enormous gratitude.”
Q: As someone who has advised in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, worked for the National Academy of Engineering and founded the Forum on Complex Unifiable Systems, what advice would you give to students looking to make a difference in the world?
A: “I think the architecture that enabled me to be, let’s say, proficient or be prepared to engage in the wide range of problem sets that I have is systems engineering. You really need to understand what influences what and what synergies are possible because of that, what side effects are coming out of this, and I think that’s a default mode of thinking to engage with these utterly complex systems and how these interactions are creating new sensitivities that we didn’t even expect in the first place.
So that is what requires a lot of prework, which means you need to be in a position to embrace all sorts of contradictions not flee from them. And that’s what a specialist engineer might be comfortable doing, but a systems engineer cannot do it.
And I think the training that I’ve received at Binghamton University and the mentorship and the community engagement that were duly incorporated into my studies over the years prepared me for that kind of confidence. We have a lot of problems that are not just tame, tidy, technical puzzles, you see, because the problems of our generations are tangled, systemic, wicked problems that don’t necessarily yield a clean, clear-cut solution of our seeking.
I think the key thing to keep in mind is to avoid the delusion that just because you have tackled something utterly bounded and boundable that you can deal with the ones that are completely unbounded and have a mind of their own. How do you deal with the problem sets on their terms? It is an uncomfortable thought for most engineers, but I’m grateful that Binghamton taught me that perspective early on so that I could apply myself or find me useful in these different contexts.”
Q: This year’s TEDx theme is Refraction, a reminder to explore perspectives that are different from our own in order to reach new levels of understanding. What differing perspectives do you hope people take away from your talk today?
A: “The theme of this year’s TEDx is “Refraction,” and that connotes some form of bending. And my talk on resilience also has a lot of bending, more about bending not breaking, and how do we design for that? I use the examples of wooden warships in the 1800s that were falling prey to shipworms and dry rot. Britain basically depleted seven-eighths of its virgin forests to build these massive warships called seventy-fours, for 74 canons, and they were floating fortresses. But they had a problem. The wood was failing. How do you do that?
There are a couple of ways to think through that. How do you come up with the right form of wood, especially the engineer that I talk about, Thomas Tredgold, he called a species of strength so that they could be made waterproof, rock-proof, stress-proof. And of course, you build these things, but engineers being engineers, over the years, they completely abandoned timber while we were trying to make better wooden warships, we went to iron.
So that’s the nature of innovation. You completely supplanted your range of work. But still, the concept of resilience takes on a different dimension. There it is still about elasticity, when bending not breaking. So in that regard, there is a deep connection to the theme of the TEDx conference, but there are also historical perspectives that I’m bringing to bear about engineers that have long been forgotten in public consciousness.”