Abstract
The pursuit of change and optimization is inevitable within systems. Technical ones demand further improvements to remain competitive within markets and interests, and social ones demand change out of their fluctuating nature. But how exactly change must be approached or how change affects these systems within their contexts is often not understood. My research aims to shed some light on the interaction of change inside these two different realities, not only to describe them but to further understand engineering as a whole.
In the technical portion of my research, my team, in collaboration with the Dahlgren Warfare Division, sought to characterize the influence of missile launcher gas management geometry on the internal ventilation and control of the missile exhaust flow. The guiding principle and purpose is simple: optimization. Future missile launchers will require alternative internal gas management designs to properly regulate the high velocity, pressure, and temperature exhaust flows unique to their operation of future missile classes. These designs have to simultaneously maximize launcher longevity, internal flow redirection, and deceleration, and minimize damaging phenomena like standing shockwaves. But to produce future designs, the relation between geometry and flow characteristics must be uncovered. My team’s simulations of the Navy-provided full-scale geometry have yielded a negative correlation between the width of the system and the downstream location of entrapped shocks. Construction of a novel gas management system around the exhaust gas of a model rocket engine for testing is currently underway, but conducted numerical simulations have yielded promising results. Our pursuit altogether has made one key insight abundantly clear: the relation between geometry and flow is complex, nonlinear, and highly interdependent, just like emotions.
In my STS research, I investigated the consequences of emotional optimization. To ground my analysis, I first defined emotions as infrastructure in accordance with previous literature. I then examined how the intrinsic nature of emotions cannot be fully conceptualized within this existing framework, necessitating additional framework for closure. I then defined this new framework by recasting emotions as three coupled fields: the relational – how emotions are born – the distributive – how emotions move – and the dynamic – how emotions interact with other emotions, and explained how optimization is a decoupling of these fields. I then described how the consequences of emotional decoupling depend on its applied scale and intent. The results suggest that at the individual scale, under certain conditions, emotional decoupling can be beneficial; however, at the global scale, under the intent of capitalism, decoupling introduces systemic distortions to the fields that fundamentally alter people’s behavioral interactions and perceptions from a natural existence to solely being a response to capitalism’s presence.
In concert, the two have provided a profound understanding of the nature of change and optimization, representing their manifestations and consequences within technical and emotional realities. In this manner, they perfectly reflect the reality of engineering. To be an engineer is to be a changer of systems. Any consideration of change within a system must be met with equal scrutiny of its effects across different domains, especially with unexpected ones such as emotions. A neglect of one domain risks inertial dominance from the others, and too much emphasis on one domain’s consequence forsakes the impacts to the others, regardless of intention. A balance must be struck to maintain stability amidst change, and that balance can only be perceived through consumption and exploration of new media, because to consider one’s impact is what it means to be an engineer.
