Worldbuilding: The Engineering Imagination

Engineers across the globe are building our future and, by extension, our world. But how can these engineers – whose educations have often encoded historical gendered, raced, competitive, and capitalist norms – responsibly engage in worldbuilding, which is both an art and a science? How can we better prepare the next generation to build a world that is more inclusive and intersectional?

In this concise and accessible book, writer and engineer Jenn Stroud Rossmann argues that we need to upgrade the "engineering imagination". By interrogating engineering's history and storytelling traditions, she reveals how we could better understand and anticipate the impacts and implications of new technology and so better envision alternative futures. Far from being a merely technical science, engineering has been shaped – and can be revolutionized – by sociocultural factors and products, the ways that we talk about the history of technology, and the ways that we pass on knowledge through education.

Drawing upon sources as varied as literature, poetry, visual art, and film as well as history, philosophy, and the technicalities of science, Worldbuilding is a guide to thoughtful technological citizenship for makers and users alike.

Jenn Stroud Rossmann is the Baird Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Jeffers Dean of Engineering at Lafayette College.