Mechanical and Materials Engineering Seminar Series

Biography: Dr. Chuck Pezeshki is Director of Industrial Engagement for the Voiland CEA, and runs the Industrial Design Clinic, the vehicle for the School of MME’s capstone class. He is a WSU Sahlin award-winning teacher who has worked with over 80 different companies on a regional, national and international basis. He now writes on 21st Century management concepts, his co-developed Theory of Empathetic Evolution, and understanding design processes and design thinking from an information sharing perspective. He is currently completing a book with one of the founders of the Lean/Agile movement on how to optimize design strategies for future products

Abstract:As academics, we spend our lives in pursuit of knowledge. But what is knowledge, and how do we discriminate between the different types? We are taught along disciplinary boundaries: materials science vs. mechanical engineering, arts and humanities vs. the sciences, and so on. But are these useful descriptors? Do they really illustrate the different cognitive processes, and the types of work we do to advance our fields? How can it be that people in closely related disciplines often do work that may be relatively incomprehensible to each other? And how can we work to bridge the gap. In this talk, I will explain generalized concepts of knowledge structure that have been generated by a collaboration between three professors in our School – myself, and Drs. Jerath and Leachman. We start from the premise that knowledge is socially constructed in the truest sense – that knowledge is created with structure that maps to the interaction patterns of the individuals who are creating it. This factor, along with legacy social structure interactions (“we can see so far because we stand on the shoulders of giants”) create our current understandings. Key in knowledge construction is the empathetic exchange of the knowledge between actors that defines the synergy in the knowledge, and its level of both coherence and connectedness. These concepts are mapped down to the neurogenic level, forming a bridge starting at the smallest scales – the neurons in our brain – to the largest – our assembled professional societies, academic institutions, industries and our whole society