期刊名称：Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association
出版年度：2011
语种：English
出版社：The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
摘要：As a relatively new field of inquiry, engineering design is still very much under construction. In terms of its final form, the engineering tradition suggests that engineering design use science to legitimate its knowledge base while emphasising the practical application of that knowledge. To explore this model, agricultural engineering is presented as a case study. Declining enrolments forced agricultural engineering to re-conceive itself, to be transformed from an applications-based (agriculture) discipline to one based on science (biology). Its strong “application” orientation (“doing”) may have contributed to its demise, for it had no well-defined theoretical base (“knowing”) that it could call its own, a nucleus from which it could construct its identity. Engineering design, too, must be careful not to be completely preoccupied with “doing” (creating a product) at the expense of “knowing”. “Knowing” means that knowledge can be an end in itself. Although selfindulgent, “knowing” for its own sake is an essential part of a strong, confident discipline.
