Photo by Karla Hernandez on Unsplash
Walk into any engineering building and you’ll see it everywhere: “Engineers solve problems.” It’s on brochures, t-shirts, merch tables at orientation, and probably in the opening slide of every intro-to-STEM talk ever given. It’s catchy. It’s empowering. It’s…incomplete? Wait, hold on, what?
Well, what if that mindset doesn’t always make things better? What if the obsession with “solving problems” is how we ended up with way bigger ones? After all, solving a problem without understanding it’s context or long-term effects isn’t engineering—it’s improv. It’s like telling people the now-broken escalator is the building’s new staircase. Sure, we addressed the issue, but we didn’t make it better.
Let’s try looking at 2 more impactful, real-world scenarios:
1.) Plastic Packaging
Plastic was marketed as a miracle. It was hygienic, durable, lightweight, and cheap. A perfect engineering win. It solved the very real issue of transporting, storing, and protecting good. And it worked. Too well.
But that neatly solved logistical problem turned into a globe spanning chemical spill. We now have drifting islands of waste in our oceans, microplastics in our bloodstreams, and ecosystems permanently damaged by a material designed to not go away. Engineers solved a packaging problem and accidentally authored a new geological era in the process. It wasn’t meant to be malicious, just a narrow solution. A solution built for efficiency and cost, not for longevity and consequence.
2.) Social Media Design
Then there’s social—the world’s most successful accidental psychology experiment. The “problem” as framed to early engineers, was simple: How do we keep people engaged?
Because engagement means growth, and growth means revenue. So, the solution became making feeds more captivating, notifications punchier, recommendations more precise. Everything became tuned to be more something. And boy, did it work. Engagement skyrocketed. Companies soared. Users scrolled.
But along the way, the solution grew some fangs. Feedback loops turned into echo chambers, muddling people’s exposure to contradicting opinions and inhibiting their ability to critically think. Infinite scroll became infinite distraction. Design choices meant to optimize retention slowly quickly started reshaping our attention spans and social dynamics. I mean, I can’t even go two hours without checking my phone for that juicy, new notification. We got the traction we asked for—and the cultural and mental health fallout we didn’t ask for.
This is the dark reality of engineering as a means of problem-solving. Solving the wrong problem perfectly can be worse than not solving it at all.
Well, what can we do better then?
The trouble starts long before any engineer sketches a design or writes lines of code. It starts with the problem itself, because engineers usually aren’t the ones defining it. Businesses, policymakers, and market incentives tend to frame the problems, and engineers are asked to deliver solutions inside those boundaries. That’s how a broad community-centered question like “How do we reduce commute time?” quietly shrinks into “How do we make cars go faster?” Once the frame of the issue narrows, everything downstream narrows with it: the metrics, the designs, the tradeoffs, the imagination.
This is where the idea of “solutionism” becomes relevant. The idea comes from Evgeny Morozov, a tech critic who popularized the term “solutionism” in his book To Save Everything, Click Here, arguing that Silicon Valley’s love of quick technical fixes usually bulldozes over the messy parts of real life. Solutionism is the belief that every issue, no matter how complex, is waiting for a clean technical fix. And while that mindset can be satisfying and energizing—who doesn’t love solving puzzles? —it often steamrolls over the messy human and systemic dimensions that define whether a “solution” actually helps. When you assume every problem is a nail, you start swinging the hammer before checking if the house you’re in is even worth rebuilding. Engineering isn’t about “solving problems.” At least not anymore. The world is too tangled and sensitive for that.
A more complete mindset might look like:
- Understand the system before touching it.
- Zoom out. What are the incentives, the 10-year consequences? What is the affected population?
- Consider ethical, environmental, and social impacts as a design constraint—not as things to be optimized when the design process is over
- Being technically right and socially destructive is not a win.
- Ask “should we?” long before “how do we?”
Because, at the end of the day engineering is not the art of fixing, but the art of predicting. If all we teach future engineers is how to solve problems, we shouldn’t be surprised when they build solutions that create bigger ones.
This post was written by Meena Muthiah. To see more of Meena’s articles, navigate to the articles page and look for her tag.
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