Normal Science in the Time of Corona

Abstract

This issue of Engineering Studies comes out during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this editorial is being written from home under ‘lockdown’ conditions. Right now, it is too early to know what the long-term consequences of the pandemic will be. In the short term, our readers and authors should be patient as most of our editors and reviewers have had to prioritize matters other than journal work. There will be some delays. Engineering Studies is not essential infrastructure, and our articles are not going to provide a way out of this crisis. Some things – staying safe and healthy, looking after loved ones, helping friends and students who are overwhelmed – are always going to be more important than academic publishing, but especially right now. We have to put things in perspective. But putting things into perspective alsomeans reflecting on howour expertise can help, in small ways and large. This crisis has revealed much about engineers and engineering, and I predict that studies of the coronavirus pandemicwill be a staple of this and other journals for some time. We have seen engineers rise to the occasion: in, for instance, helping to rapidly buildmakeshift hospitals and retooling factories tomanufacture ventilators, masks, and hand sanitizer. We’ve also seen that some engineered infrastructures have adapted incredibly well. The migration of many workplaces on-line hasn’t gone perfectly, but it’s remarkable that it could be done at all. At the same time, the crisis has shown us how much engineers have failed to take into account. Take the global passenger aviation system: it is a sociotechnical marvel made up of airplanes, airports, traffic control technologies, electronic booking systems, security systems, customs inspection practices, pilots and crews and schools for training them, etc., etc. Normally we hardly perceive its slip-ups, nor its incremental evolution. Yet an historical view shows that passenger aviation has occasionally had to evolve quickly and under duress because of revelations that its engineers failed to consider – or, even worse, considered but failed to act upon – fundamental flaws. Many aviation experts of the mid-1960s, for instance, thought that supersonic transports were the future of their industry – without, apparently, understanding that people wouldn’t tolerate continual sound pollution from sonic booms.1 The events of 11 September 2001 revealed that the passenger aviation system wasn’t configured to prevent that style of attack. Over the past year, it has become more obvious to more people that passenger aviation is unsustainable in the face of both peak oil and climate change. The growing response, especially in some parts of Europe, has been a growing sense of ‘flight shame’ and hence reduced air travel – a turn that the passenger aviation system’s designers also did not anticipate. Now, over the course of March 2020, it has emerged that passenger aviation was not constructed to withstand a global pandemic. No doubt the planes will fly again soon enough, but the system will not be the same. The COVID-19 pandemic also provides an unsettling window onto distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech and ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ labor, and the problems with seeing the