Introduction, Impressions

Greetings, welcome to my blog which is created with the motivation from one of my courses I am taking in TU Delft. The name of the course is Social Systems: Policy and Management, and it is in the Industrial Ecology master program. As an exchange (visitor) student in this class and the course, I think after all these years of tough mathematics, this will be an excellent opportunity for me to extend into social sciences. It has already started with this blog, which is my first blog ever, and together we will see what will happen in the future.

Social sciences were always my close interest, however I had not had the chance to interact with them in an academic format. With my background in Industrial Engineering and specialization in System Dynamics, this course will be very useful for my desire in creating scientific and valuable work with combining social sciences, natural sciences and engineering.One of my early impressions on Industrial Engineering during my bachelor years was something like that: why do we have to use these same, old, one dimensional, and sometimes unhealthy objective functions? In engineering what we are working on are complex, very difficult; however, well defined and well structured problems, and because of that we are able to acquire some results which can be expressed in numbers. But the structure is built according to the objective functions I mentioned before, to write in words they are either maximizing profit or minimizing cost and sometimes maximizing revenue, so it is not surprising to have results from an usual model telling the analyst to keep on operating with fossil fuels for the next 50 years: We do not even have to run the model, since it is all well defined mathematics. (Note: In many applications these models and methods are excellent) What happens if we take out the sovereignty of the cost accounting from our models? Then it is not well defined anymore and it is hardly to get any exact solutions. The problems become even more complex and more difficult. This might a problem for some people, but I do not think the same way. Coming to my first impressions in social science perspective on industrial ecology: I think it is better if we try to understand the system; its flows, stocks and causal relations; and then make critical and creative efforts in designing our policies with it. As the famous saying depicts we have to favor for doing the right things.