The Structure of Engineering Revolutions
MIT's 6.933J / STS.420J examines how engineering actually unfolds in practice, tracing the full life cycle of a major engineering project, new technology, or startup from technical, economic, political, and cultural angles at once. Students conduct original research: interviewing inventors, reading laboratory notebooks, evaluating patents, and reconstructing how engineers made decisions as a technology developed. The course is built for students who already have technical grounding and want to understand why proficiency alone does not guarantee success in industry. Materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include the syllabus, assignments, and readings used in the original course, offered jointly by the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and the Science, Technology, and Society program. There is no instructor interaction or certificate; it is a self-paced archive of the course as taught at MIT, aimed at learners who want a case-study approach to how real technologies and companies actually come into being.