Multidisciplinary Competency
Water: The Elixir of Life
Designing for Water
During my first semester of freshman year at Mines, I was part of the Engineering Grand Challenges Themes Learning Community (EGC TLC). As part of this program, I participated in a Design 1 course that was focused on answering problems related to the NAE Grand Challenges. Our team decided to focus on water usage. We decided to tackle water scarcity because of how close to home the problem was. In Colorado and down the Colorado River Basin, water is getting more and more scarce by the year, so solving this problem could have an impact on our local communities.
A Little Party Never Killed Nobody
We decided that the best option for our group was to look at improving water efficiency in the water-intensive and local-to-Golden brewing industry. As a young college student who was below the drinking age, it was a little awkward going into local breweries and asking them questions about their process. It was all academic and focused on finding inefficiencies in water usage and solutions to remove that waste, but there was something a little off about it. Maybe it was simply that an adult was teaching a minor the intricacies of the brewing process on an industrial level, maybe not. Either way, our team found one part of the process that some large companies salvaged water from while other smaller companies didn't: removing the water from the soggy husks of wheat and barley seeds after their contents have been dissolved out.
The Other Half of the Sandwich
The freshman-year project was only the first part to the water story. The other half came during my 400-level humanities class that I took senior year. The class I took was HASS490 - Energy and Society, but it the part that I enjoyed most was the part on water. During the class, we read a book called, "The Water Knife," by Paolo Bacigalupi which followed a handful of people through a water apocalypse during a permanent drought in Southwestern United States. The book was an interesting thought experiment on what it would look like if the water problem wasn't worked on by engineers like me through the ideas we made in the freshman design course.
Fights Worth Fighting
The HASS class went into more detail about water scarcity in the West today and how, as of last fall, we've started to ration water in the Colorado River Basin. This was a shock to me. It showed how the ground lost in the fight against climate change has started to impact peoples lives, and it left me with a question.
​
Is this the fight I want to fight?
Sticks in a Bundle
There are so many problems in the world and water scarcity is only one of them. While I wish I could help them all, I only have about 65 more years on this planet. Do I want to solve the seemingly inevitable water scarcity crisis? Is that where I will flourish? Is that the best way I can help the world? Is it worth my limited time?
Evidence
Unfortunately, the work from the Design 1 course was lost in the Google to Microsoft transition at the end of 2021. Fortunately, I still have some work from the HASS490 class, linked below.
Presentation on The Water Knife chapters 1-8