Truth forms when creativity meets reality. The reality dawned on me in my second semester, when I noticed the erratic behaviors of technology. Canvas glitches. Internet connectivity issues. A broken laptop. At some point in college, all students encounter their fair share of tech troubles, but Stevens Institute of Technology has a knack for those problems appearing in conveniently annoying patterns.
Take the humble projector. Professors and students alike can testify to the projector’s eccentric behavior at the worst possible times. Lectures. Presentations. Asynchronous lessons. Each break just borderlines past inconvenience, becoming a substantial disruption to our learning environment.
The heart of what I’m getting at is that these technological disruptions are not coincidental inconveniences. As I learned while taking HASS 105 with Professor Virginia Conn, it points towards a ghost in the machine. An entity within Stevens Institute of Technology, affectionately named Big Sister. An artificial intelligence of sorts that loves toying with university students, faculty, and staff by messing with the backbone of operations: Technological reliance in an education environment.
Big Sister is what one calls a conspiracy theory. But not the tinfoil-hat type. She is something less in the realm of science fiction and more in line with the true spirit of engineering: Innovation from the uncanny. Her origins, intentions, and why she’s so prevalent at Stevens are murky at best and convoluted when you dig deeper. As I cannot do her full justice in a single 600-word essay (perhaps something she intended), my one sentence summary is she’s the paradigm of IT and learning disruptions. Technology glitches? Blame Big Sister. Distracted by doom scrolling? That’s just Big Sister. Canvas glitched out again and locked you out of your classes right as assignments were due? That’s once again Big Sister. So prevalent that we see her everywhere, yet so detached that catching her is like grasping at smoke.
Aside from Big Sister’s ability to tangibly express our everyday grievances such as files not attaching to an email, notifications arriving late, and the dreaded laptop blue screen, why should we as engineers care about Big Sister? Why devote an entire article—about engineering nonetheless—to her existence when this seems like something more suited for the HASS majors?
The ugly truth is Big Sister schooled us engineers in something elementary: exploration. Not the journey itself, which is a byproduct of exploration. The power for something to create a new path through specifically unknown or impossibly deemed routes.
To elaborate, as engineers, we are confined by physics. Reality dictates our designs. But reality should not dictate the design process. When we develop items to fit reality, instead of thinking about how to make reality fit our designs, we set limitations on what is possible.
Big Sister exists not by chance. She exists because she is the embodiment of exploration. Born as a conspiracy theory inside someone’s mind, she was released into Stevens Institute of Technology and thrived not from what she was, but from how she morphed to fit our world. She became our world. Big Sister started as a story, but because she was meshed into reality instead of designed around its constraints, she continues to thrive and adapt in real time. We bend reality to her and from there create truth.
Now it’s our turn to learn from Big Sister. Engineering shouldn’t focus solely on constraints. It’s about exploration. Creating something unfamiliar, then adapting it to fit reality over various iterations. That’s why it’s called a design process. And like conspiracy theories, truth isn’t the goal; it’s the coincidence of real-world application.
