Engineering Education “Today in History” Blog: Disney launches Epcot Center, Community of the Future
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (877) · November 16th, 2012 · Add a Comment
Today in History – November 16, 1965 – Walt Disney launches the EPCOT Center: Prototype Community of Tomorrow. As Walt Disney originally envisioned it, the EPCOT Center (which stood for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow”) would be the key component of Walt Disney World – a working “city of the future” with residential, shopping and industrial districts that would showcase the latest technologies available. Walt’s vision included forward thinking ideas such as clean (read: electric) transportation systems, and a city dominated by the pedestrian (all automobile traffic was to be underground). In his own words, “It’s like the city of tomorrow ought to be. A city that caters to the people as a service function. It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities… [It] will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”
Walt Disney died approximately a year after the launch of the EPCOT project, and without his vision and drive the EPCOT Center took a very different direction. Instead of a working city, Epcot (no longer an acronym) is now a theme park with two different themes in one: a showcase of the future (a legacy of EPCOT’s original design) and the World Showcase (where you can tour the world by foot in under two hours). The theme park officially opened on October 1st, 1982 and 2007 marks it’s 25th year of operation. See the Engineering Pathway’s resources on theme parks and roller coaster design.
Also today in 1904, the electron tube was invented by John Ambrose Fleming. Electron tubes (known more commonly as vacuum tubes) are used to control or create an electrical signal by restricting the movement of electrons in a low-pressure space. They were the key devices that enabled the early development of technologies such as radios, televisions, and radar, which led to the electronics of today.
Tags: Engineering Design · Engineering Management · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Industrial Design
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