The Authorship Dilemma

Existing security measures in the regulated practice of engineering are ineffectual due to the authorship dilemma.

What was once a form of security, the rite of sealing a professional's design, now serves only as a symbolic tradition. The 'stamp' signifying a professional's supervision and approval of a given engineered design has become obsolete when securing public safety. The loss of the security that stamps once offered creates an authorship dilemma.

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While regulated by the various state boards, a single two-inch circle acts as the publicly recognized signifier that a licensed engineer has supervised and released a design or specification. While the barrier to entry to becoming a licensed engineer is effectively high, the barrier to the illicit use of professional credentials is virtually nonexistent. This nonexistent barrier against unlawful credential use is due to the nature of our predominantly digital economy.

Offices all over the world throughout the supply chain handle documents generally trusted as the true copy of a qualified professional's design. We build cities from engineered designs trusting that no record was corrupted from the author's original along the entire supply chain of decisions.

We can't prove who authored the engineered documents, yet we use them to build trillions of dollars of infrastructure.

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