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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how histories of water systems can be mobilized to train engineers. The paper contextualizes teaching efforts, showing how training technical skills and exploring ideas on future and development can be combined for engineers – which will realize water developments in any future.

Paper long abstract:

The resource water is consistently linked to human development. Current water infrastructure confronts us with the continuous presence of (former and current) others, as much as our successors will encounter our choices in their future. Water systems have been continuously adapted through interactions between different agents. Climatic changes express the agency of water differently, redistributing effects of floods and droughts. How to account for future designs being able to deal with change is both a theoretical challenge and something that should be translated into hydraulic properties and management arrangements. Historical water systems show the diversity of ideas and options that future water systems could embrace. This paper explores how developmental histories of water systems can be used to train water engineers, who are to realize water-related developments in any future. Two teaching settings suggest how to combine training technical skills and exploring future, foresight and development for engineers. Setting 1 presents the Irrigation Management Game was developed in the 1980s to help managers to recognize farmer strategies in relation to water delivery. I play the IMG with students, to let them experience that irrigation settings are realized through actions that are always partially surprising. Setting 2 discusses a project, in which I ask students to design an irrigation system, asking explicitly how future changes that could disrupt the system are included in the design (irrigators taking water out of turn, crops changing, etcetera). After all, all agents will enact their ideas now and in the future on the water system.