Kathryn Jablokow, a professor of engineering design and mechanical engineering at Penn State Great Valley, presented one of three keynote talks at NASA’s imaginAviation virtual event last week.

Jablokow’s keynote, “The Edge of Uncomfortable,” was framed as a fireside chat with John Cavolowsky, NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP) director. The discussion focused on the challenges of measuring progress and success while searching for transformative technological innovation.

“Standard innovation metrics, like feasibility, desirability, viability, quality, novelty, and so on, are useful, but they don’t always get at the heart of what we really need to know when it comes to the leading edges of technology,” said Jablokow. “Some of these metrics seem to point us toward those leading edges (away from safety), while others pull us back (toward safety).

“We talked about the natural relationship between leading edges and comfort zones, and how the human capacity for sensing when something is pushing us toward or even beyond our comfort zones can be used as a key indicator in technological projects.”

Jablokow is serving a three-year term as program director for the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Design and Systems Engineering program in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation. As part of that assignment, she serves on the Interagency Working Group on Complex Systems, which includes representatives from major federal agencies like NASA.

She has become more involved with NASA through that work, including serving on the independent review panel for TACP’s Convergent Aeronautics Solutions project last year.

The three-day virtual event focused on the future transformation of aviation. In addition to Jablokow’s talk and two other keynotes, the showcase highlighted TACP’s three major projects: University Innovation, Convergent Aeronautics Solutions, and Transformational Tools and Technologies.

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