Welcome

McBride Fall 2025

Your mind, or rather, the creative unique tangible expressions of your mind that you may wish to either commercialize (distribute into the public domain) or restrict from commercialization, and the social/political constraints on your desires will be explored this semester in practical, experiential ways. This is a course for thinkers, reflecting, and “doing” (if doing means taking thoughts and instantiating those into fixed and tangible form.

I expect you think of yourselves broadly as “engineers” and some of you also as “artists” or “creatives.” If that premise is correct, then this course is core and directly related to who you are. An engineer is an innovator at heart (see the etymology of words to find the connection between genius, generate, ingenious, engineer …). Your mothers/fathers/besties have all told you are geniuses, and despite half-hearted humble denials, you chose this school animated by identification to the profession of engineering. Now, in this class, you get to think about it, own it with self-awareness as to the extensions and limitations, and enact it with intention. Well played, future of humanity.

Great ideas and artistry extend the reach, power and impact of their authors, and can even outlive them to become lasting legacies for future generations. Artistic creations and engineering marvels all start as ideas (intellectual property) which can run through a process of law and economics to become patents and copyrights that reach audiences and consumers. Intellectual property can inspire, entertain and improve lives. We will work through copyright registrations, provisional patent applications, the creation of a company, the use of agreements such as licenses and confidentiality agreements. We will host visitors, including USPTO representatives and inventors including patent holders from the Mines community. We will learn about inventors who used patents to improve life for millions and artists who have taken their ideas and brought them to worldwide distribution inspiring our inner lives and sharing beauty and joy. We will learn not only about inventions and their social and economic impact, but about the character, grit and fortitude of inventors and their process. Students will have the hands-on experience of collaborating with each other in pods to advance student-led ideas through copyright and patent. So, if you’ve ever wondered whether your inner engineer can invent the next great beehive, band aid, musical instrument, hybrid of a zucchini that tastes like pizza, app, or gizmo that fixes some quirky aspect of daily life, join this course and form a pod to write a patent application to bring ideas into the world.

Let’s take a chance together to meet for three hours each week in the nature of a symposium. The model of a symposium (stemming originally from Plato) is a convivial but formal gathering of thoughtful people intent on serious, thorough, meaningful consideration and discussion of topics such as truth and the meaning of existence, often over a meal or banquet. Our symposium implies that each student come prepared to deliver cogent thought and to listen with engagement to the careful thoughts of others. There will be some “Socratic” aspects, where probing questions and focused dialogue follow and flow into our symposium.

Our class, though, is not living solely in the realm of the “academy” – we will be connecting our academic ideas to the so-called “real world” (by which it might be we mean the world in which ideas become instantiated and comingled with society in what might be a commercialized (meaning shared and exchanged) context of exchange.