Agnes Tamatekou
Professor Witmer
ABE 232
30 August 2021
Reflection 1
Do you think a place-focused approach to engineering is needed? Why or why not? Use
examples of interactions from the film to illustrate your arguments.
A place-focused approach to engineering is definitely needed because it allows engineers
to focus on the immediate need of the people they are working for rather than what they assume
those people need. In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy it basically covered why place-focused
engineering.
In the very beginning of the movie a pilot throws a glass Coca Cola bottle out of the
window and it lands in front of a “bushman” in the Kalahari Desert. The people in the desert
aren’t surrounded by hard things like glass so this was a new discovery for them. They use the
glass bottle for many different things. At first it seemed like a good discovery because it
facilitated their lives a little bit. Later on it began to start problems because people were fighting
over the bottle, so the bushman decided to get rid of it. This is what began his journey to the end
of the Earth to get rid of the “evil thing.”
Yes the bottle did benefit the bushmen for a small amount of time, and yes the bottle is
useful in “civilized society,” but that is not what this community needed. They have survived in
the Kalahari forever without hard objects because everything around them is soft. What they
really needed was water… because they're in the desert. Their main sources of water were from
droplets they collect on leaves and fruits that they have to squeeze. The bottle isn’t what the
Tswana people needed, but it is beneficial in other places. This is why a place-focused approach
to engineering is needed so that engineers won’t be providing inutile services and instead
services that would actually better the community.