Designing Engineers

By Louis L. Bucciarelli

Book Overview

Designing Engineers describes the evolution of three disparate projects: an x-ray inspection system for airports, a photoprint machine, and a residential photovoltaic energy system.

The products of engineering design are everywhere, but who or what determines their form and function? Their surfaces are usually cold, seemingly objective, as if they existed outside of history of the technologies that are so much a part of our lives. Written by a practicing engineer, Designing Engineers yields clues to this mystery by probing deeply into the everyday world of engineering. In doing so, it reveals significant discrepancies between our ideal image of design as an instrumental process and the reality of design as a historically situated social process that is full of uncertainty and ambiguity. Designing Engineers describes the evolution of three disparate projects: an x-ray inspection system for airports, a photoprint machine, and a residential photovoltaic energy system. In each case, we are taken through the hallways and into the meeting rooms of the company to watch over the shoulders of engineers as they engage in the manifold individual and collective work that goes into designing a new product. Louis Bucciarelli was a consultant to one project and participated in the design process for the other two. In all three projects he examines both object - the way participants understood how things work - and process - the way they go about designing. What he learns is that engineering design is a social process that involves constant negotiation among many parties, not just engineers but marketing people, research scientists, accountants, and customers as well. One of the strengths of the book is the way Bucciarelli uses the very language of engineering discourse to uncover the many levels at which negotiation takes place. Designing, it turns out, is as much about agreeing on definitions as it is about producing "hard" artifacts.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262522128
• ISBN13: 9780262522120
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Excellent book on understanding design

I teach engineering design at a large state university, and this book was wonderfully written and entertaining. The author provides, through excerpts from three in-depth ethnographic studies, insights into how design is a negotiated process between many participants. This is not an engineering book, rather it is a study of the culture and daily lives of engineers. One caveat to this review is that while the book describes the design process and highlights its inherent uncertainty, one would likely need to have extensive experience with design to really appreciate all this book has to offer. Students and novices might find the book illuminating or might lack the context to fully appreciate the uncertain world-view the author presents.