Hitting the Brakes Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge by Johnson, Ann [Duke University Press Books,2009] [Paperback]

by Ann Johnson

In Hitting the Brakes , Ann Johnson illuminates the complex social, historical, and cultural dynamics of engineering design, in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Using the development of antilock braking systems for passenger cars as a case study, Johnson shows that the path to invention is neither linear nor top-down, but highly complicated and unpredictable. Individuals, corporations, university research centers, and government organizations informally coalesce around a design problem that is continually refined and redefined as paths of development are proposed and discarded, participants come and go, and information circulates within the knowledge community. Detours, dead ends, and failures feed back into the developmental process, so that the end design represents the convergence of multiple, diverse streams of knowledge. The development of antilock braking systems (ABS) provides an ideal case study for examining the process of engineering design because it presented an array of common difficulties faced by engineers in research and development. ABS did not develop predictably. Research and development took place in both the public and private sectors and involved individuals working in different disciplines, languages, institutions, and corporations. Johnson traces ABS development from its first patents in the 1930s to the successful 1978 market introduction of integrated ABS by Daimler and Bosch. She examines how a knowledge community first formed around understanding the phenomenon of skidding, before it turned its attention to building instruments to measure, model, and prevent cars’ wheels from locking up. While corporations’ accounts of ABS development often present a simple linear story, Hitting the Brakes describes the full social and cognitive complexity and context of engineering design.

Genres: Engineering

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, a professor of history and philosophy at the University of South Carolina, develops "three hypotheses: one, not so novel, that engineers produce new knowledge rather than simply aply it; two, more original, that engineers are drawn into problems communally and that dynamic communities form around particular problems that privilege certain pracices and solutions; and a third, subversive hypothesis, that regardless of disclosure agreementsa, engineers in the private sector share their knowledge across corporations." (p. xvi)
The organization wasn't always clear to me, but what I regarded as tangents were some of the most captivating reading -- how engineers advance in their professions, patents as a tool for information while simultaneously protecting an employer's rights, how non-technological events can affect the design process in critical ways, and most interesting for a librarian, a discussion of diferent ways to know and store information.
The "hook" for this book, though, is always the interesting story of anti-lock brakes, something nearly every reader will have used and heard about and most (like me) will not have understood at all.
A minor quibble: sometimes the author descends into social science jargon: "A knowledge community is a socio-epistemological structure, and I do not privilege either the social or the epistemological dimension." p.4