Designing Engineers

by Louis L. Bucciarelli

Designing Engineers describes the evolution of three disparate 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 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.

Genres: Engineering, Design, Nonfiction, Research

230 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1994

Reviews

[Lorin Hochstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does the work of engineering design actually look like? Bucciarelli set out to answer that question by doing an ethnographic study of engineering firms, to watch design in action.

What he found was that engineering design work is a social process. It doesn't just take place in the solitary work of individual engineers, but also in meetings and hallway discussions. It involves negotiation of many different things, including the meaning terms and the problem being solved. Engineering design a messy process that involves contingency and power dynamics: a design might be changed based on whether a particular stakeholder is absent one day, or whether a particular tool was in use and so a workaround was needed.

Most fascinatingly, this messy, social aspect to engineering work isn't visible to the engineers themselves. They don't see these interactions as part of engineering design work. But it is.

This book is an enormous contribution to the field of understanding the nature of engineering design work. It's become one of my favorite books of all time. Can't recommend it enough.

[Smitesh Bakrania · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author writes, "The object [of design] is not one thing to all participants. Each individual's perspective and interests are rooted in his or her special expertise and responsibilities. Designing is a process of bringing coherence to these perspectives and interests, fixing them in the artifact. Participants work to bring their efforts into harmony through negotiation." This summarizes the premise of the book. The book provides three detailed examples to support this idea and presents a window into the design process within an engineering firm. Good book for someone who is curious about how engineering design actually happens.

[Jan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was relatively easy to read and very interesting. It is rather descriptive but puts its observations in useful theoretical concepts. A core assertion is that engineering culture focuses on the idea of underlying, physical, "true"principles in the creation of an artifact; other views are pushed aside – however, politics, emotions… are very relevant in the artifact's creation.

[Luis Enrico Nicolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book invites us to look at engineering not just as a technical activity, but as a human process—messy, collaborative, iterative, and full of compromise.

He reveals that design isn't born in isolation or clean CAD drawings. It’s shaped through meetings, disagreements, trade-offs, deadlines, and the subtle push and pull between engineers, managers, clients, and tools. It shows that engineers don’t just apply science—they negotiate it into reality. A social practice. One that must ask:

How do we make decisions?

Whose voices are heard in the design process?

What constraints are technical, and which are organizational or cultural?

[Stacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can see my review of this book on my blog: http://tinyurl.com/y8able5

[Yushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An old STS book but still is useful.