Engineers. Can’t live with them. Can’t live without them. A constant in the lives of Industrial Designers, Engineers are our either our evil, more mathematical inclined, twin telling us what we can’t do. Or our guardian angel telling us how to solve that ever elusive answer to our mechanical or electrical design problem. Either way we must all embrace the fact that engineering will always be a necessary part of most Industrial Design work.
As Industrial Designers we must take the time to gain a better understanding of the way Engineers see the world. One quick and easy way to do this is to grab a copy of Andrew Burroughs‘ little black book, Everyday Engineering. Inspired by Jane Fulton Suri’s book Thoughtless Acts?, Everyday Engineering is divided into seventeen mini collections of photographs. With a bit of text thrown in at the beginning of each chapter to prime the reader via a short explanation. This pocket sized book is an opportunity to look at the world through the eyes of Andrew Burroughs and the engineers at IDEO.
The first thing you are going to notice about the Everyday Engineering is the cut away on the spine. Essentially representing the themes of the book, uncovering how things function and noticing the little things about designs that have spent some time been utilised in the world. It also gives the book character and makes it stand out on the bookshelf which considering its size and colour is probably necessary.
Once you get inside Everyday Engineering you will find a myriad of observational primers (also know as photographs). These photographs range from fasteners that “reveal the underbelly of 1980s automotive manufacturing” and steel beams that allow a bridge “to hang over the road without visible support” in the chapters Unseen and Illusions. Through to a key hole cover on a car and ivy taking over a building in the later chapters Consequences and Nature. Each photograph in the book prompts you to think about the design,the designs function and the aesthetics of the photograph’s subject. As well as what the Engineer of the object may have been intending versus what has actually happened to the object over its lifespa or how it has been utilised.
As an example, in the chapter Interfaces – How things connect, there is a photograph of the feet of a park bench. Affixed to concrete and placed on wood chips, the photograph prompts you to consider the fact that the Engineer most likely intended the object to be utilised on hard surfaces like pavements, as oppose to soft surfaces such as wood chips. You can also see that the concrete to which one of its legs is affixed has had a hard life and is chipped away.
The chapter Elegance shows that the book is most certainly from an engineers point of view. “Engineers are not renowned for their sense of aesthetics…they have a reputation for being obsessed by a designs functional aspect at the expense of its beauty.” As true as this statement is for many objects, for some it is the opposite. In Elegance you are provided with a glimpse of some particularly elegant pieces of engineering. Such as the cog and chain system for a fixed gear bicycle. It is an elegant piece of design that is completely optimized for its function, without consideration for beauty, yet is an elegant piece of design that may not have been so if a designer had designed it for beauty, as opposed to function.
The whole book is filled with these small everyday examples of engineered objects that are out and about in the world. Not limited to only good or only bad examples, but a large range, that prompts you as a reader to consider many aspects of engineering and the thought processes of the engineeer behind each design.
Everyday Engineering is avaliable via Amazon.
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