Bucciarelli, Louis L. Designing Engineers. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994.

Louis L. Bucciarelli is a Professor of Engineering at MIT.

This book is an ethnography of three different engineering projects. Although Louis Bucciarelli is not afraid to delve into the meat of the issue, his chapter headings give him away: Observations, The Object, Cosmology, Ecology, and Discourse. The questions he asks are what the process of design can teach us about ways of knowing. He sees design as social process, occuring in a sub-culture as a form of interaction with the surrounding culture. He starts with the following questions: "What and who determines the form and function of the machinery, structures, and systems that are so much a part of contemporary life? Who fixes the workings?" [p. 12] By the end of the book one gets the impression that the answer to this question is no one, even though many people claim to be doing so.

This book addresses the nature of design as an anthropological works might address the mythic and taboo structures of another culture, and sets out to distinguish between how participants think the process works and how it really works. Louis Bucciarelli discusses two common concepts of how design works. The first is the purely utilitarian response to market demands. The other he calls the savant process, applied science as the process of design. Both ignore that engineering is a contingent process, but he focuses on the problems of the second the savant process, which contains a distinct and flawed reductionist philosophy of design. The savant process treats design as the creation of objects within a pure object-world. Control is achieved through division into autonomous components, with no attempt made to achieve a big picture and no allowance made for ambiguity. Because of this, it cannot properly define its boundaries, a process essential to design.

Some salient quotes:

To participants in design, the object serves as a kind of icon that embodies a set of attitudes and ways of thinking that are peculiar to engineering. [p. 2]

Our object definition of a chair is meaningful only if we are talking about an anonymous chair. [p. 10]

The object of design, at all stages in the design, is a constructed and contested object in the sense that more than one explanation of its behavior, more than one account, or harder still, more than one analysis of its behavior is possible and meaningful. [p. 71]

Object-world thinking is thinking about the rigidly deterministic. [p. 84]

In object-world talk, time people, and money are the same things as energy, mass, and momentum in the sense that they are all finite, measurable, and bounded. [p. 86]

What are today's ideas and concepts in flux are tomorrow's constraints. [p. 140]

Ambiguity is essential to design process, allowing participants the freedom to maneuver independently within object-worlds and providing room for the recasting of meaning in the negotiations with others. [p. 178]