Every once in a while I become philosophical about my work and about the schooling I’ve received. This is something I have wanted to write for a long time (and on which I may expand more later). In my study of engineering and my work as an engineer, there was no class on the philosophy of engineering, but if there were, maybe this would be part of it. Whereas English or writing as a discipline has literary criticism to evaluate it and critique it, I don’t know of anything analogous to the engineering discipline. Usually, either a system works or it doesn’t, it lasts or it doesn’t, but one doesn’t talk about rating if something is good engineering or bad engineering in the way that one talks about good literature. But I have to start somewhere, so here it is.
The Discipline of Engineering
The discipline of engineering involves three core skills. These are not taught in a single class or presented in any concise program that I am aware of. But, for those of us who followed a formal education at an engineering school at a university, these are learned through many classes and labs and reading and working with professors and colleagues. They are three common threads woven through the fabric of the engineering school experience and are found in any engineering endeavor. I am talking here in general about the engineering endeavor and not a specific formalized program that results in professional credentials for a subset of talented people. While I learned these skills while studying engineering at a university and then afterwards putting these into practice in the workplace, one does not need to study engineering to have these skills or to have this approach to solving problems. (I know several individuals who possess these skills who have had no formal schooling or training.) These three skills are common across the many types of engineering and they are what ties them all together and allows us to refer to that discipline with a single name — engineering.
Deciding Among Trade-Offs
The first skill may be summarized as “deciding among trade-offs to reach a defined goal” and usually involves, but is not limited to, the constraints of physical reality. This skill assumes that the parameters being considered can be quantified and added to an equation or something that can be calculated. The implementation includes quantifying certain aspects of reality and working within boundaries set by what can be quantified to acheive a goal presumably for the common good. Of course this skill does not entail actually defining that goal or developing the values that define that goal. Rather, the engineer’s talent is with reducing the problem to measurable and quantifiable terms that can then be weighed to lead to decisions about how to achieve the desired result. An example of this skill would be to figure out how to build a bridge across a river to allow human or other traffic to flow. There are materials to consider, laws of physics that define which designs will work to hold up what weight, and even costs to be weighed. But the entire project, from an engineering perspective, involves deciding which contraints to work within.
Translation Between System Representations
The second skill may be summarized as “translating between equivalent abstract representative systems or between equivalent energy systems”. A perfectly realistic example of this is in the use of electrical energy that is generated or translated from the turning of a turbine from falling water, the transporting of that energy along lines to a substation miles away and then transporting it where it can be converted to energy to heat a toaster in my kitchen. The mathematics involved with achieving that infrastructure is not trivial. The translation between different forms of energy, the translation across types of control systems (mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc.), the translation of physical laws to abstract representations and then back again, all these translations are done with no hesitation.
Realizing Underpinnings
The third skill may be summarized as “realizing the background infrastructure”. This involves the ability to understand and appreciate the workings of systems that are not always visible. Some examples of artificial systems are the engine under the hood of a car, and the collection of electrical wiring and plumbing pipes behind the plaster of a building’s wall. Some examples of human systems are the computers and financial processing behind the tellers in the bank and the research center behind the walls of the hospital. Engineers can uncover the cause of the effect, they can realize the underpinnings of systetms. I give all these examples because there are so many ways in which we construct and engineer systems. We almost forget that underneath the streets and sidewalks are drainpipes and conduits with fiber optics.
These may seem like three abstract skills but they are foundational to what engineers do, how engineers see the world, and why engineers solve problems the way they do. They can reduce physical problems to their bare essentials, they abstract the translatable aspects of systems, and they can appreciate the infrastructure that keeps complex systems working.
