Essential reference | Engineering and the Mind's Eye

How to put Design and Experience back into Engineering | Engineering and the Mind's Eye | Eugene S. Ferguson

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	• Engineering and the Mind's Eye Eugene S. Ferguson The MIT Press, 1992 - 258 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews
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highly recommended

As Uncle Albert once said, "IMAGINATION....

...is more important than knowledge." This fine book examines the deep roots of this simple and wise truth. The author takes us on a journey of discovery within our [engineering] profession and shows us where we originated from, and [unfortunately] where we are headed. The author has the courage to come out and say what many, if not most, in the field of engineering would like to say, but for one reason or another have not: Academia is producing more and more clinical analysts, and less and less true engineers. He examines and clarifies the difference between the two and goes on to explain how we have arrived at this strange place so far away from the road that we should be on. He further offers some of, but certainly not all, the solutions for getting ourselves back on track as a profession.

I found this book to be wonderfully entertaining and incredibly insightful about the field(s) of engineering and how we think, communicate, advance in our profession(s). Being a graduating senior in a dying breed of EEETs at Montana State University, I have generally found the author profoundly on the mark, and recommend this book for everyone even associated with the field of engineering and most especially, the educators!

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Essential reference

This gave me a better understanding of the history of the my profession than any other book I have. It also pointed out gaps in my education which I hadn't even realized I had. All engineers should read this.

How to put Design and Experience back into Engineering

This book should be required reading for all engineers. It reviews how the art, practical and design type courses were taken out of the engineering schools in the 1950's and how those schools are now correcting the situation.

The author reviews the importance of practical experience and the ability to sketch... particularly for chief engineers.

Most impressive and perhaps most important was the panoramic history of engineering, design and creativity. The book has beautiful pictures and an extensive bibliography.

I found interesting that Leonardo's notebooks were only part of the many notebooks prepared during the Renaissance. And, that many of them copied drawings of earlier works. Lots of pictures of these notebooks are included, along with pictures of the extensive use of models (mostly fortifications) used at this time... and all the way up to WWII.

The author discusses how CAD systems really help on the productivity but include so many limiting asssumptions that they may stifle creativity. Particularly bad from the author's point of view is the over reliance on math. He points out that most engineering problems are messy, and not amenable to a clean mathematical solution. And, that we have all these younger engineers looking only for clean problems so they can put their math training to work. Unfortunately, nature is not so co-operative.

His solution: more drawing and more practical experience. For example, budding engineers should get out into the field and go see the problem, or visit other plants. They should build prototypes and learn how to operate a lathe. In this regard he likes Dutch and German engineering schools best.

This is a great book that any engineer should add to his permanent collection.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

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Profound

In engineering, what in truth wins out and why?

-Nonverbal thoughts or unambiguous verbal desciptions?
-Art or science?

The answers to such questions can be found within the pages of this book. Nonverbal thoughts are a kind of art. And both of them will, based on history, win out.

Actually, seeing a vision that involves a win-win between art and science is the correct approach. To account for many current engineering fiascoes, Ferguson often sites late 1950's changes in curriculum at top universities as they chased after "science-orientated" federal funding.

Post world-war II misconceptions between what is science and what is in fact technology (art) have resulted in problematic media reports and poor federal policy. From MIT to NASA, our top technology institutes torture themselves in the name of "science." For instance: from the lunar landar to the space-shuttle, space-craft are almost pure technology (art). Naturally, current technologists need to be able to check themselves with fundamental science principles and that is a purpose of ABET B.S.-type engineering degrees.

A strange, new badge of intelligence seems to be the ability to see through all this.

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Thought Provoking

A short, nicely written book. A must read for those with an interest in history of technology, engineering or education. Time well spent for almost any intellegent reader. A lot of "bang for your buck" with this one!

The things that engineers design are everywhere, and the influence that engineers have on daily life is far out of proportion to their numbers. In this expanded version of a remarkable essay published in Science more than a decade ago, Eugene Ferguson takes a probing look at the process of engineering design, arguing that despite modern technical advances, good engineering is still as much a matter of intuition and nonverbal thinking as of equations and computation.

Ferguson, who has been successively a mechanical engineer, a technical museum curator, and a teacher of the history of technology, uses examples ranging from the development of the American axe to the collapse of the Hartford Coliseum and the performance of the Hubble space telescope to illustrate the ways in which visual thinking enriches engineering and the ways in which engineering that relies solely on technical sophistication can go wrong. He argues that a system of engineering education that ignores this heritage of nonverbal thinking will produce engineers who are dangerously ignorant of the many ways in which the real world differs from the mathematical models constructed in academic minds.

In Engineering and the Mind's Eye, Ferguson discusses the nature of engineering design and traces the development of visual and other nonverbal thinking, offering examples of how engineers and other technologists have used such strategies since the Renaissance. Accompanying these examples, and demonstrating the ways in which engineers have shared their knowledge, is a parallel text of illustrations showing how visual thinking has been expressed over the past five centuries. Ferguson concludes his provocative account by arguing that engineering education since 1945 has been skewed toward analytical techniques - which are easiest to teach and evaluate - and away from the art of engineering design as taught by experienced engineers.

Eugene Ferguson is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Delaware.

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