Customer Reviews

Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

"Thinking like an engineer" is a great idea for a book for designers, especially one that could encourage and develop methods of collaboration or cross-fertilization. This silly book--more of a pamphlet, really--is an utterly trivial effort. It's designer vanity publishing at its worst, a short pretty picture book for IDEO's clients to flip through in the reception area while waiting for the meeting.

The problem is that "broken things" look equally broken to everyone. An engineer might see a problem as a stress or tensile failure, or too much weight applied to a surface, or a failed gasket. A designer might see failures of clarity, accessibility, or aesthetic appeal. But a picture of a rusty pipe is pretty much just that, and it's not instructive on its own. (By the way, use Amazon's "Search inside the book" feature to read the entire book using its clever index, which reproduces every image at thumbnail size with a helpful caption.)

And if you want even more pictures of broken things, try the "thisisbroken" tag on Flickr for an endless stream of them.

I was hoping for something insightful and educational. It turns out to be a picture book of design flaws that were never designed; rusty pipes, leaky faucets, etc. The text does not redeem, in any kind of instructional manner, what is essentially a foto album. With IDEO credited as an author, I was expecting much more insight into the design process.

The book is quite small in size - smaller than a paperback novel. Each chapter starts with a page of text and then the rest of the chapter is pictures with no text. Not sure what they were trying to accomplish. If you look at the index page in the Amazon "look inside" feature, you have seen most of the book. To me this exactly the kind of thing that makes people suspicious of "creative types" - all form and no substance.

Unlike other reviewers, I find this to be a rare gem of a book. Yes, the pictures indeed capture the mundane (intentionally so), but the written pieces that introduce each chapter are a wonderful introduction to the mind of a real-world engineer: how someone with an interest, knowledge and skill thinks about the realities of things that are made and how they fare in a partly predictable world. I recommend reading the well-written text; skimming through the pictures does not do the book justice. I like that it stands in stark contrast to "theory of engineering" or celebrations of iconic feats (of which there are many and which of course have an important place). This is the humble genius of everyday. Thank you for opening our eyes.

THis is a very small picture book, with photography of random items and street scenes there are very few words and almost nothing about engineering. Very disappointing!

When I bought this book, I thought I'll be receive a lot of shared experiences from the author on how engineers see everyday interactions and situations. I didn't expect to see something familiar to Jane Fulton Suri - Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design. On the contrary, Jane's book was an appetiser to me. But, to have another book that's similar in its style, I was hungry for a main course. I felt that this book wasn't worth as depicted. Tom Kelley, please help make this book better ...

THis is a good book that emphasizes the profound impact of engineering on our daily lives. The book contains little texts but for those of us in engineering the pictures speak for them selves.