From Publishers Weekly
"Design can be easy and difficult at the same time, but in the end, it is mostly difficult." So writes engineering professor Petroski (The Evolution of Useful Things, etc.) in his latest effort, a wide-ranging exploration of the history and design of the everyday technologies like supermarket aisles and telephone keypads that are practically invisible in their ubiquity. Petroski emphasizes that these "small things" aren't in fact the results of a smooth and simple design process, but are rather the products of a constellation of oft-conflicting constraints, frequently with unintended consequences (consider the recently redesigned, fat-handled toothbrushes that, while more ergonomic, have rendered millions of traditional toothbrush holders useless). The book meanders through this world of design, less concerned with making a direct argument than with reveling in the complexities of the ever-changing design of everyday things, such as Brita water pitchers and freeway tollbooths. The writing is engaging and approachable, and reading the book feels like sitting down for a long chat with that favorite uncle who seems to know a bit about everything and never hesitates to throw in his own take on matters. Petroski's histories of, among others, paper cups and duct tape are fascinating, and this book leaves us a little more conscious of the never-ending design process of our modern world. 22 photos.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Scientific American
Early-19th-century American steam engines were less fuel-efficient and more dangerous than their late-18th-century British counterparts. These details don't surprise most first-year engineering students. After all, didn't American technology lag Britain's for many years? They are often taken aback, however, to discover that these faults derived partly from explicit choices of American steam engineers. Historian George Basalla suggested in his 1988 book The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge University Press) that such choices can be understood as adaptations to the resource-rich and skills-poor American environment, in which heavy fuel consumption mattered less than the ease of design, construction and maintenance afforded by high-pressure operation. (These higher-pressure engines could also run at greater speeds, an important feature on a larger landmass.) More generally, like the Y2K problem, what later generations saw as a design flaw can be most richly seen as the result of a designer's attempt to work within the technological boundary conditions of a given time and place. In Small Things Considered, Henry Petroski's approach to the question of "why there is no perfect design" is less evolutionary than Basalla's and reflects his own experience as a practicing engineer and a keen observer of the made world and of how people live in it. But like Basalla, Petroski continually emphasizes that all made things, both physical and social, are designed, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that anyone designing anything must work within a set of physical and social constraints. As he writes, in considering the design of chairs, "All designs must involve trade-offs, if not in materials, then in function; if not in cost, then in fashion; if not in quality, then in proportion; if not in size, then in shape; if not in this, then in that." The design process is thus often labyrinthine, and successive compromises in response to specific constraints close off and open up different choice points later in the process. Indeed, even as designers "perfect" their creations, they usually both improve (in some ways) and impair (in others) what came before. Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and of history at Duke University, illustrates his argument in a series of delightful chapters, many derived from his "Engineering" column in American Scientist magazine. He starts each with observations (some stimulated by reports in the New York Times "Patents" feature) about one or another made thing--staircases, paper cups and paper bags and the machinery to make them, duct tape and WD-40, automobile cup holders, and ink-jet printers. Many trace the origins and development of a particular device or way of doing things, and they all continually reassert Petroski's primary theme. These reflections lead him (often apparently by free association) to other examples--from the invention of single-lever faucets to the redesign of vegetable peelers, from the placement of doorknobs to that of light switches--that further demonstrate just how designers made their choices within constraints to achieve workable compromises. Although the regular echo of Petroski's thesis (not unexpected in articles that first appeared months apart) at times seems repetitious, the pleasure and excitement of seeing his playful mind at work more than make up for any annoyance. One design constraint that often emerges is the need for designers to think within the box and to consider the "compatibility with the existing world," the oversight of which "can jeopardize years of development work and result in an ultimate design and financial disaster." This statement of principle comes as Petroski traces the design of easier-to-manipulate toothbrushes too thick for traditional bathroom racks and leads into discussions of the Great Eastern (a mid-19th-century steamship too large for most contemporaneous harbors) and of the Concorde. Petroski also raises this point in considering the two different keypad arrangements found on telephones, on one hand, and on electronic calculators, on the other. In doing so, he reviews late-1950s Bell Labs studies of other designs that concluded that one alternative would be faster and that another was most preferred by those who tried it. He notes (more or less approvingly) that, despite these results, telephone manufacturers chose to keep the now conventional arrangement "'since it uses the available space efficiently and permits a simplified design in the initial application.'" Contrarily, however, he points out that few people have trouble shifting between telephone keypads and calculator keypads and that "we all seem to adapt easily to the machine before us." One wonders, however, how Petroski would view attempts of standard QWERTY keyboard users to type on Dvorak keyboards, and vice versa. Petroski's Web site describes one of his primary interests as "the use of case histories to understand the role of human error and failure in engineering design." Yet, as his book well illustrates, most (or at least many) design failures are not caused by human errors but derive, perhaps inevitably, from the necessity of compromise and the impossibility of making choices that satisfy all constraints. Whatever their cause, such failures do occur, and these often have major consequences. One such failure that Petroski does not discuss is the design of the butterfly ballot, used in south Florida in the year 2000. Some argue that the use of this ballot determined the results of that year's presidential election and, in some ways, the fate of the nation. One need not accept this argument in full to realize just how significant and complicated the process of design can be, and Small Things Considered provides all sorts of penetrating and broadly interesting insights into the nature of this process.
Michael M. Sokal has taught history of technology to engineering undergraduates at Worcester Polytechnic Institute since 1970. He will serve as president of the History of Science Society in 2004 and 2005.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
