Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation

by Dominique Vinck (editor)

A guide to the everyday working world of engineers, written by researchers trained in both engineering and sociology. Everyday Engineering was written to help future engineers understand what they are going to be doing in their everyday working lives, so that they can do their work more effectively and with a broader social vision. It will also give sociologists deeper insights into the sociotechnical world of engineering. The book consists of ethnographic studies in which the authors, all trained in both engineering and sociology, go into the field as participant-observers. The sites and types of engineering explored include mechanical design in manufacturing industries, instrument design, software debugging, environmental management within companies, and the implementation of a system for separating household waste. The book is organized in three parts. The first part introduces the complexity of technical practices. The second part enters the social and cultural worlds of designers to grasp their practices and motivations. The third part examines the role of writing practices and graphical representation. The epilogue uses the case studies to raise a series of questions about how objects can be taken into account in sociological analyses of human organizations.

Genres: Design

247 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 2003

Reviews

[Krayfish1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The use of "he" for generic people grated on me, and I found the chapter summaries at the end rather useless. There's a lot of good information which gets filtered through the lens of an ethnographer, which I found a strange lens to look through.

Chapter 1 on CERN was interesting, chapter 2's language was especially opaque and frustrating. Chapter 3 on the several redesigns of a trash/compost container was interesting. Chapter 4 on how one judges a "good" engineer was interesting. Chapter 5 on the difference between a company which documents what worked and what didn't vs. one which relies on "first principals" in a relatively new field where the rules aren't all figured out was interesting. Chapter 6 on a company that built many prototypes was interesting, but it seemed the author looked down on this company's methods. Chapter 7 the writing chapter expressed the different goals of writing to accurately portray how something is done vs. writing to show an auditor that everything is fine. Also getting things written down is useful to exchange knowledge, get everyone on the same page, find out what information is missing, and be able to find information quickly. The drawing chapter (8) about how passing a drawing through different departments changes the drawing and represents agreements & compromises between the different departments was interesting. The rough draft chapter (9) had some good material like the design team progressing from text to sketches and models to detailed drawings as they hammered out a design & being unable to use the sketches to recall what they had been talking about and why they made the decisions they did. I found chapter 10 less interesting because it was a discussion of the proper way to do ethnography, and I was more interested in the engineering culture.