Transcript Engineering and the Mind's Eye - DEG-3-04

Engineering and the Mind’s Eye
Eugene S. Ferguson
Review by David E. Goldberg
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Ferguson, E. S. (1992). Engineering and the mind’s eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Raised in Wilmington, Del., Ferguson earned his BSME at Carnegie Institute of
Technology. He worked briefly for Western Electric Company in Baltimore, in
production planning, before moving to New Jersey with E.I. duPont de Nemours and
Company. Working with high explosives for maintenance and construction jobs, he soon
headed that department. Ferguson then spent four years as an Ordnance officer with the
US Navy during WWII.
He began his teaching career as an instructor of heat-power sequence at Iowa State
College in Ames, following the war. With a brief interruption as a plant engineer for the
Foote Mineral Company in Exton, Pa., he continued until 1969 as assistant and then
associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State, earning his MS in
mechanical engineering in 1955.
In 1969 he became a professor of history at the University of Delaware in Newark.
During that time he also served as curator of technology at the Hagley Museum in
Greenville. He was consulting editor for SHOT's Technology and Culture journal from
1965 to 1975 and was president of SHOT 1977-78. He also was principal investigator
for the National museum of Hsitory and Technology-National Science Foundation
Bicentennial Project on American Science and Technology 1973-74. He served as vice
chairman 1972-75 and chairman 1975-78 for the Advisory Committee of the Historic
American Engineering Record (HAER).
Topics
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The nature of engineering design
The mind’s eye
Origins of modern engineering
The tools of visualization
Development and dissemination of engineering
knowledge
• The making of an engineer
• The gap between promise and performance
The Nature of Engineering Design
• 1828 British Institute of Civil Engineers
engineering definition: “the art of directing
the great sources of power in nature for the
use and convenience of man.”
• Influence beyond our numbers: engineers
less than 1% of population.
• Create systems that affect everyone.
Two Processes of Engineering
• Produce set of drawings and specs
• Produce the object itself
• Precision of drawings hides informal
choices and inarticulate judgments.
• Artisan v. Engineering: No drawings v.
drawings.
Design as Invention
• To design is to invent.
• Example of aircraft wheel spinner.
• PDT: Panoramic Design Technique. No
drawings. Blackboards and pictures.
• Engineering as a contingent process:
– Not formal sequential process
Mind’s Eye
• Necessity of visual thinking.
• Right brain, left brain: Roger Sperry’s work
on hemispherical thought.
• Status: Equations versus images and
analogy.
• Creativity boom of the 1950s.
Origins of Modern Engineering
• Strength of profession
in the depths of its
foundation.
• Hi-tech gets the buzz,
but 80 percent around
for decades or
centuries or more.
• Renaissance
notebooks.
Fortress Design
• Duke of Savoy’s
engineer, Francesco
Paciotto da Urbino
(1504-1576).
• Patronage a key.
• Generalists gave way
to specialists.
Tools: Perspective
• Pictorial or linear perspective: invention of the
renaissance.
• Alberti’s window.
Orthographic Projection
• Durer’s use in 1525 for art.
• Gaspard Monge introduced in textbook late
1700s, but examples exist before then.
• Other types of projections.
• Sketches:
– Thinking sketch: clarifying to self
– Prescriptive sketch: directing the drafter
– Talking sketch: napkin talk between engineers
Engineering Education
• Science v. engineering.
• Vannevar Bush and OSRD and Endless
Horizon, 1946. Science over engineering
• Grinter report of 1952: recommended PhDs
for engineering professors.
• 1961 crisis in design.
Performance Gap
• Power of seeing
• Problems of design
• Role of failure
Tools of Visualization