Engineering and the Mind’s Eye by Eugene S. Ferguson

Abstract

Book Reviews Engineering and the Mind’ s Eye. By Eugene S. Ferguson. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Pp. xiv+241; illustrations, notes, index. $24.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). This book explores the nature and history of engineering design. It extends ideas developed by Eugene Ferguson in his pioneering article, “The Mind’s Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology” {Science 197 [August 26, 1977]: 827-36). Like the article, the argument presented in the book has two main foci. First, Ferguson wants to show that engineering design is, by nature, rooted principally in nonverbal and experience-based forms of cognition. In other words, it draws on patterns initially perceived by our senses—eyes, ears, nose, fingers, muscles—and then stored in a nonverbal format in our “mind’s eye.” It is by drawing on this sensory experience that the engineer is able to make creative, innovative, and yet sound and practicaljudgments in the process of engineering design. A further characteristic of engineering design, according to Ferguson, is that it is open-ended: there is, in general, no single, “correct” solution to a design problem, no “one best way.” Thus, engineering can never be made into an exact or deductive science; in fact, says Ferguson, it has closer ties to art than to science. The second focus of Ferguson’s argument concerns the direction taken by engineering education and ideology in North America since World War II. He argues, in effect, that the American engineering profession, in order to achieve higher status, sold out to the ideology of science. The trend has thus been increasingly to deny the experiencebased , open-ended character of engineering and instead to attempt to transform it into one of the deductive, exact sciences. Ferguson main­ tains that this shift has had a serious negative impact on both engineer­ ing curricula and engineering practice. With regard to curricula, shop courses, as well as courses dealing with design and with the art and practice of engineering, have increasingly been replaced by courses in the theoretical engineering sciences: mechanics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and so on. The students are given little introduction to the real world of engineering practice and develop little understanding or ability in the art ofengineering design. The inevitable impact on engineering practice, according to Ferguson, is a growing number of seriously flawed designs and technological failures. The last chapter of the book catalogs a number of design failures, such as the Hubble space telescope, a rotary-compressor refrigerator produced by General Electric, and the U.S. Navy’s Aegis air-defense system. Ferguson concludes that “the magnitude of the errors ofjudgment in some of the Permission to reprint a review from this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 402 TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 403 reported failures . . . suggests that engineers of the new breed have climbed to the tops of many bureaucratic ladders and are now making decisions that should be made by people with more common sense and experience” (p. 184). Although the principal motivation for this book is not historical, Ferguson does bring an important historical dimension to his analysis. In order to demonstrate the centrality of nonverbal cognition through­ out the history of engineering, he devotes two chapters to a survey of the development and use of visual tools and techniques by engineers from the Renaissance to the present. He discusses the notebooks of the Renaissance engineers, the “theatres of machines” produced from the 16th to the 19th centuries, the use of linear perspective, the develop­ ment of formalized methods of engineering drawing in the 18th and 19th centuries (notably orthographic projection), the use of models, and the development of “visual systems of engineering calculation” such as slide rules, indicator diagrams, and graphic techniques such as nomography and graphic statics. He gives examples to show that such visual tools and techniques—and not abstract calculations or reasoning—were always at the cutting edge of sound engineering design and practice. Ferguson is mainly concerned in this book with the cognitive side of design, but his evidence and conclusions point also to the need to devote greater attention to its social and organizational dimensions. Indeed, his narrative makes clear that, over the centuries...