УМСТВЕННАЯ ОБСТАНОВКА (№ 9) — Инженерия

MENTAL FURNITURE #9 - Engineering

"There's no success like failure and failure is no success at all." Bob Dylan

"Life is trouble." Moshe Feldenkrais

There's probably no profession more misunderstood than engineering. The most general description of the profession of engineering is "a field of study or activity concerned with deliberate alteration or modification in some particular area." To engineer is to, "Arrange, contrive, or bring about, especially artfully." (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) Moshe Feldenkrais was a very, very good engineer.

I recommend for your reading pleasure the book To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski. It's easy to read and you'll find yourself underlining sections of the book as well as quoting stories and anecdotes to your friends. Petroski says, "I believe...that the ideas of engineering are in fact in our bones and part of our human nature and experience." and, "The idea of design -- of making something that has not existed before -- is central to engineering, and I take design and engineering to be virtually synonymous..." (To Engineer, pg. xi) And then this, "I believe that the concept of failure... is central to understanding engineering, for engineering design has as its first and foremost object the obviation of failure. ...To understand what engineering is and what engineers do is to understand how failures can happen and how they can contribute more than successes to advance technology."(To Engineer, pg. xii)

Engineering does not share the objective of science which seeks to understand and explain the given world. Nor is it that of art which, unfettered by the so-called Laws of Nature, creates worlds at the limits of the Imagination. Although engineering is most appreciated when science and art combine to make an aesthetically pleasing creation, the objective of engineering is to create new worlds out of the materials of this world and in obedience with its laws. While the honeybee's honeycomb has had a changeless design for eons, human structures are constantly changing and evolving. Human engineers develop new materials that lend themselves to new designs and all this leads inevitably to new ways that things can go wrong. Engineered things and systems (like irrigation canals) came into being long before the pyramids. Now, engineering is evidenced in virtually everything we know. The process of design differs greatly in its application, use of materials and how to arrange them.