In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation
  • Daniel Lee Kleinman (bio)
Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation. Edited by Dominique Vinck. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. vi+247. $30.

The aim of Everyday Engineering is vitally important. Through nine ethnographies of design practice, Dominique Vinck and the other contributors to this volume seek to show "how things are really done" in the day-to-day practice of engineering (p. 1). While they address themselves primarily to practicing engineers and engineering students, Vinck and her colleagues also want their book to be valuable to specialists in the social studies of science and technology.

In her opening essay, Vinck argues that engineering students enter their training expecting their work to be "purely technical." They are surprised to learn early on that part of any given project's "technical coordination takes place in the corridors" (pp. 18, 19). On the job, they learn that design practice involves argument and organizational politics. Vinck shows that what engineers create exists in close relation to the social and that design decisions cannot be based strictly and narrowly on technical data. All data must be interpreted, and no technical document is absolutely comprehensive. Thus, judgment is central to engineering practice.

Substantively, the essays in Everyday Engineering focus on models, drawings, and tools. They stress the mediating role of the "material" in [End Page 849] design practice, and show over and over that design is fundamentally a craft. They also show that much of what goes into any engineering outcome is locally determined and highly contingent. In comparison to much ethnography, these investigators are interested in more than just the meaning produced by engineers; they are concerned also with "performance," that is, "what is actually produced through human activity" (p. 208).

One of Everyday Engineering's strongest essays is Nathalie Ravaille and Dominique Vinck's "Contrasting Design Cultures: Designing Dies for Drawing Aluminum." The authors studied two companies, both involved in the production of aluminum components for window frames, ladders, bicycles, and boats. They found that the two—despite being in the same industrial sector, in the same country, and working on the same products—had very different cultures. Engineers at one firm relied heavily on a set of formal rules which they rarely interrogated, and they "started from the principle that the computer calculated all dimensions" (p. 112). Engineers at the other company, by contrast, viewed "dimensioning rules" as less reliable than "their customary practice of synoptic evaluation" (p. 112) and so they tended to depend heavily on their everyday experience in design practice.

In another essay, Vinck and Michel Bovy describe the difficulties engineers encountered in designing a system of household waste collection for a town because of their lack of preparation for the "plurality in the world of the household" (p. 53). They made assumptions about how people would behave, oblivious to the vast array of objectives, identities, and interests that one finds in any given social environment. They were not, in the well-known term, good "heterogeneous engineers."

Bringing the insights of a quarter-century of work in STS—that science and engineering are fundamentally social, local, and highly contingent practices—to engineering students and practicing engineers is surely laudable. In the case of this book, however, I fear that the often dense and ponderous writing will be a challenge for this audience. For STS scholars—the secondary audience—it will offer little that is new conceptually. The contributors have added texture to the small body of ethnographic literature on engineering. Still, I had hoped to learn more about what makes engineering distinctive, especially design practice. The qualities the contributors use to characterize engineering might, in many cases, just as easily be used to describe molecular biology. Are there not important differences? I would have thought so.

Daniel Lee Kleinman

Dr. Kleinman, associate professor of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, is the author of Impure Cultures: University Biology and the World of Commerce (2003) and coeditor of Controversies in Science and Technology, volume 1, From Maize to Menopause (forthcoming).

...

pdf

Share