IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2015 - 97

Market-Based Analyses

What Do We Get When
We Add Consumers to
Electronics Engineering?
By David Alan Grier

hy are you writing for the
IEEE Consumer Electronics
Society," Jay asked. "Don't
you have enough to do?"
Jay is a good acquaintance, the kind of
person I try to visit every time I'm in his
town, even though such visits usually
involve a tight schedule and the demand
to master a diverse and complex public
transit system. After several years, I've
mastered the buses and trolleys but still
find the trains a mystery. I believe that I
have interpreted the schedule correctly
and that I am standing on the right
platform, but then I see the train coming
from a different direction and stopping
on the far side of the station. Someday,
I may understand how the system
works, but, for the moment, I still enjoy
the challenge.
I told Jay that I was hoping to identify
the skills and procedures that differentiated the engineers of consumer products
from other kinds of engineers. Jay gave a
laugh, the kind of laugh that suggested
that such a quest was quixotic at best and
unending at worst. I suspect that he
understood the nature of my inquiry but
didn't have much to say beyond the obvious idea that consumer electronics engineers were merely a specialized class of
electrical engineers who happened to
work with the consumer marketplace.

A TAXONOMY OF ENGINEERING
In the early years of my career, I would
have accepted the claim that electrical
engineering represented a general body
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2015.2421611
Date of publication: 15 July 2015

of knowledge and that the divisions of the
field, represented by the Societies and
Councils of the IEEE, were merely applications of that knowledge to specific
problems. However, very quickly, I started to realize that software engineering,
which is the interest of the largest cohort
of the IEEE Computer Society, represented a very different form of engineering
practice than electrical engineering and

If software engineering
came from a field outside
of electrical engineering,
might consumer-electronic
engineering have a
similar genesis?

drew from a tradition that had few connections to most members of the IEEE.
Most software engineers date their
field to a 1968 NATO conference, but
that date is both too recent and too old.
The field was defined in the 1980s by a
series of IEEE standards committees.
These committees dealt with the problem
of how to create high-quality software. In
all, they created ten standards that dealt
with different aspects of this problem.
The last was the standard for the software
life cycle, which now carries the ISO
number 12027. The IEEE took the final
step to define software engineering in
1995, when it released the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK).

ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES
If 1968 is too old to be the considered the
inception of software engineering, it is
also too young. The software practitioners within the IEEE looked deep into
the history of engineering and drew many
of their ideas from the 1920s and 1930s.
In the process, they generally ignored the
practices of late-1960s electrical engineering. While they acknowledged that
the software ran in an environment that
was created by electronics, they noted
that that environment did not present
many problems that were electrical in
nature. Programmers rarely had to worry
about voltage, resistance, or even timing.
They dealt with problems that were difficult to define in physical terms. So,
instead of seeking a model in electrical
engineering, they turned to industrial or
manufacturing engineering. They borrowed most of their ideas from the field
of quality control/quality assurance,
including the word "program" itself.
So, if software engineering came from
a field outside of electrical engineering,
might consumer-electronic engineering
have a similar genesis? That question is
hard to answer in a satisfying way. The
founders of consumer electronics did not
draw on material outside of electronic
engineering. If radio receivers were the
first consumer-electronic product, then
the radio engineers were at the center of
the field during its formative decades of
the 1920s and 1930s.

THE EVOLUTION OF CE
If we look to the experience of the 1920s
and 1930s, we see a technical landscape
that is quite different from the one in
july 2015

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

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