IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 38

Feature
at an unprecedented rate, the engineers arguably
most involved in the development of new technologies
tend to disengage from social concerns.
Public interest technology (PIT) stands to directly
address this problem. PIT is an interdisciplinary field
of both study and practice, positioned at the intersection
between policy and technology, with an
expressed goal of advancing the public good [7].
David Eaves describes PIT as, " There's policy for technology
and technology for policy [8]. " The creation
of intellectual bridges between the disciplines is thus
an integral activity of PIT and a vital area of research if
the public good is to be incorporated into the day-today
design process of engineering technologies.
This article will review three key areas of engineering
epistemology: What do engineers do? How
do engineers think? In what context do engineers
develop technology? Then a case study from aeronautical
engineering will be presented, exploring
how engineers started designing airplanes around
the ill-defined, subjective needs of pilots. The article
concludes with implications for PIT, focusing on
how ill-defined social metrics, such as social justice
or the public good, might be similarly incorporated
into engineering design.
Engineering ways of knowing
What do engineers do?
Engineers are makers; they design, create, and
apply technological artifacts. Contemporary engineering,
as a profession, evolves out of the world of
blacksmiths and artisans [9], [10]. Given this, the
world's first professional engineers would thus be the
powerful mystic-blacksmiths of central Africa, who
developed iron-making as early as 3600 BCE [11],
[12]. Engineering subdisciplines are largely delimited
by the technologies they study. And while popular
discourse often defines engineering as " applied
science, " this has not always been the case [9], [13].
In fact, some engineering does not employ science
at all [14]. Philosophers of technology tend to see
scientific knowledge and engineering knowledge as
distinct in content and orientation. While science
is static, describing reality, engineering is dynamic,
emphasizing the mutability of reality [13], [15]. Or in
the words of Robert Kennedy [16, p. 114]:
Scientists see things as they are and ask, Why?
Engineers see things as they could be and ask,
Why not?
38
Engineering can be understood more accurately
as a design art that employs other bodies of knowledge
in the service of developing technology [16].
And since all technologies are ultimately created in
the service of human needs, there is no reason engineers
should not regularly borrow concepts from
sociology, policy-making, or global development
studies in that design process.
How do engineers think?
Engineers reduce complexity. The possible technological
solutions to any human problem are theoretically
infinite, and so engineering problem-solving
generally builds knowledge in an evolutionary process
of trial and error, where good ideas live, and
bad ones die. Approximations and shortcuts are
mainstays of engineering practice. Because system
behavior is often complex and not fully understood,
design ideas are regularly prototyped and tested
against quantifiable, performance metrics [15], [17].
Edward Constant II developed the term normal technology
(alluding to Kuhn's idea of normal science) to
describe what " technological communities normally
do " [15, p. 10]. He argues that the normal engineer does
not seek out radical new inventions to an established
problem, but instead, makes small incremental changes
within the conventions of proven designs. Radical innovations
are more likely to waste time and money.
Technical communities are strongly linked with
professional organizations (like IEEE) and the
boundary of what constitutes engineering knowledge
is strongly associated with the curricula as
defined by educational or professional institutions.
To design for complex systems, engineering communities
divide problems into a nested hierarchy of
smaller and smaller problems. Despite the nebulous
nature of design work, normal engineers spend most
of their time dealing with highly structured problems
that adhere to prior design conventions [15], [17].
The determination of metrics able to render complex
problems into well-defined problems is a fundamental
part of the engineering design process [17], [18].
In what context do engineers develop
technology?
Possibly due to the influence of technical communities
(see the " How do engineers think? " section),
engineering, more than any other disciplines, has
historically had strong national characteristics-
identities, methods, and epistemologies often varied
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

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