Engineering Knowledge, Type of Design, and Level of Hierarchy: Further Thoughts About What Engineers Know…

Abstract

This article comes at a point in my work that is both advantageous and awkward. The awkwardness comes from the fact that I have recently published a book under the title What Engineers Know and How They Know It (hence the allusion in the title of the present piece). 1 This book contains most of what I think I know about what engineers know, and what I offer here will not be essentially new. The advantages arise because, like most authors, I have been having second thoughts about what I have written and about ideas I think I see more clearly now. I shall attempt here to repackage and summarize those ideas in a way that — I hope — will make more explicit the historiographic and epistemological structure behind them. This structure did not appear so clearly when I was occupied with the nuts and bolts of the work. A diagram has also occurred to me that embodies some of the key ideas in an easily remembered and suggestive form. I will present and discuss it in the concluding part of this material.