Engineering vs Design
One of the more popular old posts from this blog is my article on Design vs Modeling. My take was essentially that design can happen in your head, but modeling happens in your hands to one extent or another. Designing is creating the idea. Modeling is making that idea into something physical or geometrical in any case.
Today I want to take that idea a little further and ask where engineering fits into the continuum. Engineering is one of those terms that has come to mean just about anything. Everybody is an engineer of one sort or another. The roots of the word are of course the word “engine”, which in times of yore just meant something that works – basically a machine or mechanism. So that would make mechanical engineers the prototype. Or course we already knew that.
The engineer in the most broad sense including modern misuses of the word, is that step between design – the idea – and reality – something that actually works. Engineers in my experience look at themselves as problem solvers. Designs are very often fraught with barriers to reality, and it is the engineer’s job to get past those barriers. This applies whether you’re trying to make a pair of scissors or microelectronic devices.
Scientists root out the laws of nature that allow things to happen in the physical world, and engineers apply those principles to designs to come up with practical tools. Scientist – theory. Engineer – application. So we’ve got this progression of how things come to be that moves from the Scientist who discovers the laws of nature, a designer who comes up with an idea for a useful tool, then the engineer applies the laws of nature to add detail to the design to make the tool practical. The modeler makes the physical proportions to plan the tool and then the machinist who produces the piece parts and the mechanic who puts it together and maintains it.
Engineers being who we are, we tend to only see the parts of the process that have to do with us. We don’t necessarily see the people who figure out more sociological aspects of product design, such as will anyone use this? Will anyone buy this? Can we make it more affordable? Can we ship it in quantity more efficiently? Where do we get the materials or the personnel to do all of this? Do we have a leader to manage this group of people that we need for this endeavor?
Everyone thinks their contribution is the most important. It’s my opinion that executive pay is WAY out of whack with their importance to the process. It obviously takes a lot of different jobs to make any sort of product happen, why does that job matter 350 times more than my job? It doesn’t, this is inexcusable.
Anyway, looks like I strayed from the main topic a little bit. Everybody’s job is important, and it takes all of these functions to make stuff happen.