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Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See By IDEOAndrew Burroughs ( Chronicle Books )
Release Date: 2007-09-06
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $29.95
Price: $29.95
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Product Description
World-renowned design and innovation firm IDEO uses first-hand observations to inform and inspire its work. As it did with the groundbreaking observational primer Thoughtless Acts?, IDEO once again brings its instructive methods to bear on the world around us, this time with an eye toward the inherent but unheralded presence of modern engineering. By observing the built environment we walk through every day the often-overlooked details of buildings and roads, the joinings and interfaces of our infrastructure we can learn to see the world as engineers do, and adapt this perspective to critical thinking. Through simple pictures of how objects and environments behave over time, Everyday Engineering invites anyone in creative fields, business, and design to see the world through IDEO's eyes.
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 Useless - not sure what they were trying to do ( marksugg )
The book is quite small in size - smaller than a paperback novel. Each chapter starts with a page of text and then the rest of the chapter is pictures with no text. Not sure what they were trying to accomplish. If you look at the index page in the Amazon "look inside" feature, you have seen most of the book. To me this exactly the kind of thing that makes people suspicious of "creative types" - all form and no substance.
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 good book ( qwega )
THis is a good book that emphasizes the profound impact of engineering on our daily lives. The book contains little texts but for those of us in engineering the pictures speak for them selves.
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Pictures with many guesses ... ( kok-min_wong )
When I bought this book, I thought I'll be receive a lot of shared experiences from the author on how engineers see everyday interactions and situations. I didn't expect to see something familiar to Jane Fulton Suri - Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design. On the contrary, Jane's book was an appetiser to me. But, to have another book that's similar in its style, I was hungry for a main course. I felt that this book wasn't worth as depicted. Tom Kelley, please help make this book better ...
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Great idea, embarassing execution ( heyotwell )
"Thinking like an engineer" is a great idea for a book for designers, especially one that could encourage and develop methods of collaboration or cross-fertilization. This silly book--more of a pamphlet, really--is an utterly trivial effort. It's designer vanity publishing at its worst, a short pretty picture book for IDEO's clients to flip through in the reception area while waiting for the meeting.
The problem is that "broken things" look equally broken to everyone. An engineer might see a problem as a stress or tensile failure, or too much weight applied to a surface, or a failed gasket. A designer might see failures of clarity, accessibility, or aesthetic appeal. But a picture of a rusty pipe is pretty much just that, and it's not instructive on its own. (By the way, use Amazon's "Search inside the book" feature to read the entire book using its clever index, which reproduces every image at thumbnail size with a helpful caption.)
And if you want even more pictures of broken things, try the "thisisbroken" tag on Flickr for an endless stream of them.
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I'll sell you mine ( petiedons )
I was hoping for something insightful and educational. It turns out to be a picture book of design flaws that were never designed; rusty pipes, leaky faucets, etc. The text does not redeem, in any kind of instructional manner, what is essentially a foto album. With IDEO credited as an author, I was expecting much more insight into the design process.
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Addiction
