What Engineering Is Not, Part 4 (finale)

One last thought on this topic and I’ll drop it.

Ultimately, what is engineering not? It’s not the solution to all issues concerning buildings. Some problems are best solved by architects, some by plumbers, some by carpenters, some by the building owners, and some by literally nothing.* I had one couple hire me to look at their house, decades ago, when their money would have been better spent on a marriage counselor.

If you ask engineers, they’ll tell you that they’ve been taught to solve problems. That’s true, but it’s not exclusive to our profession. Many people have been taught to solve problems in different ways. There are a bunch of ways of understanding the world, which is why there’s a whole branch of philosophy devoted to knowing what we know and how we know it. Engineering logic is useful, but it’s only one approach of many.

Engineering thinking is very good at telling you how to do something and reasonably good at telling you what the effects (e.g., cost, pollution, relative safety) will be. It’s useless at telling you what you should do because it’s value neutral. I’ll go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of engineers believe that you should provide fire safety measures in apartment houses. The thing is, we believe that because of our basic humanity, not because engineering says so. You can run a cost/benefit analysis of the effort to provide sprinklers and good egress versus not doing so and being sued; that analysis does not make you a good engineer or a good person. I’ve said in this series of posts that one of the aspects of engineering analysis is knowing the boundary conditions of the problem at hand and that applies here: using engineering for problems other than “how” and “what” is probably a mistake. Those questions are boundary conditions for the profession.

* Sometimes the best answer to a problem is to do nothing. (When the problem isn’t dangerous or severe, and the possible solutions are intrusive or expensive.) I’m often amazed at how difficult find that solution to be. Everyone wants to do something.