Ian Curtis
30-04-2015, 13:00
How do we build a safer car? (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-lament)
The public saw things very differently. They didn’t think about the necessary compromises inherent in the design process. They didn’t understand that a car was engineered to be tolerant of things like sticky pedals. They looked at the part in isolation, saw that it did not work as they expected it to work—and foresaw the worst. What if an inexperienced driver found his car behaving unexpectedly and panicked? To the engineer, a car sits somewhere on the gradient of acceptability. To the public, a car’s status is binary: it is either broken or working, flawed or functional.
As we in FIRST strive to change culture, I think this cultural difference between "engineer thought" and "public life thought" is something we ought to focus on.
The public saw things very differently. They didn’t think about the necessary compromises inherent in the design process. They didn’t understand that a car was engineered to be tolerant of things like sticky pedals. They looked at the part in isolation, saw that it did not work as they expected it to work—and foresaw the worst. What if an inexperienced driver found his car behaving unexpectedly and panicked? To the engineer, a car sits somewhere on the gradient of acceptability. To the public, a car’s status is binary: it is either broken or working, flawed or functional.
As we in FIRST strive to change culture, I think this cultural difference between "engineer thought" and "public life thought" is something we ought to focus on.