Re: Top Ten Things You'd Like To Tell Engineers

Subject: Re: Top Ten Things You'd Like To Tell Engineers
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 12:49:31 -0400




Sean Hower wrote:



I'd be interested in ... seeing if there are any trends that can be worked out with the ultimate goal of figuring out where some assumptions (that have been expressed to me by engineers) come from. Sure you could point out that it would be an individual thing, and I'd accept that, but I'm sure there has to be some underlying frame of mind at work that would be part of an "engineering culture" that maintains sets of assumptions about users.

Sean,

I don't think there is a single "engineering culture." There are a number of engineering cultures, based to a large extent on where people went to school. (Caution: You cannot draw conclusions about individual based on this model.)

Consider this gedanken experiment. Pick 100 product categories. In each category, select a product designed by engineers who went to school in Germany, another designed by engineers who went to school in England, another from Japan, and another from the US. Now make four piles, each containing 100 products designed by engineers schooled in one country.

My guess is that, if you were to do this, you would find that the German pile had the most total parts, the English pile weighed the most, the Japanese pile occupied the least volume, and the US pile had the lowest total manufacturing cost. Of course one jumbo jet could skew the results, and this might not be as true now as it was thirty years ago, but still, you get my point.

Now note that this has nothing to do with where the engineers may have been born or what their ethnicity/sex/age/religion might be. It has only to do with where they got their engineering degrees.

Similarly, just within the US, there is a wide range of engineering curricula. Some schools may see their mission as preparing kids to get entry-level engineering jobs and then go on to B-school for their MBAs. Others may be training people to sit in front of a CAD worstation for thirty years. Others may be focused on serving the employment needs relative to a particular industry, at all levels. Whatever. A large, sophisticated employer may understand this well enough to be selective about what schools they recruit at. So you may find a _company_ engineering culture in one place that is relatively uniform but quite different from that at another company.

I've quizzed engineers of various ilks from time to time, on the question of whether their schools had considered evidence of writing competency as a requirement for graduation. I've gotten the full range of answers from They wouldn't dare waste our time with that, through We had to take a semester of English freshman year, to We had to write a senior thesis that was graded on both engineering content and English composition. It just depended on the school.

I imagine the same variability exists with respect to users and usability studies.

Dick


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Re: Top Ten Things You'd Like To Tell Engineers: From: Sean Hower

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