[Book 18] The Things We Make by Bill Hammack

The Things We Make makes you appreciate the engineering method as the optimal way to solve real-world problems and contrasts it with the scientific method, which seeks to explain universal truths. In the engineering method, the solution comes before the proof, so rules of thumb are needed to get there. These are developed by applying trial and error, building on past knowledge, and accepting trade-offs. Bill demonstrates and refines this approach with several examples of invention throughout history. As an actuary, this book helped me realize that the engineering method is how the best judgement-based decisions are made.

You should read this book if you…

• struggle with knowing when good enough is good enough
• want to better understand how the invention process works
• seek to learn how to be comfortable with imperfect data, experience, or resources

Additional Information

Year Published: 2023
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 8 – Very Good – In depth insights on a specific topic
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 3 – Average

Key Highlights

1) This is the engineering method: a process of methodical and actionable problem-solving, the force that has created the human world as we know it. And by observing how medieval masons in thirteenth-century France harnessed this force, we can create a definition of the method at its most elemental: Using rules of thumb to solve problems with incomplete information
2) Put another way, the two methods have different goals: the scientific method wants to reveal truths about the universe, while the engineering method seeks solutions to real-world problems
3) Given this more nuanced perspective, we can tweak our definition of the engineering method a bit to realize its more comprehensive form: Solving problems using rules of thumb that cause the best change in a poorly understood situation using available resources
4) When creating the “best” phone or thermostat, there is no such thing as designing to an absolute standard, no ideal of a Vitruvian Man. Instead, there is only a relative standard: a woman’s typical hand to size a brush handle, an average size to serve the most users for a telephone handset. Dreyfuss’s work leads us to what best means in engineering: the best-engineered design emerges from juggling hundreds of restrictions and parameters without which there is no such thing as the best version of anything. An engineering solution can only be judged based on how it handles the constraints unique to its situation—a balance of cultural forces, societal values, availability of material resources, and even urgency. The best solution is best “all things considered,” because an engineer creates in a culture, not in a vacuum
5) While the methods of Reynolds and Metcalfe are ingenious ways to overcome uncertainty, they leave open the idea that working around uncertainty is only a stopgap measure until science can help us proceed with the “real” solutions. We might think that, extrapolating from the rapid advance of scientific inquiry in the last two hundred years, we will reach a time when many things are so deeply understood that no approximations are needed. This hope that science will subsume all, that it will bring perfect exactness and clarity to engineering practice, misses the fact that the reason engineering exists is to work at the limits of scientific understanding and reach beyond codified knowledge. Scientific breakthroughs only push out the boundary between the certain and uncertain, the boundary where engineers work
6) “A wonderful feature of engineering by evolution, is that solutions come first; an understanding of the solutions may or may not come later.”
7) Wedgwood was an engineer, what we would call today a materials engineer, and the proof is in his mastery of the three key strategies of the engineering method: applying trial and error, building on past knowledge, and accepting trade-offs
8) The rule of thumb embodied by the maximum wind maps of the civil engineers demonstrates that the most powerful application of mathematics to engineering is not mere measurement and quantification but instead the ability of engineers to go far beyond the exactness and certitude of mathematics by using statistical methods
9) When we think of an invented technology, we typically imply technology that not only exists but is reproducible in a way that can fulfill the needs of those whose problem it solves. That is, it can be manufactured or mass-produced. A handful of working light bulbs in the late 1800s is a marvel, but it doesn’t light the world. In this sense, the invention of the light bulb was a decades-long process of incremental changes to create a filament that can be manufactured reliably and extended beyond Edison and Maxim alone. To tell only a “great man” story hides the contributions of others who were essential to a technology’s development