A guide to the everyday working world of engineers, written by researchers trained in both engineering and sociology. Everyday Engineering was written to help future engineers understand what they are going to be doing in their everyday working lives, so that they can do their work more effectively and with a broader social vision. It will also give sociologists deeper insights into the sociotechnical world of engineering. The book consists of ethnographic studies in which the authors, all trained in both engineering and sociology, go into the field as participant-observers. The sites and types of engineering explored include mechanical design in manufacturing industries, instrument design, software debugging, environmental management within companies, and the implementation of a system for separating household waste. The book is organized in three parts. The first part introduces the complexity of technical practices. The second part enters the social and cultural worlds of designers to grasp their practices and motivations. The third part examines the role of writing practices and graphical representation. The epilogue uses the case studies to raise a series of questions about how objects can be taken into account in sociological analyses of human organizations.

Articles previously published in Science scope.

"This book is not as much about answers as it is about questions. It is not intended to be a guide to the built world around us, but a spur to encourage us all simply to be more inquisitive. The first half of the book shows the struggle that goes into making ubiquitous objects do their jobs and the triumph that engineers experience when the objects succeed, and it tries to reveal some of the thought processes behind their work. In the second half of the book, stories unfold. In these stories, pieces of engineering and design are deployed in the world to carry out their useful functions, beyond the protective reach of the people who created them." -foreword.

This book provides an invaluable reference of materials engineering written for a broad audience in an engaging, effective way. Several stories explain how perseverance and organized research helps to discover new processes for making important materials and how new materials with unmatched properties are theoretically conceived, tested in the laboratory, mass produced and deployed for the benefit of all. This book provides a welcome introduction to how advances are made in the world of materials that sustain and define our contemporary standard of living. Suitable for trained materials scientists and the educated layman with an appreciation of engineering, the book will be especially appealing to the young materials engineer, for whom it will serve as a long-term reference due to its clear and rigorous illustration of the field's essential features.

What makes a windup toy get up and go? How does an earbud operate? And why does the line you’re waiting in always seem the slowest? Get middle-schoolers engaged in the fascinating science behind familiar items with More Everyday Engineering. Like Everyday Engineering, this compilation brings together activities based on the “Everyday Engineering” columns from NSTA’s award-winning journal Science Scope. Thirteen hands-on investigations focus on three aspects of engineering: designing and building, reverse engineering to learn how something works, and constructing and testing models. Like the original collection, this book is easy to use. Each investigation is a complete lesson that includes in-depth teacher background information, expected sample data, a materials list, and a student activity sheet for recording results. The activities use simple, inexpensive materials you can find in your science classroom or at a dollar store. Whether you’re a teacher, parent, or enrichment-program leader, go beyond the usual bridge-building and egg-drop activities. Spark curiosity with appealing activities that will help middle schoolers understand that engineering truly is a part of their everyday lives.

This book is about the role of some engineering principles in our everyday lives. Engineers study these principles and use them in the design and analysis of the products and systems with which they work. The same principles play basic and influential roles in our everyday lives as well. Whether the concept of entropy, the moments of inertia, the natural frequency, the Coriolis acceleration, or the electromotive force, the roles and effects of these phenomena are the same in a system designed by an engineer or created by nature. This shows that learning about these engineering concepts helps us to understand why certain things happen or behave the way they do, and that these concepts are not strange phenomena invented by individuals only for their own use, rather, they are part of our everyday physical and natural world, but are used to our benefit by the engineers and scientists. Learning about these principles might also help attract more and more qualified and interested high school and college students to the engineering fields. Each chapter of this book explains one of these principles through examples, discussions, and at times, simple equations.

A guide to the everyday working world of engineers, written by researchers trained in both engineering and sociology.

From video games and sports equipment, to cars and cleaning products, many of the things we use everyday were designed by engineers. This exciting title incorporates child-centered examples and engaging text to capture the readers' attention as they explore the connections between engineering, science, and technology, and discover how engineering impacts our day-to-day lives. Teacher's guide available.

We all live our daily lives surrounded by the products of technology that make what we do simpler, faster, and more efficient. These are benefits we often just take for granted. But at the same time, as these products disburden us of unwanted tasks that consumed much time and effort in earlier eras, many of them also leave us more disengaged from our natural and even human surroundings. It is the task of what Gene Moriarty calls focal engineering to create products that will achieve a balance between disburdenment and engagement: “How much disburdenment will be appropriate while still permitting an engagement that enriches one’s life, elevates the spirit, and calls forth a good life in a convivial society?” One of his examples of a focally engineered structure is the Golden Gate Bridge, which “draws people to it, enlivens and elevates the human spirit, and resonates with the world of its congenial setting. Humans, bridge, and world are in tune.” These values of engagement, enlivenment, and resonance are key to the normative approach Moriarty brings to the profession of engineering, which traditionally has focused mainly on technical measures of evaluation such as efficiency, productivity, objectivity, and precision. These measures, while important, look at the engineered product in a local and limited sense. But “from a broader perspective, what is locally benign may present serious moral problems,” undermining “social justice, environmental sustainability, and health and safety of affected parties.” It is this broader perspective that is championed by focal engineering, the subject of Part III of the book, which Moriarty contrasts with “modern” engineering in Part I and “pre-modern” engineering in Part II.