Description: The products of engineering design are everywhere, but who or what determines their form and function? Written by a practicing engineer, Designing Engineers yields clues to this mystery by probing deeply into the everyday world of engineering. In doing so, it reveals significant discrepancies between our ideal image of design as an instrumental process and the reality of design as a historically situated social process that is full of uncertainty and ambiguity. Designing Engineers describes the evolution of three very different devices: an x-ray inspection system for airports, a photoprint machine, and a residential photovoltaic energy system. In each case, we are taken through hallways and into meeting rooms to watch over the shoulders of engineers as they engage in the manifold individual and collective work that goes into designing a new product.

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