Books_engineer Should Read

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November 2005 7

A MODNA R T

P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y

T

his is a column I’ve wantedto write for a long time:

my engineering readinglist. Some of these booksoffer wisdom on how to

think about the task of engineering, oth-ers focus on the boundary between thedesigner’s world and the real world withhuman users, and some have helpedinform my personal worldview in away that I think has made me a betterengineer.

For me, this is the all-star team of theengineering book world.

ENGINEERING FOR SOCIETYHenry Petroski and Samuel Florman

have created and maintained the enter-prise-of-engineering literature almost,er, double-handedly. Petroski’sTo Engi-neer Is Human: The Role of Failure inSuccessful Design (St. Martin’s Press,1982) is a classic treatise on the impli-cations of the craft of engineering, fromboth the engineer’s and the user’s pointsof view.

The title says it all: Not everythinghumans try works out the way wehope, in any field of endeavor includ-

ing engineering. If our works are to bejudged successful by their users, wemust ply our trade with that ineluct-able fact ever in mind.

Florman’s The Civilized Engineer(St. Martin’s Press, 1987) helps toremind us of why we are engineers andwhy the world needs us. Keep thisbook handy for the next time a bridgefalls, a building collapses, or your con-fidence that we can ultimately succeedis otherwise shaken.

It’s not altogether a bad thing tooccasionally question how effectivelywe engineers can improve the world.

John McPhee’s The Control of Nature(Noonday Press, 1989) is a starkreminder of what we’re up againstwhen we tackle dams, levees, bridges,

and so on. This book is all the morepoignant because McPhee included achapter on New Orleans, contrastingthe local population’s confidence inand requests for more Army Corpsengineering on their behalf, and theCorps’ knowledge that their prepara-tions are not, in fact, up to anythingnature can throw at them. Tragically,we now know which group was right.

Other books to help keep us humbleinclude

• Robert Pool, Beyond Engineering:How Society Shapes Technology,

Oxford University Press, 1997;• James L. Adams,Flying Buttresses,

Entropy, and O-Rings: The World of an Engineer, Harvard Press,1991;

• Stephen H. Unger, Controlling Technology, Wiley Interscience,1994; and

• Henry Petroski,Design Paradigms:Case Studies of Error and Judg-ment in Engineering , CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994.

We proceed in our profession by tak-ing well-informed and well-intentionedrisks in exchange for what we hopewill be worthwhile rewards. Therealways will be a certain amount of trialand error. But that doesn’t give us carteblanche to take reckless chances in ourdesigns, nor does it forgive stupidity ornot knowing what we’re doing.

When things go awry in a big way,it’s relatively easy to see that there arelessons to be learned, and often a care-ful analysis of a disaster can show usexactly what those lessons are. It’s less

easy, but arguably far more important,to recognize those same learningopportunities in near misses.

Contrary to what most people think,Murphy’s law does not state thatthings always automatically movetoward the worst possible outcome asif guided by a malevolent unseen hand(At Random, Computer, Apr. 2002,pp. 9-12). Catastrophic events usuallyare the culmination of a sequence of cascading failures, often including sys-tem design shortcomings, human error,

and natural events occurring togetherin a way that might have been pre-ventable had the designers and usersbeen able to imagine them (AtRandom, Computer, August 2005, pp.12-15). It’s often the case that the rightintervention in such a cascade can stopthe sequence. We have much to learnfrom these near misses as well.

In Normal Accidents (PrincetonUniversity Press, 1984, 1999), CharlesPerrow provides a must-read account

Books EngineersShould ReadBob Colwell

A recommended

reading list

includes books

that offer wisdom

on how to think

about the task of

engineering.



8 Computer

A t R a n d o m

of several such juxtapositions of unfor-tunate events, including the Three Mile

Island nuclear reactor near-meltdownof the late 1970s. Perrow also has veryinteresting ideas on human/machineinterface designs, arguing that engi-neered systems should be designed andused under the assumption that it isnormal, not an aberration, for suchsystems to fail occasionally.

James Chiles has written a book,Inviting Disaster: Lessons from theEdge of Technology (HarperCollins2001), that I particularly like because heincludes near misses. While nobody can

overlook an actual disaster, humans arequite adept at ignoring near misses, andI don’t think engineers are immune tothis. The “normalization of deviance”that was at the heart of the space shut-tle Challenger disaster was exactly thisprocess, dressed up in engineering lan-guage and seasoned by misunderstand-ings between the technical ranks and themanagers (Diane Vaughan, The Chal-lenger Launch Decision, University of Chicago Press, 1996).

But even when we’re doing every-thing right—meaning as well as

humanly possible—we know there areareas of uncertainty in our concep-tions. There must be; otherwise wewould merely repeat the past. What weengineers know, but the public doesn’talways understand, is that engineeredsystems always have a finite probabil-ity of failing. Great engineering canreduce the risks but never to zero.

Samuel Florman’s Civilized Engineerbook addresses this directly; othergood books that tackle the question of where the bar should be set include

• Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety, Princeton University Press,1993;

• Aaron Wildavsky, Searching forSafety, Transaction Publishers,1991;

• Matthys Levy and Mario Salva-dori, Why Buildings Fall Down,Norton & Co., 1992;

• Edward Tenner, Why Things BiteBack: Technology and the Revenge

of Unintended Consequences,Knopf, 1996;

• Richard Schwing and WalterAlbers, Societal Risk Assessment:How Safe Is Safe Enough?, PlenumPress, 1980; and

• Stephen Potter, On the Right Lines? The Limits of Technological Innovation, St. Martin’s Press,1987.

Much less rigorous, but a lot of fun,is M. Hirsh Goldberg’s The BlunderBook (Quill, 1984). Some of this bookdiscusses science and engineering

gaffes, but all of human endeavor isfair game here.

The game of engineering is to con-ceive things that have never existed.

Imagination is extremely important.I’ve noticed over the years that some of the brightest people tend to think interms of analogies—they seem to find ituseful to abstract aspects of things theyalready understand and to reuse thoseabstractions when conjuring up newthings. Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies(Basic Books, 1995) takes up this themeand is enjoyable reading.

If you’re designing products for thegeneral public, some special (and very

nonlinear) rules apply. Intel learnedthis in 1994, when the floating dividedesign error in the original Pentiumchip put the company in the expensive,uncomfortable glare of unforgivingpublic scrutiny. Later, we put a chipidentification facility in the Pentium IIIand discovered how surprisingly easy itwas to get privacy, nationalist, andanarchist protestors to temporarilyalign. The globalization phenomenonis real, and it’s very relevant to the

design of contemporary products. Thebest summary I’ve seen of these issues

is by Thomas Friedman in The Lexusand the Olive Tree (Anchor Books,2000).

The conceptualization stage of anydesign project requires inspiration.Where do those bursts of inspirationcome from, and how can we get moreof them? Skip the dozens of books thatspend hundreds of pages indirectly say-ing “we don’t really know,” andinstead read Tom Kelley’s The Art of Innovation (Currency Doubleday,2001), which offers actual techniques

and useful mindsets and attitudes.

PRACTICAL HELP FORAN ETHEREAL TOPIC

Historically, the governments of var-ious nations have funded a great deal of science. When you win such a govern-ment grant, the natural inclination is tothink the grantors simply acquiesced tothe obvious greatness of your proposal.When you don’t win it, those samegrantors are clearly morons. But neitherof those perceptions is generally true.

Donald E. Stokes’ book, Pasteur’s

Quadrant: Basic Science and Techno-logical Innovation (Brookings Insti-tution Press, 1997), gives an enlight-ening historical perspective on how thescientific field views the various kindsof science and engineering, what hap-pened to the Superconducting Super-collider, and who was Vannevar Bush.

In the August 2005 At Random col-umn, I mentioned Richard Posner’sCatastrophe: Risk and Response.Posner asks some fascinating questionsabout the choices and decisions we

make as a society, either deliberately orby default. His book was the first I’veencountered arguing that we shouldtake into account the number of peoplewho will live on this planet over thenext several million years. Posner alsoexplicitly tries to quantify his argu-ments to make truly rational decisionson complex questions. I’ve orderedseveral of his other books because Ifind his writing crisp, and I admire hiserudition and clear analysis.

When things go awryin a big way, it’s

relatively easy to seethat there are lessons

to be learned.



November 2005 9

THE BUSINESS OF ENGINEERINGFor most of us, engineering is a sub-

task of a larger effort, undertakenbecause somebody believes there is aprofit to be made. In other words,we’re all in business—make moneywith our products, and we get to playagain. Some of the books mentionedabove are also helpful in this context.Others that I have found useful andenlightening include

• Donald Norman, The InvisibleComputer, MIT Press, 1998;

• Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The

Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley, 1979;• Andy Grove, Only The Paranoid

Survive, Currency, 1996; and• Jerry Weissman, Presenting to

Win, Prentice Hall, 2003.

Clayton Christenson’s The Inno-vator’s Dilemma (HarperCollins,1997) has achieved near-ubiquity inthe halls of most high-tech firmsbecause Christenson has identified areal problem: why high-fliers of onedecade routinely become the roadkill

of the next, along with concrete ideasfor what to do about that. Everyoneshould read this book, if for no otherreason than that you’ll recognize ref-erences to it, which occur about oncean hour in high-tech business planningcircles. (You must also read Dilbert forthat same reason. Every company hasits own pointy-haired boss.)

ENGINEERS PLAYINGNICELY WITH OTHERS

We don’t always get to live in splen-

did isolation. In fact, we engineers usu-ally are expected to productivelyco-reside with nonengineers, or worse… The Scientists. At least with mostnonengineers, we get the benefit of thedoubt—they don’t know what we do,so they assume we must know some-thing they don’t.

Scientists often don’t assume anysuch thing, and considerable frictioncan arise from their misapprehension.An example of this is Eric J. Chaisson’s

The Hubble Wars (HarperCollins,1994). Okay, so the original Hubble

mirror wasn’t right, and the engineersgoofed. We should take a few lumpsover that. But hey, we fixed it, andbesides, this is the same scientific com-munity that purposely reserved wholesections of the starry sky so that the sci-entists who had been studying that sec-tion their whole lives couldn’t bescooped by some amateur who justhappened to accidentally point theHubble at his baby. Somewhat under-standable, but disturbing. Exactlywhat I’d say about the mirror.

Here’s a scientist who gets it exactlyright: Steve Sqyres, who was the princi-pal investigator of the Mars Rover land-ings of 2004. In a recent book, Spirit,

Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (Hyperion, 2005),Sqyres tells the story as only an insidercan. From the first page, I was en-thralled. It’s all in here: the politics, thegood intentions, the mistakes, goodluck and bad breaks, brilliant engineer-ing as well as its diammetric opposite,physics, team dynamics, the farce thatalways accompanies human effort. Thisis one beautiful book, quite possibly thebest I’ve read in 10 years. I knew how itall turns out, and I still had tears in my

eyes while reading it.Speaking of having the right stuff, leg-

endary NASA flight controller GeneKranz describes his storied career, espe-cially the heroic rescue of Apollo 13, inFailure Is Not an Option (Simon andSchuster, 2000). I’ve always foundNASA’s successes, trials, and tribulationsto be a direct source of engineering inspi-ration, and Kranz’s personal recollectionof what it was like on the inside of allthose historic space missions is priceless.

Even when we’re doingeverything right, weknow there are areasof uncertainty in our

conceptions.

Any technologist can benefit fromreading Richard Feynman’s What Do

You Care What Other People Think?(Norton, 1988) or The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Perseus, 1999).Watch how Feynman’s incredible mindnoticed mundane things and observehis unerring instinct for knowing whenthe conventional wisdom needed tobe questioned, then go forth and dolikewise.

Likewise, you could do a lot worsethan emulate Kelly Johnson, Lock-heed’s chief designer of the SR-71 spyplane, the U2, and many others, as

recounted in Kelly: More Than MyShare of It All (Smithsonian, 1985).There are universal truths in the prac-tice of engineering, and in Kelly John-son you’ll see a master at the craft.

One of the major pillars of scientificadvance is our insistence that experi-ments be repeatable. Trying somethingover and over gives us the ability tokeep whittling away distractions untilonly the essential elements remain.Engineers don’t usually get to do this:We build a bridge, a road, or a micro-processor once, and we don’t get to try

something N different ways. Getting aworkable product into the market isstrong proof of our understanding, butfor others to learn from the effortrequires an insider to analyze that effortand write it down. I humbly offer myown book, The Pentium Chronicles:The People, Passion, and PoliticsBehind Intel’s Landmark Chips (Wiley,2005), as one such attempt.

RANDOM OTHER BOOKS I LIKEDMost members of the general com-

puter science community are fans of Donald Knuth. Everyone knows abouthis classic Art of Computer Program-ming tomes, but not everyone is awareof Knuth’s book titled Things a Com- puter Scientist Rarely Talks About (Stanford Univ. Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2001), histreatise on his religious convictions.Rational believers of any particular per-suasion should find Knuth’s clear-headed analysis illuminating.



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I also loved Knuth’s 3:16: BibleTexts Illuminated (A-R Editions Inc.,

1991) in which he does several amaz-ing things simultaneously: He ran-domly samples biblical verses in thesame way he would approach anumerically difficult problem in the sci-ences; he produces his own interpreta-tions of the verses from the Greek(rather than using the usual King Jamesversion); and he gets the best calligra-phers in the world to do their ownartistic interpretations of those verses.This book is a tour de force of humanintellect and artistic output.

If you’ve never heard of Ishmael (Bantam/Turner, 1997), Daniel Quinn’sSocratic dialogs between an earnesthuman and a brilliant, telepathic gorilla(would I make up something likethat?), then you should put reading thisbook on your to-do list. It’s amazinghow many people say that this bookchanged their lives and their worldview.Personally, I found it interesting, alarm-ing, insightful, irritating, and bleak byturns. While I agree that identifying aproblem is the first step toward resolv-ing it, I don’t quite trust books that

essentially stop there. I admire the con-testant in the arena much more than thecritic up in the bleachers. Nevertheless,Ishmael is a powerful book that willmake you think. It asks questions weshould all be asking and taking seri-ously if our great-grandchildren are tothrive on this planet.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubnerwrote a book called Freakonomics(HarperCollins, 2005). Although Iwish they hadn’t succumbed to thecutesy title because it doesn’t do the

book justice, they do use an odd,stand-on-your-head way of looking atthings that often yields real insights.These two authors have elevated thistactic to an art form, applying it inutterly surprising ways. For example,they prove that some sumo wrestlershave cheated (by not applying them-selves full-out in every match, thus rig-ging the final competition lists), butthen so have some elementary schoolteachers who are trying to get their

classes to pass the current wave of standardized tests.

Levitt and Dubner are fearless, andthey walk boldly into issues that pre-sent societal booby traps—for exam-ple, what are the implications of givingyour children unusual names? Theydon’t shy away from the fact thatunusual names are not evenly distrib-uted across all ethnicities, for instance.I think Feynman would have approvedof these guys and the mental gymnas-tics they put their readers through.

In On Intelligence (Times Books,2004), Jeff Hawkins takes us back to

the beginnings of AI and suggests thata better understanding of the functionand wiring of our own neural machin-ery, along with some judicious assump-tions about how intelligence might

emerge from that background, givessome new hope that artificially createdintelligence could yet be achieved.While I think there’s a pretty wide gapbetween what is known and whatwould need to be known before self-aware machinery could even beattempted, I applaud the effort and thevision, and enjoyed reading the bookjust for the vistas Hawkins paints.

What a fascinating world it will beif Hawkins turns out to be right. ■

Bob Colwell, the 2005 recipient of theIEEE Computer Society/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award , was Intel’s chief IA32architect through the Pentium II, III,and 4 microprocessors. He is now anindependent consultant. Contact himat [email protected].

Engineers know thatengineered systemsalways have a finiteprobability of failing.

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