The Right Answer

For today’s self-indulgent waffle, I shall spoon out the fanciful batter that is one of my favourite little throwaway comments that I regularly hear during my labours in the world of product design.  The comment that I refer to is that “engineering is easy because there’s a right answer”.  Effectively you have some textbooks and equations, you plug your numberthings into a calcuwotsit and out pops the answer.  Repeat as necessary.

Bingo.

I suspect product design is not alone in this and anywhere that “creatives” (we shall return to why that word is in quotation marks at a later date) rub shoulders with...technical people will have some similar sentiment bandied about from time to time.  Ignoring for the moment that it is sometimes - but not always - used with coy sarcasm, we shall assume that this is a serious philosophical sentiment and dissect it as such.

Let’s start with an analogy - it would be like an architect suggesting civil engineering is easy because all they have to do is make sure something doesn’t fall down.  That would constitute the “right” answer.

“Look, we’ve made loads of bridges - you just use all the same calculations and we can just make another one, ok?  I have to do the hard bit and make it beautiful.”

As will be obvious to anyone who’s sat a science exam, there is no such thing as a “right” answer - merely varying degrees of wrong.  Science and engineering are one in that, after about the age of 16, there is no higher authority present to pat you on the back and congratulate you on achieving 100%.  I appreciate that in other countries the cut-off age where your hand stops being held and the harsh realities of the universe take over may be a little later, but in the UK you start being taught at around sixth form (if not earlier) that you really don’t know ***t.  No matter how good your answer and your derivation of whatever equation from first principles, you’ll have made an assumption somewhere along the way that renders it not quite right in every possible scenario in the space-time continuum.  A real project consists of hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of these calculations.  Those inaccuracies stack up and conspire to prevent you ever creating anything “right”.  Engineering is a balancing act between the rigorous application of scientific theory and not losing your mind.

Further, the idea of “right” ignores the fact that any real world solution exists within finite constraints.  Designers are acutely aware of this the first time they go through the heartache and ego-crushing devastation that is productionisation of a cherished design.  Much like pushing a delicate fawn in front of a freight train.  Good design requires an understanding of the challenges of the real world ahead of time and adequate preparation.

Now, none of this is to say that I do not agree with the foundation of this sentiment - that design is subjective.  This could be debated (some designs are obviously wrong and others seem right - why else are all our phones filleted rectangles with glossy surfaces?) but the basic argument is that there isn’t a formula or process that anyone can follow in order to produce great designs loved by all.  We can all agree on this.  What I would say is that engineering is not purely objective.

Much as any layperson can appreciate the beauty of a well-styled car, they can also appreciate the elegance of the cupholder mechanism (contrary to popular belief, engineers don’t just do the engine).  There will have been an infinite number of solutions to that perennial human ache to simply store a vessel of liquid within a moving vehicle.  Compared to this infinite solution space, the number of implementations that quietly slide out of their lair in a majestically understated piece of mechanical choreography, eliciting that quiet approving nod from your passenger is a vanishingly small subset of that space.  But could any one of them be called the “right” answer?

I say not - there is never a right answer in engineering.  But there are plenty of ****ing good ones.