Engineering Design According to xkcd

Because I couldn’t resist, here are five selections pertaining to some aspect of engineering design. (As an aside, my friends and I have been wondering why the heck everything sounds so much like our lives—we think they’re getting access to our lives/headspaces somehow, say via hidden cameras around the engineering buildings...)

1) #85: Paths (“It’s true, I think about this all the time.”)


My friends and I discuss efficiency of things we see all the time. This was especially pertinent, at least to myself, so when I saw this I literally laughed out loud. My mind becomes a trip planner when I’m going anywhere; it’s especially bad when walking because there’s so much time and so little to pay attention to that sometimes all I’m doing is iterating my pseudo-algorithm. (Just a personal rant: I hate when there’s something that slows me down like barriers or buildings I can’t cut through. Going to class via King’s College Circle is really annoying because the field is covered in snow during the year—I trudge through it anyway if I’m running late and end up with soaked feet—and then when the snow finally melts, it gets closed off.)

2) #242: The Difference (“How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?”)


This should be fairly obvious: learning through personal experience/observation and confirming/refining through iteration. Rigour! Although I wouldn’t label the second branch as only “scientist”—engineers get overlooked once again. It’s yet another example of what has been repeatedly discussed on this blog.

3) #277: Long Light (“You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think, ‘some engineer was frustrated while designing this.’ It’s a little human connection.”)


This will be pertinent to my design critique post later—sometimes, even though something may seem very poorly engineered, there might have been extenuating circumstances and issues that were physically irresolvable. The stubborn, perfectionist part of my mind, however, will always question if anything is really impossible—perhaps a qualifier is necessary, e.g. “given these circumstances”. But is it really possible to rule out all given possibilities even with certain restrictions? Wouldn’t something be figured out eventually? Perhaps that’s what engineering is all about (and one of the main factors distinguishing it from science): approximating a solution as efficiently as possible (resource-wise, e.g. time, cost, labour) instead of trying to come up with an absolute and perfect one that may be impractical to both design and use.

4) #309: Shopping Teams (“I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.”)


This is pretty much what we did in Praxis II for most of the semester: definitions (the gap!) and decision-making heuristics. I don’t know if this is necessarily a good thing—xkcd obviously thinks it isn’t—but sometimes our desire for rigour ended up in heated debates over the smallest things and we had to step back and look at the big picture again. (Tangent: I’m currently trying to decide if I should take offense at the term “nerd”...)

5) #552: Correlation (“Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.”)


Again, more about the search for rigour—(to make a semi-transparent effort at tying everything together) perhaps it is at the cost of efficiency. I took a course in high school called Theory of Knowledge (required for all IB Diploma candidates) where we were supposed to examine the methods with which we acquire and analyze information, and pretty much all we ended up doing the entire semester was argue that we couldn’t ever really know anything for sure because there was physically no way to get rid of bias. You can’t deny that it’s true, but it’s not very useful. As an aside, I could turn this into an argument in favour of engineering over science, but you could just flip it over in turn and say engineering is pseudo-science, lacks rigour, etc. Is perfection ever attainable?