Author: Andrew Burroughs
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Year Published: 2007
Rating: 
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Management guru Peter Drucker once said “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
The skill of seeing creatively lets you look at your company, products and services with fresh eyes and see opportunities and possibilities rather than “what everyone else does” or “how we’ve always done it”. Innovation is the implementation of that creativity to improve products and services – or to introduce something radically different in their places.
Creativity and innovation are about problem solving – and you can improve your skills in both areas by looking at the world a bit more closely. Andrew Burroughs of IDEO, one of the most innovative design consultancies in the world, has put together a book to help you do just that.
Everyday Engineering: How Engineers See isn’t your typical book. It’s a small black book that resembles a paper swatch book. Inside, you’ll find close up photographs of everyday objects such as bicycle gears, manhole covers, fire hydrants, and sign posts – things you probably wouldn’t take much notice of if you passed them on the street. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief, reflective excerpt designed to get us to be more inquisitive about the world around us.
Burroughs wants to help us take a closer look at how engineers have solved specific problems, why they choose that solution, and what they might do to improve upon it. He says:
Our environment is brimming over with information that can help us with our basic ability to navigate a course. The better we are able to refine our actions and our thoughts based on seeing what has gone before, the fewer mistakes we will make and the world will be a better place for it.
To illustrate this, the book is divided into two sections: “creation” which shows how engineers struggle with making commonplace objects do their jobs and “degradation” which shows how objects are abused, misused, and worn due to unforeseen events.
Since the purpose of the book is to make us better observers, this isn’t a book you can speed-read cover to cover. To really get the full benefit, you need to sit with it and mull over the pictures and commentary in small bites. Each is its own food for thought – and a window into how an engineer solved a problem for us. It’s a great book to pick up if you’re stuck with a particular problem or you need a new perspective.
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