The Importance of Aesthetic Considerations in Engineering Design

Abstract: In this paper I argue that aesthetic considerations are not frivolous "add-ons" in

relation to good engineering design. I argue that, on the contrary, good engineering design in so

far as it accounts for human needs must also account for the aesthetic needs of human beings.

Moreover, I argue against the idea that form follows function, which is often put forward in order

to absolve engineers of responsibility for how the things that they design look. I emphasize the

ethical motivations for taking aesthetic considerations seriously in engineering design. In

particular, I emphasize the importance of accounting for humans as aesthetically responsive

agents and not just as mere consumers, and I also point out that aesthetic responsiveness is not

purely subjective. I go on to argue that engineering design which discounts aesthetic

considerations fails qua engineering design, because engineering design presupposes an adequate

philosophical anthropology (and, a philosophical anthropology that discounts aesthetic needs is

inadequate). Furthermore, I argue that engineers who do not reflexively challenge the idea that

form follows function are projecting an ideological image of technology as being autonomous

and inhuman. I then offer a critique of the basic axiological assumptions of the engineering

profession. In particular, I challenge the implicit assumption that only that which can be

quantified can have value. Finally, I draw the ethical implications of taking aesthetic

considerations seriously in engineering design; I argue that since the determination of the value

of individual (aesthetically engaging) engineering works necessitates dialogue, to make aesthetic

considerations prominent in engineering design is to slow down the pace of technological

development and to humanise it.

The Importance of Aesthetic

Considerations in Engineering

Design

Author: Zeyad el Nabolsy

Supervisor: Barry Allen

1

Inquiry Question: Why are aesthetic considerations inseparable from good engineering

design?

(Main auxiliary question: what are the ethical implications of (and motivations for)

establishing a close connection between aesthetics and engineering design?)

It is sometimes claimed that engineering design does and ought to discount aesthetic

considerations and that the task of engineering design is to find the one best form or design of an

object (or a process).1 I will argue that this commonplace conception of what engineering design

is like and of what engineering design ought to be like is mistaken because it is based on a

misunderstanding of what is actually involved in the process of engineering design.2 I will argue

that the form of the designed object or process is always under-determined by the effects that the

designed object or process is expected to reliably produce. In that respect, I follow Barry Allen

and David Pye in drawing a distinction between function and the effects that a designed artifact

is intended to reliably produce.3 The idea that engineering design is an algorithmic process by

which the engineer comes to discover the singular optimal design is fallacious because it is based

on the erroneous functionalist mantra of "form follows function". I will also argue that engineers

1 Per Boelskifte points out that aesthetics is regarded by many engineers as being unscientific and therefore

unteachable (Boelskifte, 2014). This view is wrong and it seems to presuppose a very crude positivism. Many things are unquantifiable (and therefore, "unscientific") but that does not imply that they are unteachable. 2 I will use "designers" to refer to those who design material objects (material systems & processes fall under the

scope of this category, e.g. cities). If we adopt this definition, then we can follow Alain Findeli in speaking of both artists and engineers as being designers (Findeli, 1994). 3 Allen describes well-designed artifacts as "works". According to him, "what distinguishes a work from the side-

effects or by-products of its artifice is its artfulness, its technical coherence, well-made parts in a well-designed system" (Allen, 2008, 49). In turn, an artifact is "an effect of human performance, individual or concerted, under any description" (Allen, 2008, 49). For Allen, all works are artifacts but not all artifacts are works. It's important to note that if we follow Allen's definition of what artifacts are, then there are important ethical consequences to be drawn for it means that we are directly responsible for environmental degradation.

2

have an ethical duty to account for the aesthetic needs of human beings and that consequently,

for design to be excellent it must be aesthetically excellent.4

Before presenting arguments against the functional mantra, it is necessary to briefly

discuss what is meant by "aesthetics" or "aesthetic considerations" in the context of this paper.

Allen defines aesthetic as referring to perceptual, sensory responses to how things look or sound

(Allen, 2008). It is important to note that aesthetic response and aesthetic preference are not

driven by discursive thought. In a similar vein, T. W. Allan Whitfield writes that, "an aesthetic

category is intrinsically sensory-perceptual and lacking in semantic content" (Whitfiled, 2005,

11).5 A key point is that an artifact that has what Allen calls an "aesthetic, perceptual presence"

does not convey linguistic knowledge; it affects us by the perceptual appeal of the features that

are designed and worked into it. A work is said to have positive aesthetic quality if the aesthetic

response to the work is pleasant. Aesthetic responsiveness is contemplative in the sense that it is

not indexed to instrumental reasoning. For instance, it would be very strange to say that I find an

artifact to be beautiful because it is useful (though, of course, it can be both beautiful and useful).

This point is important because to call on engineers to take aesthetic considerations seriously in

their designs is to ask engineers to acknowledge that human beings are not merely consumers

and that they have very real (aesthetic, perceptual) needs which cannot be met if one only

designs for consumption. If beauty is fundamentally relational, in the sense that it is an

interaction between our perception and our environment, as Allen believes it to be, then the call

4 P. Aarne Vesilind, a professor of civil engineering, notes that "the first canon of most engineering codes of ethics

states: The engineer shall hold paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public" (Versilind, 2002, 2). I argue that if aesthetic engagement is necessary for public welfare, then it follows that engineers have an ethical duty to make their work as beautiful as it can be. 5 It's important to note that if Whitfield's conception is adopted then it pulls the rug from under the feet of modern

(conceptual) art, since strictly speaking its products could not be described as art (in so far as art is beautiful).

3

to care for and cultivate beauty in our environment is also a call to care for human subjects.6

Hence, there is a prominent ethical dimension to the call for taking aesthetic considerations

seriously in engineering design. The idea that form follows function is used to undermine the

possibility of integrating aesthetic considerations into engineering design. For it seems to imply

that the aesthetic look and feel of a thing is derivatively predetermined by its "function". Hence

(this line of reasoning claims), if an artifact looks ugly or if it does not have an aesthetic presence

this is not the designers' hands, since it has to look that way in order to work.

To think that form follows function is to conflate between the function of a work (as

engineered artifact) and the reliable effects that it is designed for. The latter can be described

purely in terms of mechanical effects, while function cannot be described in purely mechanical

terms.7 To take a concrete example, think of the function of a gun. In order to describe the

function of a gun it is necessary to think of it as being used by individual agents who are

historically situated and who act in relation to a particular tradition governed by particular

norms. It is only when an artifact is incorporated into such a context that it can be said to have a

function. The gun as an isolated engineered work doesn't have a determinate function. It is

incorrect to say that the function of a gun is to kill, since it's clear that this function cannot be

actualized without the mediation of agents (who are in turn historically situated, with all of the

conceptual and social mediation that this implies). What a gun is designed for is the launching of

small sized projectiles at high velocities (obviously a much more rigorous description in terms of

mechanical effects is possible), so strictly speaking it's incorrect to say that the gun is designed

6 Of beauty, Allen writes that "beauty is not an essence. It is a response, an interaction, a vital exchange between

perception and environment" (Allen, 2008, 100). 7 As Allen puts it "what it is designed for is the reliable generation of particular effects, not the "function" such

effects may have for given users" (Allen, 2008, 75).

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for killing, hunting or armed robbery.8 The distinction between function and mechanical effects

is important because the requirement of producing certain mechanical effects in a reliable

fashion does not determine the form of the designed or engineered work. David Pye argues at

some length that "nearly all the so-called technical limitations on design are limitations not so

much of technique as of material, or . . . economy" (Pye, 1974, 43). To use the language of

engineers, form is underdetermined by what is commonly referred to as "function".

In relation to the distinction between function and mechanical effects, it can be objected

that humans infer function from form all the time. There is evidence from experimental

psychology to show that people don't actually respond to a individual objects per se, but rather to

the general type (which in turn is indexed to a particular function) under which the individual

object is subsumed and through which cognitive access to the object takes place (Whitfield,

2005). However, this evidence doesn't show that we ought to infer function from design. First,

the fact that our perception of objects is mediated via general categories that are indexed to

certain functions does not show that this indexing is not subject to historical contingency and

cultural particularity. For instance, non-western subjects might (and probably do) associate some

of these general types with different "functions". Second, it does not follow that we cannot learn

to "see" individual objects. David Pye draws a distinction between perceiving and seeing. His

definition of perception is quite similar to Whitfield's, "perceiving, as we know, is essentially the

abstraction of signs from the total of what is seen and the ignoring of the rest" (Pye, 1974, 121).

For Pye seeing is distinguished from perceiving, in that in seeing or looking at something one

"contrasts one shape in it with another, it is the quality of each shape, its formal quality, its

8 "Knowledge of function goes beyond knowledge of form to knowledge of users and knowledge of history,

because a function never belongs to a tool by itself. There is no function for a tool until it is enrolled in someone's subroutine" (Allen, 2008, 76).

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singular individuality, its feel, that one compares, not the measurable characteristics of it" (Pye,

1974, 125). It seems to me that the aesthetic experience of beauty (and aesthetic experience in

general) requires that we actually look at an artifact, instead of just perceiving it. If someone

points your attention towards a beautiful chair and you respond that "it's only a chair", it is fair to

assume that you have merely perceived the chair (in the aforementioned sense of perceive). The

sharpening of the capacity to look at things and perhaps the re-kindling of the desire to actually

look at things should be one of the tasks of the ethical engineer. I say the "re-kindling of the

desire" to look at things because I think that it is entirely possible that many of the products of

modern engineering have repressed that desire. For if aesthetically responsive subjects are

constantly frustrated in their desire to look at things, if wherever they turn they are met with a

visually indifferent wall of cold concrete, they may very well repress that desire, which only

brings them disappointment and suffering.9 In this case engineering that is indifferent to aesthetic

considerations is not only engineering that is inadequate to its ideal, it also positively morphs

into social engineering of the worst kind.

As to the question of whether aesthetic responsiveness can be cultivated, it is very much

possible that the creation of an environment which invites visual engagement can help develop

aesthetic sensibility. It is not a contradiction to affirm that the capacity for aesthetic

responsiveness is a product of our evolution and to also affirm that its refinement requires

discipline and training. It's important to note that I am not claiming that the ethical responsibility

of the engineer is to instruct people in what is and isn't beautiful. I am only claiming that it is the

ethical responsibility of the engineer to design an environment that is worth looking at. Pye

writes that "the only teaching which can lead anyone towards the appreciation of beauty is to say

9 Here it is important to note that it's not the material which "determines" form; one can design beautiful buildings

using re-enforced concrete.

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'Look at this. Look at that...' but you cannot teach a man what to see when he looks." We should

remember that this approach is only possible if the built environment is itself beautiful (Pye,

1974, 123).10

No one disputes that physics imposes restrictions on what can and cannot be done when

engineers are designing buildings, household products, production processes and so on. What is

disputed is the extent of those restrictions and whether they determine the form of the design.

Many of the features that we think are necessary for our devices to work are, in fact, not

necessary at all to get the results that are desired from the device (they are what Pye calls

"useless work", though here it is important to note that useless work does not imply valueless

work). For example, it is often the case that the smoothing of surfaces does not serve any

"utilitarian" purpose, yet that does not prevent their designers and makers from smoothing them

and it is doubtful if anyone would be willing to pay for products with unsmoothed surfaces.11

So

when Pye writes that "the ability of our devices to 'work' and get results depends much less

exactly on their shape than we are apt to think. The limitations arise only in small part from the

physical nature of the world, but in a very large measure from considerations of economy and

style" what he wants to emphasize is that our devices and engineered works look the way they do

because of our choices and aesthetic needs (Pye, 1974, 14). I would like to emphasize that there

is a close relationship between the functionalist mantra and what the historian of technology John

M. Staudenmaier calls the thesis of "autonomous technological determinism". They are both

descriptive claims (though often morphing into prescriptive claims) about history, specifically

10

I am restricting my discussion of beauty to artifacts because it's clear that, for better or worse, our present lot is to live in an artifactual world. 11

In relation to smoothing of the plaster that is applied to brick walls, Pye writes, "plastering a brick wall is utilitarian . . . but making the plaster smooth is entirely useless" (Pye, 1974, 78).

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about the history of technology (though it is important to note that the history of technology

cannot be abstracted from its cultural and social context).

The functionalist thesis, like the technological determinism thesis, "rests on the radically

ahistorical premise that technical designs operate according to their own inevitable laws, that the

context of origins has little to tells us about the design decisions that bring new technologies into

being" (Staudenmaier, 1989, 151). Recent historiography of technology and engineering has

shown that technologies do not look the way they do simply because they had to look that away

in order to produce the effects that they are intended to produce.12

It's to be understood that in the

case of design, the "context" which Staudenmaier refers to includes style, fashion and our

evolved human aesthetic responsiveness. Serafina Cuomo, a philosopher and historian of

technology, points out that taking the history of engineering seriously requires that we accept

that, "the notions of technical efficiency and simplicity . . . have long been historicized" (Cuomo,

2011, 22). It would simply be bad historiography and bad anthropology to assume that because

choices in design appear obvious to us, therefore the form of a designed object was inevitable. It

is a mistake to believe that the things we have today work only because of the way they look. It

is an empirical mistake as well as an ethical mistake.

When designers try to justify the specific choices that they have made, they often speak

of their design as being "the best". However, it is important to note what they usually mean to

say is that it is the cheapest. I am clearly not arguing that there is no cheapest design, as it is easy

to see how it would be possible to model the cost of a work (say an object like a fork) as a

12

Edwin T. Layton, another historian of technology, writes that "characteristic of the present view, science is no longer seen as making and evaluating discoveries in a manner that is substantially independent of context. Instead, both science and technology should be evaluated in terms of the ends pursued in the appropriate social context" (Layton, 1989, 32). In this paper, the emphasis is on the relationship between technology and social context; hence it is the second statement which is of interest.

8

function of certain design factors such as dimensions, weight of material, and type of material

and so on. It is also entirely possible (and even likely) that there is a single optimal solution

(found by taking the derivative of that function and solving for the roots of that derivative).

However, the key point that must be emphasized is that the designer is still choosing to equate

the best with the cheapest; the designer is therefore not absolved of responsibility for how the

designed work looks. Of course, I do not mean to say that an engineer-designer is working in a

cultural and historical vacuum, it is clear that the designer is pressured to produce the cheapest

possible design that will reliably produce the required mechanical effects.13

Therefore, it is not

merely a matter of personal responsibility (though that is certainly important); it's also a matter

of a general cultural orientation (a mode of life). However, before I discuss the ethical

implications of the integration of aesthetic considerations into engineering design and pedagogy,

it is necessary to establish the importance of aesthetic considerations in engineering design.

Following Allen, I argue that the notion of coherence as the hallmark of design can be

used in order to make sense of the idea that excellent engineering design is also aesthetically

excellent design (i.e., it is a mistake to think of aesthetic elements as being merely ornamental

add-ons). My primary contention is that what is designed (or engineered) is (generally) designed

to be used by human beings (even if in an indirect manner), consequently for a design to be

coherent it must account for how human users will interact with the designed artifact. It is clear

that aesthetics, understood as disinterested perceptual response, is one of the fundamental ways

in which humans interact with their environment. The concept of coherence can be described in

terms of how artful an artifact is, when the artifact is considered relative to the most

13

Pye gives a description of one prominent way in which considerations of economy affect the form of what is designed, "it is through the insistence on reducing the number of operations perhaps more than anything else that economy in first cost influences the shape of things designed" (Pye, 1974, 50).

9

comprehensive level of description that is available to us.14

This "accounting" for how human

users will interact with what is designed involves accounting for the aesthetic needs of human

beings. Hence, I think that one form of justification for aesthetic considerations in engineering

design is fundamentally ethical. In fact, one could argue that the indifference to beauty in our

everyday lives is symptomatic of a general dulling of sensibility. The idea that concern with a

cultivated aesthetic sensibility is the mark of a frivolous and immature mind is based on a facile

anthropology and it is entirely ahistorical. The functionalist thesis must be challenged in both of

its forms, i.e., as descriptive and as prescriptive. I claimed that the functionalist understanding of

engineering design is based on a superficial kind of philosophical anthropology. However, I

would also argue that engineering design always presupposes a kind of philosophical

anthropology. Since it is simply not possible to design works for human use if one does not have

any idea of what humans need and consequently of what humans are.15

Consequently, if my

argument is to be convincing, it is necessary to show that aesthetic needs really are needs and not

just frivolous wants.16

First, it is important to note that aesthetic norms are necessary in order to have a tool

making and tool-using tradition, otherwise it would be very difficult to account for the

consistency of form that is observable in pre-historical tools, such as the Acheulian hand axe, if

14

Allen describes coherence "as the artfulness of artifacts all things considered" and he suggests that when we describe an artifact as being designed, we are identifying its coherence at a certain level of description (Allen, 2008, 50). 15

Carl Mitcham argues that the engineering profession (in its current guise) is philosophically incoherent in so far as it involves a commitment to public safety, health and welfare. Mitcham asks "On what possible basis, however, are engineers more qualified than anyone else to understand or determine the safety, health and welfare that should be associated with engineered structures, products, or processes?" (Mitcham, 2009, 10). I agree with Mitcham that engineering that is indifferent to philosophical anthropology is engineering that has a philosophically incoherent structure, and I think that it is clear that engineering pedagogy cannot reduce engineering practice to the application of specialized, technical knowledge. 16

Alain FIndeli points out the importance of bringing about a reconceptualization of "needs", as a necessary condition for any philosophy of engineering design (Findeli, 1994). While I think that this claim is true, the reconceptualization of "needs" is clearly outside the scope of this paper.

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purely instrumental considerations were guiding the tool makers (Allen, 2008, 69). Second, it is

important to note that artistic culture is not an extraneous "add-on" to what is fundamentally

human.17

You can't have the human without the cultural and the cultural is both technical and

artistic. To think that a purely utilitarian culture, one that is devoted to making only purely

functional things, is possible (and even worse, to believe that it is desirable) is to mistakenly

believe that culture is possible without aesthetics. It is difficult to imagine how one could interact

with any engineered thing without also perceiving it, and consequently it is difficult to imagine

how an engineered thing can be designed without anticipating its own perception, which is an

element of anticipating how the human user will interact with it.18

There is also strong evidence

from experimental psychology that shows that "there exists a powerful drive to control the visual

appearance of all artifacts, habitats, and selves" (Whitfield, 2005, 12). Allen points out that there

is evidence to show that humans have been doing "useless work" for the sake of appearance,

from at least the late Palaeolithic (i.e., about 40,000 years ago) (Allen, 2008, 126). Hence, the

functionalist thesis as a descriptive account of history is patently false.

One could argue that when very little of our built environment is aesthetically engaging

(i.e., perceptually compulsive, if not necessarily beautiful), engineering has failed its own ethical

ideal, which I understand as a kind of ameliorative task. When human users are discounted as

aesthetically responsive agents one is not just engaging in bad engineering, one is also engaging

in bad social engineering.19

The engineer who discounts aesthetic considerations is engaged in a

17

And as Takis Zourntos (following Barry Allen) points out in relation to the aesthetic elements of machines, "there are no aesthetic embellishments, but aesthetic features which relate to an object's way of working" (Zourntos, 2014, 37). An object's way of working involves its multi-faceted relations to human users, and it should be noted that an object's aesthetic presence is an element of its way of working. 18

"Probably any work has aesthetic presence (including aversion) at some level of our interaction with it. Practically any work anticipates its perception and manipulation somewhere" (Allen, 2008, 97). 19

David Pye argues that the desire to find rapport with our environment is a fundamental human need. He argues that the value of beauty is that, "along with human contact it enables us to break out of the otherwise

11

task of desensitization and repression, precisely because the drive to make and contemplate

beautiful things is a fundamental human drive. I think that it is dangerous for engineers to seek to

absolve themselves of responsibility for what their work looks like by hiding behind the facade

of the "one best way". When engineers adopt this stance they are not acting as "disinterested"

builders and designers, they are acting as ideologues.

This judgement may seem excessively harsh; hence, some explanation is required. I am

arguing that engineers who present themselves as determined in their designs by physics (or the

way the world is) are misrepresenting the nature of technology.20

They are presenting, through

their mode of conduct, an image of technology as an inhuman force that has its own autonomy,

worse yet they are presenting an image of technology as an inhuman force whose destiny is to be

autonomous (a strong version of this idea would be the equivalent of resurrecting the "Fate" of

the ancient Greeks under the guise of "Technology"). For even if one accepts the idea that

technology, as it has developed historically, has been problematic (and perhaps even tragic) in so

far as the rhetoric of mastery (the rhetoric which advanced/advances the idea that, by applying

scientific knowledge, humans can be become masters of nature and thereby better their lot) has

been undermined by the historical trajectory taken by technology (i.e., the idea that technology

has spiralled out of our control leading to anthropogenic climate change, the destruction of

ecosystems on a massive scale, the ossification of unjust social arrangements and so on) it's

another matter entirely to present this trajectory as being the necessary destiny of technology

and, consequently, of humanity. With regard to the idea that the historical trajectory of modern,

impregnable spiritual isolation to which every one of us is born and to feel ourselves at home in the world" (Pye, 1974, 102). Hence to deny this desire is to engage in a repressive task. 20

By "technology", I am referring to what Allen describes as, "an economic transformation of an older technical culture, a historical mutation first appearing in Europe and America and now effectively global" (Allen, 2008, 107). Leon R. Kass offers a similar conceptualization of technology, for him, "not all human societies would be rightly described as technological, even though all of them practice at least some of the arts....even in the rationalist West, technological society seems to have appeared only in the last two centuries" (Kass, 1993, 6).

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advanced technology has undermined this rhetoric of mastery, Leon R. Kass describes this view

in the following terms: " in each generation we bequeath to our descendants wonderful new

devices, but by their aggregate effects we preordain or at least greatly constrain how they are

able to use them" (Kass, 1993, 13). Even if this understanding of the history of modern

technology is correct, it does not follow that it is the destiny of technology to morph into an

autonomous, inhuman force.

This is where the emphasis on the importance of aesthetic considerations in engineering

design comes into play. To re-assert the importance of the aesthetic moment in engineering

design is to undermine the idea of technology as an autonomous force. I think that it is important

to understand that public perceptions of technology are influenced by the image that engineers

project, and it is through their works that engineers project their image of what technology is and

ought to be. An engineer's work is never politically neutral, at least in so far as contemporary

political discourse is structured around images of technology, which in turn, reflect the

engineered works that constitute the environment of millions of people around the world.

The problem of engineers as "the priests of pure functionalism" is not just hypothetical. It

has historical antecedents. Sociologist and historian Jeffery Herf has pointed out the role that

engineers played as ideologues in Weimar and Nazi Germany. He characterizes these engineers

as having played on the trope of technology as expressing a cold, utilitarian Enlightenment

materialism which needed to be suffused with spirit and indexed to romantic philosophies of will

in order for it to become human (Herf, 1984). To conceive of technology as disassociated from

human perceptual (aesthetic) needs invites a kind of reactionary modernism, which seeks to

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infuse technology with humanity by summoning up a romanticized (and consequently,

ahistorical and anthropologically facile) idea of what it is to be human.21

According importance to aesthetic considerations in engineering design can be motivated

by ethical and political considerations, and the question of the relationship between aesthetics

and engineering design is not purely academic, as it directly pertains to the historical trajectory

of contemporary human technology. Even if one affirms that technology is a contingent

historical development it would be a mistake to conflate a historical event's contingency with its

reversibility. The destiny of contemporary human societies is inextricably bound to the destiny of

technology. As Allen put it, "we didn't have to cross that threshold [i.e., the economic

displacement of first-order machines, which are machines that directly amplify human capacities

by exploiting a mechanical advantage, by second-order machines that function as systems of

first-order machines and which direct their concerted effects towards economic goals] any more

than we had to cross the agricultural or urban threshold. But we did, and given that we have, it is

an irreversible condition for as long as there is a future [my emphasis]" (Allen, 2008, 114). If

the destiny of humanity is entwined with the destiny of technology, then it's clear that to present

technology as fate is to present a fatalistic image of the trajectory of human history. Insisting on

the close relationship between art and engineering (as being both instantiations of design)

undercuts this fatalistic image of human history.22

One is not being a hard-headed, brave "realist"

about history when one presents technology as modern, autonomous fate. Instead, one is

21

Herf describes the ideology that engineers helped to shape and sustain during the inter-war years in Germany as "reactionary modernism". He writes that, "the irrationalist and romantic traditions of German nationalism were reconciled to modern technology in a cultural system one can call reactionary modernism" (Herf, 1984, 2). 22

Note that this undercutting of the fatalistic image of human history need not (and should not) take the form of delusionary optimism. Actually, there is no contradiction in being both an anti-fatalist and a pessimist (not that I recommend this path).

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absolving oneself of responsibility for how history plays out. This is the ethical truth (or rather,

falsehood) of the functionalist mantra, taken as a stance on history.

Before I proceed to a discussion of concrete examples of the conscious application of

aesthetic considerations in engineering design, I should address the objection that to call upon

engineers to beautify the world is "unrealistic" and even romantic. I reply that it is not at all

necessary to ask engineers to beautify the world. If engineers cannot convince their employers

and clients that the beautiful is valuable, and that (apparently) cheap "functionalist" designs

come at a heavy social and ethical cost, then it may be necessary to adopt an indirect approach.

Engineers may be forced to make the ugly prominent. Or they may have to show society the

consequences of its choices, i.e., the "purely utilitarian/purely functional" world turns out to be,

ironically but predictably, an uninhabitable world.23

While it is true that the kind of brazen

moralization which seeks to confine history and possibility is contemptible, it is also true that

there is cowardice and dishonesty in refusing to moralize about the present moment. The

moralizing stance is both necessary yet embarrassing to adopt openly, and it may be that

engineers are uniquely placed to become silent moralizers, i.e., to make apparent what is hidden,

to make apparent the ugliness that permeates our cities and environment, but of which we are

unaware.

Engineers can serve beauty by making the ugly prominent. Obviously this idea of hidden

ugliness is problematic because it seems that ugliness as an aesthetic categorization of an artifact

implies that the artifact has what Allen calls "compulsive perceptibility". However, I argue that a

city (for example) can be ugly without its ugliness being apparent. This can happen when a city

is designed in such a way so as to actively inhibit any aesthetic contemplation. A city can be

23

This is obviously an extreme solution, but it can serve as a kind of preformative reductio ad absurdum directed against functionalism.

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designed to be a place of work, a place one lives in, and a place that one drives by, without being

designed as a place where one can slow down and actually look at the city. Such a city can be

ugly without its ugliness being apparent precisely because it's designed so that one does not look

up. The people who work and live in the city can live their lives without ever thinking about

whether their city is ugly or beautiful, because they have been socialized into thinking of their

city as a place where they can work, where they can eat, go to the cinema, and so on, but not as a

place that can be looked at.24

The philosopher Karl Aschenbrenner writes that, "the city is thought of as a place to get

the dirty work done and get out", even though, as he says, "the point is, for the most part, we

don't get out" (Aschenbrenner, 1970, 6). In relation to the question of whether a thing whose

compulsive perceptibility is not immediately expressed can be considered to be ugly, we should

not forget that aesthetic responsiveness also depends on an aesthetically sensitive agent

(ugliness, like beauty, is an interaction between aesthetically responsive agents and their

environment). This is not to say that aesthetic responses are merely subjective. I am only

pointing out the obvious fact that without an aesthetically sensitive agent, aesthetic experience

and consequently the aesthetic categorization of entities is not possible.25

It is likely that

socialization plays a role not so much in terms of what we consider to be beautiful or ugly as in

terms of what we consider as being amenable to aesthetic categorization. I think that

Aschenbrenner is right when he claims that the reason that many of our cities are ugly is because

we have never looked at them long enough to discover that they are indeed ugly (Aschenbrenner,

1970). This is what I am referring to when I say that the engineer can serve beauty by making the

24

As I have argued above, bad engineering is also bad social engineering. The two cannot be separated. 25

Allen describes the aesthetic experience of beauty in the following terms, "The experience of beauty is not an involuntary sensation, like smelling an odor or tasting a taste. It is a process, a structured duration, not passively endured but self-involved, feeding on the complexity and coherence of the stimulus" (Allen, 2008, 99).

16

ugly prominent. There is nothing nihilistic about this approach precisely because it is not an

invitation to indifference but rather to care for our urban habitat, which is really an invitation to

self-care. It is also worth noting that if we understand ourselves to be fundamentally relational

beings (constituted not only by our relations to other human beings, but also by our relations to

artifacts), then self-care must, in part, be care for the networks in which we are embedded.

Having argued for the importance of aesthetic considerations in engineering, I now turn

to the issue of whether aesthetic preferences are mere whims which cannot be controlled for by

the engineer. For it may be objected that while I have established that excellent engineering

design must also be aesthetically excellent design, I have not really shown that there is a

determinate way of controlling for aesthetic considerations in design. It is often argued that

aesthetic response is entirely subjective; hence that it is not possible to account for it in

engineering design. First, it is interesting to note that if this claim is true, then an empirical

psychology of aesthetics would not be possible. However, as the psychologist Thomas Jacobsen

points out, the empirical study of the psychology of aesthetics is the second-oldest branch of

experimental psychology (Jacobsen, 2006).26

Jacobsen notes that research in the psychology of

aesthetics has not been very popular among contemporary psychologists, but this may be the

result of how the idea that aesthetic responsiveness is entirely subjective has been internalized by

psychologists in the same way that it has been internalized by engineers.

Second, it is important to note that aesthetic responsiveness has an evolutionary basis and

that consequently we can think of species-wide uniformity in aesthetic responsiveness without

discounting cultural and individual diversity. To claim that aesthetic responsiveness and art have

an evolutionary basis does not amount to claiming that aesthetic responsiveness and art are

26

Jacobsen takes the publication of Gustav Theoder Fechner's Vorschule der Aesthetik in 1876 as marking the beginning of an empirical psychology of aesthetics.

17

evolutionary adaptations, nor does it amount to the claim that we evolved to be artists and

aesthetes.27

The anthropologist Alexander Alland puts it well when he writes that art (and

aesthetic responsiveness) "is the accidental result of evolutionarily unrelated adaptations each of

which has adaptive significance in domains other than aesthetics" (Alland, 1989, 6).

The issue of the range of aesthetic responses to expressive works can be better

understood if we distinguish between aesthetic responses in different individuals within the same

cultural group and cross-cultural aesthetic responses. There is strong evidence from experimental

psychology to show that there is high statistical agreement between individuals from the same

cultural group as to what they consider beautiful (Alland, 1989).28

Additionally, at least one

extensive study from the 1960s shows that there is cross-cultural agreement as to what

constitutes a beautiful work of art. What is particularly interesting about this study is that there

was a greater chance of agreement between art experts from different cultural groups (in this

case American and Japanese) than between non-experts and experts from the same cultural group

(in this case Americans).29

"The average agreement between this group of students and the

Western art experts was only 47% while the Japanese experts averaged 63% agreement with

Western experts" (Alland, 1989, 8).

27

For instance, it's obvious that our capacity to play the harp has an evolutionary basis, but it would be utterly absurd to claim that we evolved to play the harp or that harp playing is an evolutionarily adaptive capacity (it may be adaptive in a particular social environment and/or in a particular historical tradition, but that is a different matter). 28

Note that it is a mistake to conflate what they consider to be attractive in the consumptive sense with what they consider to be pleasing in the disinterested aesthetic sense. 29

The art works were Western and the Japanese experts were unfamiliar with Western art.

18

This result is interesting because it seems to support David Pye's claim regarding the

importance of abstracting from style and taste when passing aesthetic judgements.30

Alland

doesn't seem to think that this gulf between experts and non-experts undermines the claim that

there is an evolutionary basis to uniformity in aesthetic preferences. Instead he argues that "if

such a thing as universal appreciation for certain kinds of form exists, one would expect it to be

widely distributed among humans, but manifest only among those who pay attention to art"

(Alland, 1989, 9).31

My aim is to show that aesthetic preferences are not entirely disparate and

subjective. It's certainly not my aim to produce a list of the features that people consider to be

beautiful, and the engineer who seeks to account for aesthetic considerations should not expect to

be provided with an algorithm for determining what the designed work should look like.

Judgement and knowledge of the particular tradition that one is working in cannot be supplanted

by an algorithm, for traditions and styles don't eliminate the need for choice; they only make

choice actually possible. This is an important point to make because I have mentioned that

aesthetic judgement should be rendered by abstracting from style, but, as Pye points out, it would

be a mistake to think that actual design proceeds without reference to style and tradition or even

to believe that design can dispense with style. "There has never been any design without style.

There has of course been design without obviously stylistic motifs: that is another matter: but

never any that could not be unerringly placed by means of signs of style, and could not be

imitated stylistically" (Pye, 1974, 143).

I presented the evidence above in order to counter the claim that aesthetic preferences are

entirely subjective and therefore cannot be controlled for by the engineer. I now wish to discuss

30

He writes that "the value of a work of art can only be judged by a generation for whom its style no longer has strong associations" (Pye, 1974, 135). Though, it does disprove his claim that experimental psychology can only be concerned with taste rather than beauty (Pye, 1974, 128). 31

Alland is explicitly drawing on the distinction between genotype and phenotype in evolutionary biology.

19

concrete examples of engineering designs that more or less successfully control for perceptual

human needs in the way that I am arguing that they should. Of course while both engineers and

artists are engaged in design, engineers operate under more stringent constraints than artists

(though those constraints may not be as stringent as some engineers seem to think). The double

constraint of cost and profitability is unavoidable in engineering. Hence Pye's claim that an artist

should be disinterested with regard to whether what he makes is sellable doesn't, unsurprisingly,

apply to the engineer.32

However, it is within the hands of the engineer to integrate the demands

of human perceptual needs into the standards by which an engineering work is considered to be

good or professional work.

For instance there are engineers like Brian Duguid who draw attention to the fact that

value and cost are not reducible to monetary price (Duguid, 2011). Duguid discusses the

problems associated with the construction of landmark footbridges. He distinguishes between

conventional bridges which are primarily "functional" (in light of the critique of the functionalist

position, I am using the word "functional" in order to denote bridges which are not expected to

do aesthetic work) and landmark bridges, which are supposed to do aesthetic work and be

"iconic". Duguid defines a landmark bridge as a bridge that "adopts unusual structural form for

its aesthetic impact rather than or in addition to its structural performance" (Duguid, 2011, 2).

Duguid's comparative survey of the costs of "conventional" bridges and the costs of "landmark"

bridges shows that while there is a wide range of variation, landmark bridges are more costly

than conventional bridges.33

This is important to point out because if engineers are seriously

interested in controlling for aesthetic considerations in their designs, they have to be able to

32

In his The Nature and Art of Workmanship Pye writes that "if any artist is to do his best it is essential that his work shall not be influenced in the smallest degree by considerations of what is likely to sell profitably" (Pye, 1978, 80). 33

Cost in this context refers to price per metre length.

20

articulate the distinction between price and cost, and they have to be able to articulate why

aesthetic considerations are important (i.e., why they are not frivolous, ornamental add-ons).

Furthermore, it is simply false to claim that there is no possibility of agreement (at least

among engineers and architects) as to what engineering works are ugly. Martin Burke, a

structural engineer, conducted a survey of the literature on bridge aesthetics in order to ascertain

what features tended to be the objects of aesthetic criticism. He writes that "the most significant

[finding] was the discovery that writers in the field of bridge aesthetics were almost unanimous

in one aspect of their evaluations: they singled out fewer than ten of the world's major bridges for

aesthetic condemnation" (Burke, 1998, 1).34

While all of those bridges were structurally sound,

their design was a failure because they were aesthetic failures. As Allen points out, for a bridge

to fail aesthetically is for a bridge to fail qua engineered work.35

The "qua engineered work"

qualification is important because it conveys the idea that the aesthetic moment is not extrinsic to

good engineering design.

In terms of push back from other engineers, Duguid quotes Billington and Woodruff as

claiming that, "the drive for landmark bridges has led some engineers to disregard the

engineering ethic of economy with some recent footbridges" (Duguid, 2011, 8). However, we

should not forget that the "the engineering ethic of economy" is a derivative ethical principle for

the profession; it's clearly derived from a more general injunction to advance the public welfare.

Hence it's entirely possible that in seeking to advance the public welfare (after all thousands

upon thousands of people will be seeing the bridge everyday), the principle of economy will be

34

In fact, the list was actually narrowed down to five bridges: the Lansdowne in Pakistan, Williamsburg and Queensboro in New York City, and Tower and Hungerford in London. 35

"These bridges could have done what they are designed for and not been notorious eye sores. So how can they be really good, technically good, engineering, when much better bridges were technically within reach?" (Allen, 2008, 146)

21

justifiably violated (if we equate economy with monetary cost).36

Even if the value of

aesthetically excellent engineering works cannot be determined in monetary terms, this does not

mean that value is absent. If anything, it shows that our basic axiological methods are

fundamentally flawed, for if beauty cannot be weighed on our axiological scales, then we should

start to think that our conception of what is valuable is fundamentally flawed.

We (as engineers) should not hide behind claims of rationality and efficiency when

dismissing aesthetic considerations as without value merely because their value does not show

up on our spreadsheets. Instead, we should take this as an opportunity to re-evaluate our basic

conceptions of value. Especially given that contemporary engineering practice seems to

explicitly draw its understanding of value from economics, and it's no secret that the latter field's

conception of value is rather narrow.37

There is nothing rational about neglecting a fundamental

truth about humans (namely, that humans have perceptual, aesthetic needs) because it cannot be

described in quantitative terms. Even if the value of works of art (and a bridge can be a work of

art in a very definite sense) cannot be quantified, it doesn't follow that there is no way to

determine the value of beautiful works in engineering. In fact, explicitly discussing the

comparative aesthetic value of different designs opens up room for (and indeed necessitates)

dialogue with the communities that are directly affected by the projects, simply because

determinations of value in aesthetics cannot be settled by a single utilitarian calculator.38

It is

clearly a mistake to think that because aesthetic value cannot be determined without dialogue

(within communities and derivatively with history), that it's therefore not worth having.

36

As Duguid puts it "so long as value exceeds the cost, why does structural efficiency matter?" (Duguid, 2011, 8). 37

I think that it is clear that the difficulties involved in discussing issues pertaining to aesthetics within an engineering context can serve as gate-way to a more self-reflexive approach to engineering, as well as improvements in engineering pedagogy. 38

Perhaps it may be fruitful to introduce Jürgen Habermas' distinction between instrumental reasoning and communicative-moral reasoning in relation to distinguishing between the reasoning involved in determining the economically optimal solution and the reasoning involved in discussing determinations of aesthetic value.

22

Engineers should welcome the opportunity to widen the scope of discussion about the value of

what they do, and the way in which they should go about doing it.39

In relation to "purely functional" modern bridges, it could be argued that to build a bridge

that does not account for human perceptual needs is to build a bridge that is motivated by the

idea that humans are just the river-fording animals or just the driving animals. What is lost in the

construction of such a bridge is the opportunity to help the people for whom the bridge is built,

to help them find comfort and aesthetic stimulation in their environment.40

It seems that much of

our contemporary built environment expresses the idea of helping as pushing along, or as

propelling individuals along. However, there is also the idea of helping as extending an invitation

to dwell. This idea of helping as an invitation to slow down can find its actualization in well

designed engineering works (which are therefore aesthetically excellent).

Architecture does a disservice to (civil) engineering when it attempts to become purely

functional and conversely (civil) engineering does a disservice to architecture when it demands

39

In this I am in agreement with Duguid when he writes that "we should also do more to question and challenge those beliefs about ethical design, which are shared across the engineering profession, but which may not be shared by the public, who should be the ultimate arbiters of the value of what we create" (Duguid & Sobrino, 2014, 1). 40

Though, I should note that aesthetic stimulation is sometimes incompatible with comfort, e.g. when we encounter a work that grates us. I think what I mean by a "work that grates us" is captured by Freud (in a passage quoted by Alland) in his The Moses of Michelangelo (1914). Writing of his experience of works that he admires but which cause him discomfort because he cannot quite comprehend what they allude to Freud writes, "this has occasioned me, when I have been contemplating such things, to spend a long time before them trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what is it that affects me" (Freud, 1955, 211). I think that Freud may have been alluding to the difficulty of coming to terms with works that challenge us by alluding to possibility (works that necessitate the creation of a new conceptual scheme). I think that works that grate us are works that issue forth a challenge to the contemplator, whispering to the contemplator "you, as you are, cannot understand me", a kind of call for the re-examination of self and history. I understand that this claim is paradoxical in so far as it seems to contradict the claim that works of art do not affect us through conveying ideas, however, we should also be careful to remember that aesthetic experience must terminate at some point. And that it can terminate in a movement of discursive thought, now suffused with if not new concepts, then at least the need for new concepts. Here we have the idea of caring as pointing to what is not there but could be there, i.e. caring as spurring on.

23

that it should abandon all aesthetic ambitions (and ambitions of symbolism). The result is not a

rationalized architecture or the triumph of engineering "rationalism" over artistic frivolity.

Instead, we get the failure of both architecture and civil engineering, which is the triumph of a

fallacious functionalism and the nihilistic acquiescence to technology as fate. Drawing on

Hegel's conception of architecture, John Whiteman argues that for architecture to be symbolic

and rhetorical is not for it to be without value. If the symbolism of a work must always "fail" in

so far as it must convey meaning in an ambiguous manner, it does not follow that this failure is

to be frowned upon (Whiteman, 1987).41

It is human to fail, and to abandon ambitions of beauty

and possibility (even though these ambitions maybe doomed to fail, and hence may be tragic) is

to advance the triumph of what is inhuman.42

I emphasize this point because in relation to civil

engineering the envisioned relationship between art and engineering can be actualized (and has

been actualized) in a very concrete form.

This oversight in contemporary engineering practice can be traced back to problems in

engineering pedagogy, where insufficient attention is paid to problems regarding the situation of

engineering practice in a wider social context. A survey, conducted by Per Boelskifte, of 15

engineering design textbooks published between 1976 and 2008 found that only 3 of them

allocated more than 3% of their content to a discussion of aesthetics (Boelskifte, 2014).

Engineering pedagogy should not discount the importance of cultivating aesthetic sensibility

41

Note that the aesthetic expressiveness of a work does not necessarily mean that it gives rise to a feeling of satisfaction (see n. 42). A work of art can be beautiful by expressing possibility, pointing to something in the future but it's precisely in pointing to something that is fundamentally different from what is positively given, that it must be ambiguous and indeterminate. For the act of pointing at something different from what is given must be a delicate act, otherwise that which is pointed at or alluded to may be tethered to what is given (and therefore, destroyed as something different and in the future). 42

The fear of the tragic and the worship of what is triumphant end up as the fear of what is human and the worship of what is inhuman. The triumphs of functionalist design are petty and fictive. Petty because they are the triumphs of gaolers, for with functionalist architecture "the human subject paradoxically feels both locked out of architecture and yet imprisoned by it" (Whiteman, 1987, 10), and fictive because the necessity of form is itself illusory.

24

unless we want to surrender to the idea that engineers should not aspire to be anything more than

instruments of destruction and dehumanization in the hands of a deeply flawed economic and

social system. It's obviously true that an engineer does not just work for a client, at least in so far

as the work produced will, in many cases, outlive both the engineer and the client.43

Hence, the

scope of the responsibility of engineers extends towards their wider environment as well as

towards future generations, precisely because the designs of engineers remain as deeds in the

world.

What this implies is that it is the duty of engineers to make technology more human, and

if that means slowing it down and hampering its efficiency, then we should remember that what

we are slowing down and making less efficient is the process of the transmutation of technology

into an autonomous and inhuman force. When I alluded to problems in engineering pedagogy, I

wanted to point out that many of the ideals inculcated in engineering pedagogy are problematic

because they are oriented towards means severed from ends. For instance, it makes no sense to

strive for efficiency for the sake of efficiency; in fact, I would argue that engineers are ethically

obliged to strive against efficiency in systems which damage our environment (social, built and

natural). C. Thomas Rogers, a reflective engineer, terms this problem the "end-use" problem

posed in terms of the question, "what are we doing with technology or what are we doing

engineering for?" (Rogers, 1980, 2). As I have pointed out throughout this paper, the justification

for taking aesthetic considerations seriously in engineering design, hinges on the answer that we

give to this question.

Allen draws a direct connection between the injunction to make engineering as artistic as

it can be and the democratization of technology "A more democratic technoscientific civilization

43

As Pye points out, "when we are designing a motor car for one man, we are designing scenery for fifty thousand others" (Pye, 1974, 93).

25

would allow, even expect, a more artful, aesthetic approach to technology, overcoming obstacles

to engineering being as artistic as it can" (Allen, 2008, 182). We should not conceive of this

development as constraining engineering, but rather we should think of it as its liberation. We

shouldn't forget that the image of liberation as propulsion (i.e., unhindered technological

development without heed to context), is not the only image of liberation that we have available

to us. As I have argued, there is also the freedom of being allowed to stop, to think, remember,

and care. Slowing things down and acknowledging that there is something valuable which is not

the prerogative of the utilitarian calculator (namely beauty) is what the humanization of

technology means. For technology to be aesthetically expressive is for technology to become the

object of rational democratic discussion, in so far as communities would actively contribute to

discussions about how they want their built environment to look like.

In conclusion, I have argued that aesthetic considerations are properly and inevitably

inseparable from good engineering design because the aesthetic moment is not extrinsic to

design. I have also argued that aesthetic needs are fundamental human needs, and consequently

that if engineers have a duty to uphold the welfare of the public, then it's their duty to make

works of engineering as beautiful as they can be. Furthermore, I have argued that engineers

should embrace the opportunity to question their basic axiological assumptions; in particular,

they should question the implicit belief that what cannot be quantified cannot have value. Since

this belief is clearly based on a mistaken view about what reasoning entails, since reasoning need

not take the form of solving equations and can equally take the form of democratic dialogue.

I think that engineers should be more reflexive about the assumptions that they adopt.

For example, engineers should be open to the possibility that their discourse of rationality and

their spurning of the perceptual needs of the people for whom they design artifacts are not driven

26

by a heroic desire to defend the rational against the spurious, but rather by the desire for power.

This desire for power as it's expressed in a distrust of discussions about beauty and the value of

aesthetically engaging works is destructive. It is destructive because it would end up in

technology becoming an autonomous force ravaging our environment and bringing about

ecological catastrophes. There is also a tremendous irony in the way that this desire for power is

actualized by forsaking responsibility for and power over how our designs look, and the face that

they present to others. Engineers need to acknowledge that design cannot be divorced from its

ethical dimensions and that to engage in engineering is to implicitly answer the question: what is

engineering for? I have not sought to answer this question in any definitive manner; I have only

attempted to bring it to the foreground.

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