Perhaps it’s telling that engineers keep on refusing to enter the domains of human and social factors; we don’t yet really have a field of “cultural engineering” or “personality engineering” for instance. Arguably cyberneticians and technocrats in the 1900s made attempts but fell out of favor.
I’m wondering if you’re making a mistake expecting engineering from a scientific field. It seems to me we do very much have some early facsimiles of those kinds of engineering: marketing, propaganda, therapy, and meditation. They’re imprecise, but (not in every case, but increasingly so) very much about using the insights of the social sciences to create real-world impact. Industrial and organizational psychology also comes to mind.
One of the problems, I think, is that most people outside chemistry don’t think they’re chemists, but most people think they understand humans well enough that they don’t believe that the social sciences offer meaningful, actionable insights, and feel comfortable ignoring even the most well-grounded advice from research in these fields. Sometimes these are (or should be) really obvious, with decades of research consistently pointing in the same directions (e.g. open offices cost more in productivity than they save in square footage and don’t increase collaboration). And yet, here we are.
I agree we do have things similar to engineering, but these fields seem to be done differently than if they were in the hands of engineers. Industrial engineering is thought to be a field of engineering, but operations research is often considered part of “applied mathematics” (I think). I find it quite interesting that information theory is typically taught as a “electrical engineering” class, but the applications are really just all over the place.
My honest guess is that the reasons why some things are considered “engineering”, and thus respected and organized as an option for “engineers”, and other areas that could be are not, is often due to cultural and historic factors. The lines seem quite arbitrary to me right now.
I’m wondering if you’re making a mistake expecting engineering from a scientific field. It seems to me we do very much have some early facsimiles of those kinds of engineering: marketing, propaganda, therapy, and meditation. They’re imprecise, but (not in every case, but increasingly so) very much about using the insights of the social sciences to create real-world impact. Industrial and organizational psychology also comes to mind.
One of the problems, I think, is that most people outside chemistry don’t think they’re chemists, but most people think they understand humans well enough that they don’t believe that the social sciences offer meaningful, actionable insights, and feel comfortable ignoring even the most well-grounded advice from research in these fields. Sometimes these are (or should be) really obvious, with decades of research consistently pointing in the same directions (e.g. open offices cost more in productivity than they save in square footage and don’t increase collaboration). And yet, here we are.
I agree we do have things similar to engineering, but these fields seem to be done differently than if they were in the hands of engineers. Industrial engineering is thought to be a field of engineering, but operations research is often considered part of “applied mathematics” (I think). I find it quite interesting that information theory is typically taught as a “electrical engineering” class, but the applications are really just all over the place.
My honest guess is that the reasons why some things are considered “engineering”, and thus respected and organized as an option for “engineers”, and other areas that could be are not, is often due to cultural and historic factors. The lines seem quite arbitrary to me right now.