Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See, by IDEO engineer Andrew Burroughs (Chronicle Books 2007), is an odd little book -- and I do mean odd, it's almost completely pictorial; and little, about 4“ x 6”. It's now part of my permanent collection of design books worth keeping. Why? Because it's a perfect evocation of, as the subtitle says, how engineers see the world of everyday life: as an assortment of things -- objects, assemblages, and machines -- maintained in relation to one another by unseen forces, both manmade and natural.

Over time, these relationships are altered -- the objects' purposes are sometimes defeated and at other times improved -- in ways that designers and engineers can't always predict. It's the engineers' responsibility, however, to anticipate these vagaries, to make these arrangements work and keep on working -- or if things go really out of kilter, to shut them down and replace them. One would like to think that designers -- a term I use broadly, to include professional designers but also architects, carpenters, industrialists, and other de facto designers -- are the engineers' equal partners in this pursuit. But as the prolific photographs that constitute the main content of Everyday Engineering illustrate, too often this isn't the case.

Everyday Engineering is a study in visual literacy. Burroughs' foreword and brief introductions for its 17 chapters are too short to fully explain his meanings in every sense. (Part 1 focuses on Creation, Part 2 on Degradation.) I would have liked more of Burroughs' insights and recommendations for how everyday artifacts, machines and processes, should be created and maintained. Instead, he's assembled hundreds of full-color photographs to make a persuasive case for more advance thought on the designers' part before they foist their inventions on the engineers who must convey them to the public. Some are close-ups of obscure elements, others broad landscapes; most are portraits of things.

Yet it's the unforeseen forces that most need to be elucidated. These are largely implied in the photographs, not explicit. This may be the nature of everyday environments and the their elements, but the delightful website, How Stuff Works, is a more accessible guide for those whose curiosity about everyday life requires more than Burroughs the engineer's visual lyricism. (HSW is about more than engineering. It ranges across mythology, biology, physics, media -- you name it, it lives up to its title.)

Published by Chronicle Books, at $29.95, Everyday Engineering is pricey. (Amazon.com currently discounts it to $19.77.) The cover is stylish but impractically constructed of black paper that doesn't resist stains. The pages, however, are substantial. I liked very much the press kit that accompanied Everyday Engineering: it provides a context that increases the reader's appreciation for Burroughs' accomplishment. Perhaps Chronicle Books or IDEO will see fit to incorporate the press kit in a website that allows Burroughs and his readers to more fully explicate their take on everyday engineering and its future.

I'm placing my copy of Everyday Engineering next to my copy of the 25th-Anniversary Edition of Vintage Books' Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and illustrated with photographs by Jane English. The two books' classy illustrations are yin-yang representations of the manmade world and the natural world, respectively. The contrast is remarkable. “Designing with nature” has a long way to go.