"The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function"
About this Quote
The line lands harder in Simon’s historical context. Writing in the mid-century moment that birthed modern systems analysis, operations research, and the managerial state, Simon was pushing back against a narrow view of “science” as only describing what is. His broader argument in The Sciences of the Artificial is that design is its own kind of knowledge: synthetic, goal-directed, and constrained by limited information and bounded rationality. In other words, the engineer isn’t an omniscient optimizer; they’re a decision-maker working under pressure, building workable futures out of imperfect models.
The subtext is a warning disguised as a definition. Once you admit design is about “ought,” you can’t hide behind technical inevitability. If a system “functions,” the immediate question becomes: functions for whom, at what cost, and toward which goals? Simon’s phrasing makes responsibility unavoidable. It also explains why design debates so often become political fights: the conflict isn’t over whether something works, but over what “attain goals” is allowed to mean.
Quote Details
| Topic | Engineer |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: The Sciences of the Artificial (Herbert Simon, 1969)
Evidence: Synthetic or artificial objects, and more specifically prospective artificial objects having desired properties, are the central objective of engineering activity and skill. The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be, how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function. (Pages 4–5 (3rd ed. pagination confirmed; original 1969 text shown on p. 5 in a scan)). Primary source is Herbert A. Simon’s book *The Sciences of the Artificial*. The line appears in the opening discussion distinguishing engineering/design (concerned with synthesis and ‘ought’) from science (analysis and ‘is’). A National Academies Press book chapter footnote explicitly attributes this passage to Simon and gives pagination for the MIT Press 3rd edition (1996) as pp. 4–5, which strongly corroborates the location in the book. The Slideshare scan labeled as the 1969 edition shows the passage on its page 5 (the scan text is slightly OCR-mangled around the dash, but the sentence is clearly identifiable and matches the commonly quoted wording). Other candidates (1) Urban Planning’s Philosophical Entanglements (Richard S Bolan, 2017) compilation92.9% ... Herbert Simon: The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be—how they o... |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Simon, Herbert. (2026, February 15). The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-engineer-and-more-generally-the-designer-is-69351/
Chicago Style
Simon, Herbert. "The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function." FixQuotes. February 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-engineer-and-more-generally-the-designer-is-69351/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function." FixQuotes, 15 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-engineer-and-more-generally-the-designer-is-69351/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2026.
