"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"
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Engineering gets romanticized as pure problem-solving, but Simon quietly flips the premise: it is moral philosophy with a drafting table. “How things ought to be” is a loaded phrase, smuggling values into what often pretends to be value-neutral. Designers don’t merely discover truths about the world; they legislate arrangements of the world, choosing which goals count, which tradeoffs are acceptable, and which people get optimized for.
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.
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 | Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press (original 1969; 3rd ed. 1996). Contains Simon's discussion of design/engineering and the phrase on how things 'ought to be' to attain goals and function. |
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