Vincenti argues that engineering is not simply applied science. Engineering design of artifacts and systems, does not result from the mere applications of scientific knowledge. “Scientific knowledge is a wonderful tool. But it doesn’t tell you how to build an airplane.”
Bucciarelli applied Wittgenstein’s approach to explore the engineering design process. “Structural engineers speaks of stress and strain; of displacement, stiffness, and load path. Electronics engineer speaks of power, voltages and currents, analogue and digital, resistance and capacitance. Their languages and object worlds are incommensurable. They lack a common, objective language. How do they communicate? This is an unresolvable problem. How then to make sense of the successful design of an electro-mechanical artifact or system? How to make sense of the outcome, of the technological reality?
I point out that these languages and object worlds are formally complementary. Modern quantum theory tells us that particle mechanics and wave mechanics are complementary. The languages and the object worlds of these two mechanics, as well as the engineering disciplines that rely on them are also complementary. There are no common conceptual or operational denominators.
When mechanical and electrical engineers manage to work together to create novel electro-mechanical artifacts and systems it cannot have been through any sort of simple applied science design strategy. Besides their design process being mysterious, we will be unable to make sense of the resulting technology in terms of either the mechanical or electrical languages alone.
The successful engineering design process as well as the ontology of engineering reality cannot be reduced to, cannot be understood in terms of idealized scientific realities.
By extending Bucciarelli’s arguments with reference to complementarity we see that the successful design process (viz. itself a technique) advances by the ‘middle way’ - between the idealized, scientific, mechanical extremes. The products, the technological artifacts and technological systems, necessarily embody complementary features and can be characterized as ‘middle ground’ realities.
Complementarity is ubiquitous and is involved in all successful design - from the design of the irrigation of our fields, the design of our houses, our cities, the design of our businesses and economic policies and to the design of our political and moral system.
Human socio-economic systems are technological systems. The imagined structure and function of free market individualism and socialism suggest two complementary design ideologies. Oakeshott observes that all real societies embody both individualist and socialist structures and functions. Haidt captures the ‘essential tension’ in real societies and the expected ‘talking passed each other’.
Bohr clearly recognized the connection between quantum theory and the structure and function of reality. The central image on his coat of arms is the Taoist yin-yang diagram. Dawkins and Falkowski have explored the question of the design and the evolution of the design of the biosphere.
Gallie characterized the socio-economic design dialogue as involving ‘essentially contested concepts’- such as justice and fairness? Connolly commented that once the design participants realized that they were dealing with essentially contested concepts “enlightened dialogue could begin”.