A number is worth more than a thousand pictures: The case of designers’ cynical resistance through quantification

This article draws on an ethnographic investigation of product development at an engineering organization to examine the struggle faced by designers in justifying design proposals when cooperating with engineers and managers. Frustrated by the priority given to numbers over other modes of evaluation traditionally used in design, designers in this case developed and mobilized their own evaluation device to quantitatively prove the validity and worth of their work. This quasi-parodic form of evaluation enables designers to criticize and influence strategic project decisions. At the same time, this cynical act of resistance paradoxically endorses the quantitative approach and undermines designers’ own professional expertise as a valid way of conceiving worth, which ultimately renders this move more indeterminate than what a distinction between resistance and conformity denotes. Overall, the study adds to our understanding of how modes and principles of justification typically embraced by professional groups can be unsettled by attempts to protect them. In doing so, it brings to light the ambivalent nature of resistance through a cynical embrace of quantification.

Military Science Priorities in Georgia (Military Engineering Organization)

The priorities of military science, particularly military engineering organization and its structure against the background of today’s threats and challenges, the role of military sciences on the different stages of the development of defense capabilities of the country are crucial. The main attention is focused on the development of engineering structures and subdivisions that should ensure the growth of the country’s defense capabilities and engineering potential based on the principles of total defense. The military engineering organization will be put into operation in the total defense scheme and will ensure the creation of a unified engineering system of the country. An idea of engineering headquarter means that it will be the part of the General Staff of the Defense Forces and ensures the improvement of management and control of engineering operations, as well as management and preparation of infrastructural projects to increase engineering capabilities. There is given comparison and balance concerning engineering functions and levels of operations in every stage of warfare. The structures of engineering subdivisions that should be put into operation to improve engineering capabilities to perform engineering operations on strategic, operational and tactical levels are also discussed.

Data Fairy in Engineering Land: The Magic of Data Analysis as a Sociotechnical Process in Engineering Companies

In the era of digitalization, manufacturing companies expect their growing access to data to lead to improvements and innovations. Manufacturing engineers will have to collaborate with data scientists to analyze the ever-increasing volume of data. This process of adopting data science techniques into an engineering organization is a sociotechnical process fraught with challenges. This article uses a participant observation case study to investigate and discuss the sociotechnical nature of the adoption data science technology into an engineering organization. In the case study, a young data scientist/statistician interacted with experienced production engineers in a global automotive organization to mutual satisfaction. However, the case study highlights the mis-aligned expectations between engineers and data scientists and knowledge in what is necessary to successfully benefit from manufacturing process data. The results reveal that the engineers had an initially romantic and idealistic view on how data scientists can bring value out of dispersed and complex information residing in the multisite manufacturing organization’s datasets in a “magic” way. Conversely, the data scientist had not enough engineering and contextual understanding to ask the right questions. The case reveals important shortcomings in the sociotechnical processes that undergo changes as digitalization is brought into mature engineering organizations and points to a lack of knowledge on multiple levels of the data analysis process and the ethical implications this could have.

THE BALANCED PRODUCTION LOAD OF A MACHINE-ENGINEERING ORGANIZATION

The article deals with an approach to calculation of equipment, employee or work centers load during the production plan forming by machine engineering organizations. The calculations are based on the duration of manufacturing operations and the electronic structure of items, and provide the most balanced workload at the shortest time of production. The article describes the model of item production and the technique of production plan forming according to each work center with the set of calculation constraints. It also calculates the efficiency of an equipment load and time of production based on the current production plan. The calculation of load plan for work centers is provided by auxiliary software module of an interactive web-resource using the T-SQL.