on Engineering

Last night, I picked up a little book called Everyday Engineering by Andrew Burroughs + IDEO. Maybe 'picked up' isn't quite right, as I've been anticipating this book for a couple weeks now, popping into bookstores around the city all this week, looking to see if it had finally been shipped. I ended up finding it at Williamsburg's Spoonbill & Sugartown, a stone's throw from my loft, and one of the best bookstores around. But not to digress...



The book itself is tiny - 4x6 inches - with a matte black cover cut to show the title and binding. It carries like a journal. And it reads like a spiritual pocket-book - which makes total sense. The book is intimate, offering prose in a slightly-more-formal-than-conversational tone, with the greater emphasis on the accompanying photos. While the book is broken up into stratified sections, they are more exploration than ontology, which is refreshing. Burroughs, in a clever move, divided the book into two main sections - Creation and Degradation - and exploring aspects of each.





Again, the book is missing a sense of finality, refreshing, as Burroughs seeks to evoke the thoughts of an observing engineer. The index provides more detailed and directed exploration into the content of the photos.