Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World
TLDR: “Confusing and pointless”
I abandoned this one. It just wasn’t going anywhere.
It’s hard to even write about the book, because I can’t figure out what it was supposed to be about. The subtitle ostensibly claims it’s about engineering our way around problems, but by the halfway point, the book was no closer to that point than when it started.
It uses a odd story as a running theme: one engineers attempt to create a flight simulator in early days of airplanes. Apparently lots of pilots died trying to learn how to fly, so this guy set out to solve that “wicked problem” by creating a simulator so they could train without danger.
…I think? I mean, I think that was point of the story that the author keeps revisiting over and over again?
The author defines these properties of “wicked problems”:
- Efficiency
- Vagueness
- Vulnerability
- Safety
- Matinenance
- Resilence
This list is confusing in and of itself, because it doesn’t have parallel form. “Efficiency” is good, but “Vagueness” is bad. Also, “Maintenance” is an action you perform, not a property of something.
There’s a chapter devoted to each of them, but I think I got through two of them and felt that neither chapter did anything to explain the concept. And he just kept returning to the flight simulator thing, which didn’t make any sense to me.
I think I bailed out at the halfway point.
Book Data
- Author
- Guru Madhavan
- Year
- Pages
- 384
- Acquired
- Not recorded
- Open Library
- OL37571729W
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.