DO NOT LOOK FOR A BOOK REVIEW HERE, WE DON’T DO THEM. THIS IS OUR SPACE TO FEATURE BOOKS THAT WE LOVED AND TELL YOU WHY YOU SHOULD NOT BE MISSING THEM.
Who’s the author and what is this book about?
Guru Madhavan is a biomedical engineer and senior policy advisor and conducts research at the National Academy of Sciences. He’s been named a distinguished young scientist by the World Economy Forum. In the book Applied Minds, Madhavan explores the various aspects of the Engineering mind.
How is a book on engineers supposed to help a reader who has no interests whatsoever in engineering or technology?
Well for starters, this is not really a technical book. This book is more like a collection of real life events that the author has used to explain some engineering concepts. For instance, he discusses how pencillin had to be mass produced during World War II and the task was assigned to Margaret Hutchinson. This engineer devised methods for mass production and helped produce 650 billion doses for the Allies by 1945. With stories like this, the book brings out the often unacknowledged thinking prowess of engineers which the author believes, if emulated, can solve most problems that the world and its people face today.
What makes it a worthwhile read?
The book has been written in a way that keeps you peeled for more. Madhavan’s opening case studies, ‘demonstrate the power of engineers to convert feelings into finished products,’ and also looks at the issues of structure, constraint, and trade-off, as well as the allied concepts of ‘recombination, optimization, efficiency, and prototyping.’
As far as the narrative goes, the section endings are almost always cliff-hangers, and the whole book is on a multi-level story structure. The author starts off with events, and then before ending them, skips off to another seemingly unrelated story. You will later find out that these events were not unrelated at all, and how things connect between the various timelines and locations and implementation of Google Maps. He has relied on a story-telling method for most of the book, and most of these chapters ends with lessons that could possibly be learned from them. He explains the various aspects of engineering beautifully and that too in a lucid way that is bound to be appealing to most readers.
Madhavan’s work will help readers move from the common understanding of engineering as a set of technical skills for building objects to the realization that engineering is a way of looking at and solving problems, and is not limited to situations involving science and math.
What kind of stories does the book have?
Madhavan picks his stories from both sides of the hemisphere and with time frames ranging from the 18th-century development of French artillery to the 21st-century technological development. The stories he tell span across varied parts of the planet, including India (the author’s home country), Japan, Indonesia and mostly, The United States. The stories are all issues that engineers have faced, and the ways in which they tackled these problems to arrive at technologies such as the bar code, ATM machines, ZIP codes in the US, self-service supermarkets, digital photography et cetera. Thorough research has been done for the book and is very apparent in the stories, as they date as long ago as the 18th Century, and some are as recent as Google Maps’ traffic prediction technology. Through these stories Madhavan tries to tell us that one need not be employed as an engineer in order to put these principles to use. In one of his best case studies in the book, Madhavan notes that the film director Alfred Hitchcock was trained as an engineer and employed these practices in his movies: “Hitchcock was a backward thinker. His final product was preordained but flexible. He valued implementation over improvisation.”
What are the other topics and concepts that are discussed in the book?
The book talks about various concepts and methodologies in engineering. The most explained and recurring concept is that of “Structure-Constraints-Trade off”, which explains how engineering
designs are edited and reworked on, according to the external factors that affect the final design/product. Madhavan introduces a flexible intellectual tool kit called Modular Systems Thinking as he explains the discipline’s penchant for seeing structure where there is none. The creations that result from this process express the engineer’s answers to the fundamental questions of design:
usefulness, functionality, reliability, and user friendliness. Other concepts such as Deep design, backward design, and matrix thinking (among many others) are explained well, using examples from real life.
What is your take away from the book?
Madhavan admits that the engineering mind is trained to think in black and white and very wisely notes that “optimization algorithms may yield financial windfalls, but they also “had an ‘invisible hand’ in financial disasters,” just as the liberating technology of cellphones now means that people are chained to their work at all hours. Nonetheless the book will help you look at problems differently. Instead of backing off the first second you are faced with an issue, you might probably rethink it and come up with creative solutions. And like most of the stories you will find in this book, solutions are found in the most unexpected places. This book will help you think differently and respond to issues in a different way. You may also start looking at different scenarios and find relations in them. Most of all, his book will teach you that inspiration is everywhere. (And there is a lot of that in this book).
Book facts
Book: Applied Minds: How Engineers Think
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Author: Guru Madhavan Year: 2015
Rating on Goodreads: 3.22
Our favorite line: “As the saying goes, In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
Review: “In this smart, insightful, and fascinating book, Madhavan shows how engineers turn problems into opportunities. The engineering mind-set is something we should all study and embrace. It applies to every aspect of life.” – Walter Isaacson
Text: FWD Media Photos: Various Sources