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Veblen-doer hierarchy Science is savagery. “Hmm what happens if I eat the apple like the nice snake says?” Engineering is barbarism: “How do I solve this problem with minimal refinement?” Design is civilization: “How can I express Brooklyn aesthetics with maximal refinement?”
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Something I did not recognize fully then: refinement is not the same as precision. Precision is a function of necessity. The clock simply won’t run if the gears aren’t aligned precisely enough. Refinement is precision beyond functional necessity, driven by aesthetic necessity.
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Simonden observed that the difference between Artisanal and Technical mentality is that the former requires an artisan to bring together information and energy at the site or material to be transformed, whereas technical/industrial mode separates informational and energy inputs.
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This latter approach affords scale, but at the cost of needing to homogenize (either final output, or source materials). Unfortunately, it also creates a distance between the point/act of invention and the point/act of use. Into this gap flows obsolescence and irrelevance.
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