The Visual Culture of Engineers

This chapter defines and illustrates the visual culture of engineers as situated in practice, delineating the components of engineers' visual culture and its relationship to tacit knowledge. A historical account traces the development of drafting conventions in the West, discussing how engineering designers' daily practices have constructed a visual culture not necessarily compatible with the assumptions built into computer-graphics design. The visual literacy which engineers develop in practice is described along with levels of encoding in engineering drawings. Parallels are drawn between these encoding structures and those found in language and artworks in order to explain how visual representations function as boundary objects and conscription devices and why visual representations are such a powerful tool.