This weekend I went on two long bike rides around sun-filled Vancouver with views of the mountains and waters and soaring city buildings. Tremendous. I have also worked on a new course I am fighting with for EduMine. I already have five courses up on EduMine; but this new one is on something I know something about in detail. The course will be called Geotechnical Engineering for Mine Tailings, Rock, and Heap Leach Facilities. Who knows when it will be ready. In the meantime here is something I picked up, copied, and expanded from a book I wrote a long time ago. The book is called Principles and Practice of Waste Encapsulation and it tells of our work in designing and building facilities for uranium mill tailings and other radioactive wastes. Maybe you can find it on Amazon.
The art of design may best be conceived of as a synthesizing facts, scientific theory, and judgment to produce a plan of action. But what, you may well ask, is judgment. To the engineering scientists, whose lives are numbers and computers, judgment is a crutch, a poor substitute for sophisticated analytical procedures. To the junior engineer and many an unimaginative practitioner, judgment is no more than an impressive name for guessing. The cynics amongst my colleagues brand judgment as a poor substitute for collection hard facts and for rational thinking.
As any practicing engineer and designer of action knows, however, judgment is an indispensable attribute when problems cannot be solved by numerical analysis. In fact, judgment is probably even more crucial when there are numerical analyses aplenty. Judgment is required to inject reasonableness into numerical analyses; for numerical analysis without judgment leads to poor decisions and bad design. We know there is an attribute called judgment. We recognize it presence, we are pained by its absence, and we grieve over the record of our past lapses of judgment.
All attempts to define the essence of judgment come down to this simple definition: judgment is a good sense of proportion.
Engineering judgment can be a gift; sometimes you have or do not have. I prefer to think that judgment, particularly as it applies to geotechnical structures, is based on:
- Observation of natural phenomena.
- Familiarity with the truths of science.
- Thorough analysis of available information, including collecting and examining all the data, doing all the calculations, and evaluating all reasonable options.
- Comprehensiveness, breadth of knowledge, and distinguishing and extracting important information from a plethora of irrelevance.
- Balanced consideration of multiple concerns and thoughtful reconciliation thereof.
- Examination of past mistakes.
- A “gut feeling” brought on by age, panic, a schedule deadline, or a drink.
To cultivate engineering judgment, within the meaning of the term as I define it above, we can do no better than draw on Ralph Peck who recommends the following:
- Make every assignment count: observe attitudes and techniques, facts, sizes, and methods.
- Teach your brain to register what your eyes see: keep a notebook, write reports on observations, and compile inspection reports.
- Consciously evaluate the size of things: ask how big is the column, how deep can frost penetrate, how many drums would be filled per day at a seepage rate of 10-7 cm/sec.
- Read: read technical journals, books, papers; but don’t only read the formal contents; also study the advertisements for they are what is happening in practice.
- Study case histories for they are the record of past successes and failures.
- Consult and communicate with people form all disciplines.
- Recapitulate: frequently examine one’s past contributions with a critical eye.
- Strive for continuous improvement and innovation.
