Engineering and Engieering Profession

In general, the following post discusses that the definition of engineering can be very broad as to every human's daily life, but the definition of engineering profession must be differentiated to the broad engineering by linking engineering profession with its products and business, so as to help professional engineers find their professional identity.

I didn't know "engineering" can be so broad, until:

• At the beginning monologue of the movie My Sister's Keeper (in this movie, a 13-year-old girl Anna has an older sister Kate who suffers from leukemia. Anna was born to be a perfect donor match to help save Kate's life), Anna said: Most babies are accidents, not me, I was engineered, born to save my sister's life. I appreciate a lot the usage of "engineered" here, better than "conceived" which is widely used in introductory literature of this movie and the novel it based on. Because "conceive" is "to take into one's mind" or "to form a conception of "--maybe--by accident or unconsciously, but it reveals here that "engineer" involves doing something on certain purpose.
• I saw an artificial crystal necklace at the Art Fair. The artist put certain materials into certain machine (something like high-temperature oven), and the materials will grow themselves into artificial crystal with beautiful patterns inside. Somebody said the crystal is engineered. Although the colors and materials used by the artists do set some constraints, the way the pattern grows are mostly random, thus we can see here the word "engineer" includes uncertain and uncontrollable factors.
• Koen(2003) says "To be human is to be an engineer".

Based on these points, I see engineering is a process of doing certain things on certain purposes under certain constraints with uncertainty. It is so broad that almost everybody encounters engineering in their daily lives. Yet to be broad is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

The advantage is that this broad character of engineering can be used into publicity, to persuade people that engineering is relevant to their daily life, and to encourage them to engaged in engineering, because it's easy, and everybody do it everyday. It's not like science and art that only belong to those gifted people who is somehow "geeky", it belongs to everybody.

However, the disadvantage is more obvious. When the category of "engineering" is broad enough to include everybody, everybody loses their identity as engineer (Pawley, 2009). So I see it's necessary to do a boundary-drawing(Gieryn, 1999) work here, to differentiate "engineering" and "to be an engineer (professional engineer)". Engineering can be very broad as Koen describes, but to be a professional engineer is not. A housewife may do the cook everyday, she does the cook on the purpose of making some food to eat using what she has in the fridge or from the grocery store. Although she is experienced, there are still uncertainty in the process as to things influencing the food that might happen at any time. She is engineering food everyday, but she is not an professional engineer, at best a chef. If there is no boundary here between everyday engineering activities and engineering profession, all professions including cook, writer, and artist can be regarded as engineer. Engineers have striven to professionalize themselves ever since the mid-1800s (Layton, 1971; Noble, 1979; Pawley, 2009), and I see lots of boundary works drawing differentiation between science and engineering, but few among engineering, cooking, writing, and art. Maybe because they looks so obviously different, and there seems no need to say they are different. However, I say, they are essentially the same, if by the definition of engineering no matter I give above or Koen gives. So why they looks so different? In my opinion, what differentiate them are the things/products they are making and the way their products link to business field, namely, the product of cooking is for eating, the product of writing is for reading, the product of art is for appreciation, the products of engineering is for usage, and the business ways these products go to consumers are very different. I think this is why business or money is so important when talking about engineering (myriad of literature has clues of the importance of money, and it's beyond the length of this post. I might develop it in my essay), because the definition of engineering profession must include the description of the purpose (the products) and the way it consumes. We couldn't give engineering profession a definition independently (like making things, or doing design), because this will result in a broad dangerous "universal" category where engineers will lose themselves.

P.S.
I came across Dear Dr. Pawley's article "Universalized Narratives: Patterns in How Faculty Members Define "Engineering"" when doing the quick and dirty review of JEE papers. It's very interesting, and the background introductory part really helps me a lot to digest and make connections among Layton, Noble, Koen, Gieryn, and also the Changing the Conversation Report. After reading the narratives of engineering faculty, I become interested in what the narratives about "engineering" of engineers in the industry will be?