Roger Boisjoly was an amazing person, a renowned and ethical engineer who tried to stop a disaster from happening -
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-roger-boisjoly-20120207,0,2248999.story.
I read a bit about this in an organizational theory business class a while back and had looked into it a little on my own.
Info visualization was and important factor and Edward Tufte's work stands out, he produced a really helpful information booklet about the issue of communicating the O ring problem to non engineers and non scientists decision makers. Science just could not get through to managers, and well, managers did not trust or fully understand their scientists and NASA lacked a decision making tree on critical issues as it had so many subcontractors working on so many pieces of the shuttle that it seemed like no one was in charge! The book Splintering Infrastructure comes to mind here - everyone is responsible so no one is!
Here is some background about the way it was/ was not communicated -
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB
Richard Feynman also developed a simple process to communicate a complicated problem at the inquiry
http://www.fotuva.org/online/frameload.htm?/online/challenger.htm and videos here
http://www.awesomestories.com/assets/dr-richard-feynman-discovers-the-oring-problem
The article by Porter in Engineering Management entitled
Serving Two Masters is also very insightful:
http://www.nichols.edu/newsevents/news_detail/gps_porters_serving_two_masters_cover_story_in_mechanical_engineering
Knowing about these things causes me to get the willies when our government experts no longer get to speak and communication's departments become the purveyors of truth. I also get really scared when MPs play with scientific methodology and pretend they are doing it for out own good, then manufacture consent about an issue that did not exist in the first place and follow up the process by stacking investigative 'public' committees with crackpots to support their side while refusing to listen to reason (e.g., Census). It's the cultural attitude of hunch based ideological governance VS evidence based decision making that makes me really nervous.
Watching US Republican races does not help either. shiver!
--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
"Every epoch dreams the one that follows it's the dream form of the future, not its reality" it is the "wish image of the collective".
Walter Benjamin, between 1927-1940, (
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/buck-morss.pdf)
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