08-19-2020, 08:39 AM
(08-18-2020, 10:31 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: To be fair, I don't think--in theory at least--detailed designs should be put out to public input...I mean, the point of having engineers is to understand how to build detailed designs that work well...the public (and our representatives) should only be setting the general direction.
I think the detailed designs should be put out for comment. It should be a limited sort where they announce where they are in the project and put everything on the Web; no drop-in sessions (even in normal times). There are enough sufficiently knowledgeable or just curious people that it’s reasonable to do this, and given the designs need to be created and shared between project members, they can just be shared on a public site.
The real need is for designers to take seriously the public input and not pretend that they are all-knowing.
I’m sure they don’t consciously consider themselves all-knowing, but I am quite confident they feel comfortable dismissing most public input as being based on a lack of knowledge. By contrast, in my work I frequently get suggestions that are problematic from a technical perspective, but I think about them from the perspective of the person asking for it, and frequently am able to come up with a way of incorporating their needs into the overall design. The final form isn’t usually exactly what the person asked for (“please add a button right here to do this”) but still makes them as happy as, or even happier than they would have been.
In traffic engineering it’s a bit different, where so much of the professional knowledge is wrong. Not the knowledge about how big a bridge girder has to be to support a particular road, but the so-called knowledge about how wide lanes need to be, what turn radii need to be, and what is acceptable protection for non-motor-vehicle users of the infrastructure.