(spoiler alert: we’re the sponsors)

Liminal of state

Liminality refers to the experience of being somewhere between the end of one stage - in life, say - and the beginning of the next. These in-between phases can be hazy, undefined and even disorientating, like being trapped in a poorly-executed fade or wipe from one scene (or, worse, presentation slide) to another. We might be unclear as to whether an in-between phase has already started, what signal we should look for to tell us that we’re fully through, and therefore be uncertain as to where or when in between one might be.

To bring clarity to the situation, cultures have developed rites of passage for those shifts, creating effectively binary gates to mark the transition from one very analogue, often fuzzy phase to the next. These rites have varied from the excruciatingly brutal to the similarly dull, so I’m not personally always a fan: perhaps the short sharp shock and the unending sermon are equally effective, but I’d rather endure neither. The key is that, at the end of it, it’s clear where everybody stands.

Liminal of place

Places and spaces can be liminal, too. From a recent trip, I can attest that hotel corridors are particularly strong examples of “in-betweenishly” vague places with a way “out” somewhere ahead, through the door to your room, which looks identical to all the other doors in the corridor. Fittingly, the word liminal itself stems from the latin limen, meaning ‘threshold’.

Liminal of design

Engineering projects can put us through the liminal wringer, too, with projects “not really started” or “not quite finished“ and everything in between. To counter uncertainty, companies, too, developed rites of passage, with gates, milestones and check lists of misera- sorry, I mean deliverables to clear (or block) us for passage to the next phase.

I say “us”, but more precisely we should apply this to the objects of our intent, of our engineering endeavours. These, not we, are the candidates for passage through their lives’ phases: we and our project teams are their sponsors who petition the “high priests” to grant that passage.

Being a sponsor is also a liminal activity: we carry the same uncertainties and hopes as the candidates, our efforts are confirmed in those same rites. Their failures are our failures, their successes… that of the team.

It’s a small, in practice unappreciated difference in engineering, being the sponsor rather the candidate, but I find it to be clarifying in some instances - we can “disconnect” from the engineered object and gain a little extra distance to check ever so slightly more dispassionately what direction things are travelling.

Dismantling hope

It occurred to me, writing the above, that a key sign of a liminal phase, a corollary to its uncertainty, is hope. I’ve worked on plenty of development projects where we started off with that technical mix of intuition and hope that a new design or material will be better than the current one. From such starting points, I find that a key aspect of engineering is to dismantle hope and to replace it with a more robust framework of assertions converted into knowledge.

This epistemological framework consists of test reports, patent reviews, checklists and the like, engineering “truths enough” intended to permeate into the minds of all involved: the engineer, the business analysts, the manufacturing plants and the customer, to give them all sufficient confidence in the investment and the undertaking.

Hope shows us the direction in which to build our knowledge, and should, if we’re aware of it, also to ask the right questions. If the knowledge structure just won’t stay up, it’s better to accept Danté’s ultimatum of Abandon all hope, ye who enter here if you see no path to engineering… well, salvation is too strong a term: confidence is close enough.

Phenomenology and liminality

All of this is actually a story of how humans experience life: temporally, emotionally and rationally. Phenomenology is the philosophical perspective that gets us to consider these aspects, even in technological fields (Don Ihde was a major proponent of this area of study, as is Peter-Paul Verbeek today).

I find phenomenology a little bit confusing, stuck, as it feels to me, between the considerations of consciousness, psychology and hermeneutics. This latter is the study of interpretation, combining an engineer’s experience into a reflection on how we see and interpret our data, our readouts, our FEA analyses, etc: and how we act upon them. In the context of liminality, phenomenology can be a good signpost for our feelings and experiences as humans and engineers. We can acknowledge our hopes and concerns (hopes and fears through all the years…) during those sometimes awful phases of long-term testing (corrosion testing of coatings has always been my main example here), just waiting; switching to the rapid, detailed analyses, taking or just recommending corrective actions, then waiting again for the next samples; attending production runs, collecting samples and waiting - again and again - for the next tests to start.

These are all uncertain, liminal stages in an engineer’s life - as a sponsor of the product to be.

They are also uncertain stages in the life of that product-to-be, the actual candidate: it may be some_thing_ that doesn’t experience the emotions that we do, but it’s something becoming nevertheless.

And that’s worth celebrating, in its small way.

What does this change?

Being aware of liminality and the need for rites of passage can bring to mind the idea of the candidate and the sponsor roles in that ceremony. It seems to me that we, the engineers, are the sponsors in these rituals: we vouch for those engineered objects, pass on the certificates to the appropriate “authorities”, and endeavour to replace hope with confidence that the candidate will be accepted.

Perhaps it can help to reduce the danger of confirmation biases, give us that little extra distance in the process as we guide our somehow beloved candidates through to the next phase.

And we perhaps we can learn to appreciate hotel corridors as destinations themselves, to be appreciated for their carpet designs and calm lighting, a chance for a last chat with a colleague or a friend before turning in - alone or not - for the night.