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Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science. However, their form and function, their dimensions and appearance, were determined by technologists, designers, inventors, and engineers using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that a technologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt with in the mind by a visual, nonverbal process, pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry or thermos-dynamics , because they were first the picture in the minds of those. The creative shaping process of a technologists mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists. For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might express individual ways of nonverbal thinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What would be the shape of the combustion chamber? Where should the valves be placed? Would it have a long or short piston? Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physical requirement, by limitations of available space, and not in the least by a sense of form. Some decisions, such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientific component design remains primary. Design courses, then should be an essential element of engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, a central mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, which is the special technique of the artists, not the scientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to need hard thinking, nonverbal thought is sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive processes and inferior to verbal mathematical thought. | 
