Methods comprise a significant part of the knowledge engineers are taught and that they use in professional practice. However, methods have been largely neglected in discussions of the nature of engineering knowledge. In particular, methods prove to be hard to track down in the best-known and most influential typology of engineering knowledge, put forward by Walter G. Vincenti in his book What Engineers Know and How They Know It. This article discusses contemporary views of what engineering methods are and what they contain, how methods (fail to) fit into Vincenti’s analysis, and some characteristics of method knowledge. It argues that methods should be seen as a distinct type of engineering knowledge. While characterizing the knowledge that methods include can be done in different ways for different purposes, the core of method knowledge that does not fit into other categories is explicit ‘how-to’ knowledge of procedures, that draw on other types of knowledge.
