The Linville Creek Bridge: A Case Study of Design Thinking in Structural Engineering

The Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century transformed the United States from a largely agrarian country to an industrialized nation. Many technical solutions met technical needs, which contributed to changing qualities of life for the better and worse. As innovative technologies were adopted to enhance human comforts, typical technology practices of the time overlooked impacts to the environment and to human health. Widespread areas of air and water became polluted, and dangerous working conditions were commonplace. Engineers participated in this revolution, as well, by creating new infrastructure to move manufactured goods. While engineering solutions were similarly technical in nature, there exist rare examples in the 19th Century where civil and structural engineering followed an atypical, empathetic approach to meet the needs of people. The design and construction of the Linville Creek Bridge in 1898 at Broadway, Virginia, for example, is a unique case study that structural engineers and engineers-in-training will be interested to learn about due to the project's incorporation of community input in its technical design and construction. This project is an early example of a bridge's design and siting being informed by the community in which it is located. This paper presents an argument that the design and construction of this 19th Century bridge followed steps that are similar to the modern-era human-centered Design Thinking (DT) process now used in the 21st Century. We highlight how civic leaders and engineers in the town of Broadway used the community's input to empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test a bridge that would meet the needs of the community. Thus, even though the DT process did not exist at the time, the specific steps undertaken helped to create and design a unique truss structure that fit the desires and needs of the community and contributed toward the truss bridge gaining sociocultural value over time, now recognized as a historic landmark. This case study exploration of the DT steps being used by structural engineers in the 19th Century is a valuable lesson for structural engineers of the 21st Century to gain insight into how structural engineering has been conducted in the past and at present to see how the incorporation of human dimensions of engineering problem solving has grown tremendously. The sociotechnical success of the Linville Creek Bridge shows how it is valuable to meet the needs of the people in structural engineering design and construction to create successful structures that satisfy the needs of communities for decades to come.