“There’s lots in this picture really because it doesn’t just set humans and engineered infrastructure in context. It shows what engineering’s done for us, you know. Energy provision, connectivity, roads, simply supporting life of human life on Earth.”
“Engineers are changing the world in different ways. They are changing the the physical environment, but they are also changing our social environment. There is something here like buildings or infrastructure, but it’s about peoples, it’s about goals, it’s about culture, its processes, values. And that is the way for me that engineers primarily create value.” Explore more >>
“This is a television series that shows many engineering marvels. And I thought that the title was really good: ‘Impossible Engineering.’ So for me engineering is really making the impossible possible. And what I added, which is ‘using systematic and rigorous understanding.’” Explore more >>
“The viaduct is an 18th century thing that can trace its origins back to Roman times. So viaducts as a technology were shaping society thousands of years before we coined ‘engineer’ as a word. So engineering’s kind of always been around human activity, human endeavour. And the way that we shape our socio-technical systems to create value, whatever value is.” Explore more >>
“What actually touches on the comments about the Apollo missions, the ‘Earthrise’ picture, is one of the reasons that I like this. It put me in mind of the concept of ‘the overview effect’ The effect of having that image of the Earth sort of capture the fragility of life on Earth and how small Earth was in relation to the rest of the universe. That, for me, captures a lot of what I think about in engineering.”
“There’s something about improvement and interaction with the natural world that’s kind of fundamental to what it means to be doing engineering. And that’s changing nature, and of course there are consequences to doing that.” Explore more >>
“This is one of the first steam-powered ploughs brought into operation. You can see that it digs a very large furrow indeed. That’s because this is about making that entire landscape, having that landscape irrigated in a new way entirely. So this is about changing hundreds of acres of land and re-purposing it entirely.” Explore more >>
“In engineering notebooks every page is signed by two people: signed by the person who did the work and signed by their supervisor, telling you perhaps all kinds of things. Taking responsibility for your work, or taking ownership for your work, or the types of oversight systems that are in place.” Explore more >>
“I guess on one other level it represents where I sit now, which is policy at quite a high level. I no longer get to do that very nitty-gritty ‘let’s do stuff.' You know, 'a contaminated site, let’s clean it up, let’s design the technology that we need.’ So I don’t get dirty like that. I sort of sit right at the very top, which is good as well but sometimes not good at all.”
“There was this beautiful vision of this socio-technical system with this very well-engineering thing that would be a part of it. But it didn’t actually work for the reality of small-scale farmers across east Africa, across the world, really. The economics and the time and the energy just didn’t work. When I think of engineering, I think of how, how all these different pieces of this socio-technical systems have to hold together and cohere. And that can be for a moment of time, or it can be not at all.” Explore more >>
“In engineering notebooks every page is signed by two people: signed by the person who did the work and signed by their supervisor, telling you perhaps all kinds of things. Taking responsibility for your work, or taking ownership for your work, or the types of oversight systems that are in place.” Explore more >>
“In the mid-2000s, there was this moment when at a global level, at a national level, there was this love affair with the idea of jatropha. Because it’s a shrub that can grow on marginal soil, and that doesn’t need a lot of inputs, that this was going to be the answer to biofuels. This was going to be the thing that you could have your food and you could have your fuel and you could grow it all.” Explore more >>