“I was looking for something that was archetypal engineering. So, you look at this picture and there are two obvious pieces: one obvious piece of civil engineering, the viaduct, and an obvious piece of mechanical engineering, the train.”
“I could have used all sorts of images. Engineering is the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Hoover Dam, Durham Cathedral, things like that. Or integrated circuits.” Explore more >>
“All of these tanks contain essentially homogenous mixtures that have been brought together from a bunch of varying sources. Modesto brings in grapes from all over California and outside of California to create something that consumers will recognise consistently as being the same wine.” Explore more >>
“I came to engineering from biology ten years ago. Very much the standard biologist, never thought about engineering at all. So, I didn’t have a clue what a logic gate was, no idea about circuits, switches, repressors, and all this kind of stuff. Not concepts I had ever thought about, but the kind of biology that I was always interested in was applied biology, and using biology for useful purposes.” 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.”
“It was a political decision made by the president to go to the moon, and the engineers delivered on that. And there was a huge economic spinout. That’s what engineering really has to be, it has to be a benefit to the economy.” Explore more >>
“Turns out there’s this big chunk of something called engineering that people actually haven’t spent that much time thinking about, by and large. So engineering for me is an opportunity to rediscover all the history that I already know and re-imagine it in light of things like engineering practices, engineering knowledge, engineering societies, all of the various kinds of engineers.” Explore more >>
“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.” Explore more >>
“There’s not a single blade of grass that hasn’t been affected by some sort of engineering activity. So humankind and engineers and the way that we interact with everything can be seen as sort of, forms of engineering.”
“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 >>
“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 >>
“I could have used all sorts of images. Engineering is the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Hoover Dam, Durham Cathedral, things like that. Or integrated circuits.” Explore more >>