“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.”
“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 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.” Explore more >>
“Doing engineering for me is creating value, tools creating value. The immediate question comes up, ‘how do you do that and by what kinds of things are engineers creating value?' 'And what kind of value?’” Explore more >>
“This press is brilliantly engineered in the sense that it’s a perfect size for small-scale distributed production of local fuels. It runs on petrol, so you don’t have to have electricity, which is the case in rural Kenya. It’s reasonably sized for what it’s worth. But when I was working on agricultural politics stuff in Kenya, and I was talking to a small-scale farmer, and I was asking him about biofuels, he said, ‘oh, you’re talking about jatrophra? I have a jatrophra press in the shed from the 90s that a German NGO gave me. Do you want it? We don’t, we are not going to use it.’”
“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 >>
“Doing engineering for me is creating value, tools creating value. The immediate question comes up, ‘how do you do that and by what kinds of things are engineers creating value?' 'And what kind of value?’” Explore more >>
“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 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.”
“If you look at how engineers solve problems, because engineering is also about problem solving, you see that when they have a choice, when they are facing a certain problem, engineers tend to get the humans out of the picture. That’s why I’ve given this example in the photo, right? Suppose that they are given the problem of solving a traffic jam at the crossroads in a city. One way of doing that is not by solving it by technology, but by introducing a social system. You put a police officer there, or traffic man, who organises, who rules the traffic. A more advanced system from an engineering point of view is the traffic light. They want to get the humans, who are error-prone, out of the picture.” 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.” Explore more >>
“Engineering associates a lot, for me, with design. And if you look up the dictionary for ‘design,’ it says, ‘purpose, planning, or intention that exists, or is thought to exist,’ which is an important thing, ‘behind an action, fact or material object.’ And I’m quite interested in designs that are not obvious from the look of it.” Explore more >>