“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.”
“A good engineering system is a system that you use every day and you don’t even realise that it’s been engineered. It is just doing what it has been built for in such an elegant and beautiful way that you don’t even realise that there is a lot of understanding, rigorous aspects put into the process to make it work.” Explore more >>
“Engineering is also about creating something that meets some kind of identified need. So we talked about that as problem-solving. That’s what engineering is about: solving problems. So in this case, the shelf is too high. The object is designed, it’s manufactured, it’s bought. Now the shelves are accessible.” 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.” Explore more >>
“I use this image to illustrate this point, that there’s an element of dynamics here which is complicated, which is not obvious, and somehow it is designed.”
“A good engineering system is a system that you use every day and you don’t even realise that it’s been engineered. It is just doing what it has been built for in such an elegant and beautiful way that you don’t even realise that there is a lot of understanding, rigorous aspects put into the process to make it work.” Explore more >>
“Engineering is making things that work. At first, they don’t necessarily look like something that will be finalised and perfect and nice like planes. If you actually open up a plane, you would see lots of nasty and scary things, but this is how I think about engineering: dirty and working.” Explore more >>
“The idea was, ‘let’s find a propeller that has great thrust. We don’t really understand how these things work the way we should, but we need to deliver airplanes, so let’s try to find a great propeller.’ So, they just built a bunch of propellers with different shapes and tested them.” Explore more >>
“If you buy one of these things, you will be told how much wind-power you need for it to start flying. You will also be told what is the maximum wind-power you should be trying to sail it. There are boundaries known and it is understood and can be put together and it behaves as it should, as long as you know to do the right thing.”
“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 >>
“Engineering is things that augment the human to almost extend what people can do. In really simple terms, this footstool makes us taller, extends reach.” Explore more >>
“This was my first conscious exposure to engineering. My parents had a very disorganised, rather drunken party when I was young, very small. And my boring uncle--who’s an engineer--who was just my boring uncle, that’s all I ever thought about him, he came to the party. They served food, and ran out of plates and bowls, and then they served a fruit salad. There were no bowls, so everyone was like, ‘how do we have salads if there are no bowls?’ So my uncle drunk his wine, took the fruit salad, and put it in his wine glass. I was like, ‘wow!’ And he said, ‘well, I’m an engineer.’” Explore more >>