By the very nature of their jobs, engineers are highly-skilled and technically-minded people. Engineers are innately creative problem solvers that utalise their knowledge and skill to create almost everything we use today. Ask people what they think of engineers and engineering (and I often do), and the response will usually be along the lines of applying mathematics to some design before getting dirty and building something. There are many aspects of engineering that put people off the subject and often the hard technical aspect overshadows the soft creative side.
The engineer can fall into the role of a technical expert and their work is misunderstood. One reason engineers aren’t considered creative is that they often don’t start with the proverbial blank sheet of paper each time they do something. Rather, they bring together and build on existing technology and try to improve incrementally on its performance. An engineer’s core mission is to try to improve the utility of things, to design products or processes that will solve problems better, faster, and cheaper.
While engineering can be technically demanding and required a working knowledge of maths, I feel I flex my creative engineer muscles regularly. Working with hard and soft systems provides the ideal technical creative environment to express innovative solutions to multilayer problems. In a recent discussion the term ‘Ingineer’ was used to distinguish from the stereotypical main stream view of ‘engineering’, to allow us to visualise the softer traits of a creative engineer. Rather than focus on the output, the process and initial thinking behind an inspiration was examined. When we think of invention, we (in the UK) still like the idea of a slight eccentric working away in their shed (like James Dyson). I don’t want to get into the discussion regarding who is and isn’t an ‘engineer’, but most engineers will have the capacity to influence society by meeting a demand, solving a problem or through innovation.
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