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Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

Engineering’s Many-Headed Hydra

                                      ‘And further more, for what it’s worth,
                                       By very nature of his birth,
                                       An Engineer was thought to be
                                       From social classes two or three,
                                       So not, like some among his peers,
                                       At Eton in his former years;
                                       Hence lacking in the social graces
                                       Required for elevated places.’ *

Stimulated, no doubt, by yet another round of enquiries ( Parliamentary Committee for Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills) into UK Engineering, the season for earnest public statements is with us once again.

The Chief Executive of the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering, rightly reminding us of the great achievements of modern UK Engineering, issues this warning ( Guardian. Letters 27 November) :

“ … none of this can be achieved without a lot more engineers – despite a 60% growth in participation in higher education over the past 10 years, the number of students taking engineering degrees has remained static. Only 14% of engineering students are women and some socio-economic groups remain deeply unrepresented.

( * Notwithstanding the great contribution of engineers,  ambivalence about their social and ‘boardroom’ status occasioned this comment in my Financial Times/ Bertie Ramsbottom column back in 1982!  It went on …..

                                            ‘ Too long, we chose to favour trade
                                     To what is actually made;
                                     As if to handle a machine
                                     Were, in some curious way, obscene;
                                              While finance, stocks and shares, or shipping
                                     Were oh! so marvellously ripping’ (ibid)

In the same Guardian edition, the Director General of ‘Intellect’  rightly broadens the theme to embrace the currently ‘cooler’ concept of the “ creative industries” ….

“ When we talk about manufacturing and engineering there is a tendency to think of the person with an oily rag. Traditional manufacturing is an important part of the economy, but we should not forget those engineers with perhaps softer hands. Software Engineers etc…….”.         Nor should we…

Other voluminous submissions arrive by the hour from the Engineering and Technology Board, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and other learned professional bodies with which the engineering industry and profession are, by long tradition, liberally endowed.

Regrettably we - that includes our professional working engineers, universities and potential students – have all been round this circuit many times before. No fewer than eight Decembers ago, the Hawley Group ( joint intiative of the then Engineering Council and Department of Trade and Industry ) began reporting (December 2000);-

‘ Making the Best of Available Talent - Findings and Recommendations’

“Engineers recognise the need, and want to be, more broadly qualified, but not necessarily in the conventional sense.”

“The crucial need is for engineers to be multi-disciplinary, to have a
clearer understanding of their place in the process of creating value.”

 ”They need a series of bridges into the wider processes within which they operate.”"
( 6 specified, including the crucial ‘bridge’ between Engineering and the Arts.

“ All these, including the latter, to be the critical determinants of the
new Engineering and Technology Board’s (ETB) programme. “

Dr Robert Hawley’s brilliant analysis, elaborated in his ‘Bridge Lecture’ (City University 2002) led to his collaboration with CVN on its ground- breaking ‘Janus’
( Arts/Engineering ) Project, aimed precisely at enhancing engineering’s creativity appeal and relevance to high-potential entrants and younger graduates. Arup in-
house International surveys were further endorsing the urgency of the need.

The Engineering Profession’s confusions and 2003 failures to act on these clear imperatives are fully documented elsewhere. Their seriousness drew from Lord David Puttnam these comments ( September 2003) to the ETB …..

“ One great benefit of the CVN (‘Janus’) proposal is that it has alerted us to the urgent need for action and serious progress in this field. Indeed, it seems to us that the future of the UK engineering industry clearly depends on such progress ”

“ We were astounded that the failure to address the need for greater investment in creativity and innovation did not appear to be a matter of urgent concern to the industry…”

For now, however, the priority is that these key messages for engineering recruitment and progressive performance are not buried under a further avalanche of conventional verbiage. Within CVN’s wider concept of the Arts/Science/ Engineering interactive potential , the ‘engineering’ specifics remain as they were in Robert Hawley’s focussed analysis :-

“Engineering is the key process in converting the output of basic science, via  technology, into utilitarian and wealth-creating products.”

 ”It isn’t a ‘science’. Science studies particular events to find ‘general’
laws ;engineering exploits these ‘laws’ to solve particular practical problems.”

 ”After a ‘post-Victorian’ drifting apart, science and engineering have, 
 for the most part, come back into an appropriate configuration as technological  progess has accelerated.”

 ”Between them, however, and the arts and humanities,  a dangerous gulf
( a la C P Snow) still remains.”

“This is serious. For the role of engineering is closely related to an ‘art’ or ‘craft’. As in art, there is a multiplicity of potential solutions - good, bad, indifferent. So it is essentially a ‘creative’ activity, involving
imagination, intuition, choice – not
all solutions conform to direct quantitative analysis.”

 

This, briefly, is the essence of the CVN case. It is a case which demands an act of imagination by the policy makers, too.

This time round, the message must not be lost again in the confusions between the short term ‘new widget’ fixation; and the greater need for sustainable, cross-disciplinary, flows of creativity.

These messages ring out clearly in the live dialogue with bright engineers ‘on site’; but become attenuated and confused in the over-long upward journey to the Hydra’s many heads.

For the future, Engineering needs its share in the ‘creative synthesis’, the ‘ exciting sudden inter-locking of previously unrelated skills or matrices of thought’ which Koestler talked about .

Gutenberg’s ‘ray of light’ on the way to the printing press was just that.

“ The wine-press has been lifted out of its context – the mushy pulp, the flowing
red liquid, the jolly revelry – and connected with the stamping of vellum with
a seal. The ‘ray of light’ was the bisociation of wine-press and seal which, put
together, create the letter-press “.

With or without a spanner, that’s what good engineers do, and student aspirants deserve help to learn.