Expedition’s blog

November 14th, 2008

(article for The Structural Engineer Centenary Issue)

We sometimes lose track of the fact that structural engineering is something done by humans, for humans. I am a strong believer that we are people first, engineers second, and structural engineers third.  And I believe that what unites us as people is much more than what divides us as engineers. So I’d like to look at the future of structural engineering through the people who might do it, and the changing world they will serve.
 

What is the role of engineering in C21?

Not long before he died, Arthur C. Clark said: “Optimism about the future is always desirable”. Well, I too am an optimist, and in thinking about this essay, I have gradually realised that while we cannot predict the future, we can at least get ready for it.  To engage with our future we need to understand the past. To do this, we need to understand the intrinsic ways we respond to this planet. Then we look at the changing needs of mankind. Then we look at the tools that we might develop to meet those needs, through technological and economic waves and their impact on the way engineers work. And finally we can look at how we can configure ourselves to use those tools to meet everyone’s needs. After all, we are a service industry. So here goes.

Technological waves and underlying trends
 

In our technological world, the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce was founded in 1754, the Institution of Civil Engineering in 1828 and RIBA in 1834.  “Structural Engineering” as a profession was formally founded 100 years ago.  Each a techno-body in response to the preoccupations of the time.
 
But a look at technological and economic waves of change shows us that most of the key developments over the past 100 years have been in areas other than structural engineering. There have been five waves since the industrial revolution:-  The Industrial Revolution (beginning in 1771);  The Age of Steam and Railways (from 1829); The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering (from 1875); The Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production (from 1908);  The Age of Information and Telecommunications (from 1971). The 5^th one we know is characterised by virtual “networks” of large and small firms based on close cooperation in technology, quality control, training, investments, and “just-in-time” production. Every technological wave reaches a crest and then dies back after its products become a commodity. We are just beginning the 6^th wave, entering what has been described to me as a Century of Biology.  
 

What might this mean for us? Well, the pace of change is increasing inexorably…..for example,  the UK’s two main waking activities in 2005 were working (3 hours), and leisure (5 hours)….compare that with 100 years ago. At the same time our population is ageing. The number of people over 85 years old reached a record 1.2 million in the year to 2006. As the UK pension pot is sadly not sustainable, the inevitable consequence for most will be careers well into our 70’s and beyond.   When we map this against the 6^th, 7^th and 8^th technological waves, life becomes rather interesting. Schumpeter’s prediction is that the waves get faster and faster, with a 6^th wave of only 25 years or so, and the 7^th even less.  So, for the first time in technological history, we are witnessing waves of change that are much shorter than our careers….meaning that the context in which a “structural” engineer operates will inevitably change during the life of an individual, and more than once. On this basis, we would be foolish to assume that the profession, as we know it, will go on for the foreseeable future.
 

Engineering,  Engineers , Tools and Projects –  the intrinsic stuff

What engineering is

The activity of engineering underpins human history. Everybody does it, whether they call themselves an engineer or not. Of course some people are better at engineering than others, and some even do it professionally. Tim O’Brien RDI, the eminent and erudite theatre designer, tells me “Design transcends objective problem solving and, dealing in truth and beauty, cares for the world and the people in it”.  For me, the best engineering has always been transcendent, too.  Engineering at its best humanises the past, present and future.
Of course, the original ICE Charter defines Civil Engineering as “…the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man, as the means of production and of traffic in states both for external and internal trade, as applied in the construction of roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, river navigation and docks, for internal intercourse and exchange, and in the construction of ports, harbours, moles, breakwaters and lighthouses, and in the art of navigation by artificial power for the purposes of commerce, and in the construction and adaptation of machinery, and in the drainage of cities and towns”
 

The compass of this statement may have been enormous in 1829, but it seems very limited today. This is because it was written at the start of the age of Steam and Railways. But the first bit of the 1829 definition is very good, and in our practice we have re-written the definition of what we do, right now, in 2008, as:
 

“Engineering…. the art and practice of changing the physical world for the use and benefit of mankind”.
 

Of course, even with its mighty span, structural engineering is just a small sub-set of all engineering. As a matter of fact we often argue, in a jolly sort of way, that architecture is also just a sub-set of engineering…and to our definition, it is.  Taken properly, engineering has a great and unfettered range, and its power is that engineering skill gained in one area is transferable to another as the technological waves roll along.
What engineers are 1 (the Artist, the Artisan, and the Philosopher)
I should admit here that I was wrong 8 years ago when I hoped in this magazine that the Digital Age would usher in a new generation of time-rich structural engineers who would be liberated from “the tyranny of mathematics” to deal with the big questions in life. I was wrong again 5 years ago when I stood up with the environmental engineer Ed McCann at the RSA and delivered a talk called “Engineers Unchained” on a similar theme. On the contrary, careful observation of structural engineers shows that most absolutely delight in their analytical lot. Never one to spoil people’s enjoyment, I now believe we should capitalise on those pleasurable analytical skills and turn them to new ends, in as many areas as we can find. Already you meet people who are bursting out far beyond their origins, usually recognisable by the arrows in their backs or at least a furrowed brow.
With a little study, we can identify 3 generic engineering personality types around the place, each defined by the way they approach their work. We sometimes call them the Artist, the Artisan, and the Philosopher.
The Artist is motivated by interest, finds it easy to start, but hard to stop. They are not precious about their product, are full of ideas, and often end up somewhere unexpected.
The Artisan seeks perfection of form, can’t begin without a pre-existing concept, and then incrementally seeks improvement.
The Philosopher seeks meaning, and needs perfection of meaning before beginning anything at all. Philosophers find it hard to start and hard to adapt to changing circumstances having invested so much in the original meaning. Once they eventually start, the outcome is meant to be predictable.
Testing this with various audiences around the country we find engineers are mostly Artisans, with very few Philosophers and Artists. All are important, but does this give us the right shape for the future?
What engineers are 2 (the Specialist Specialist)
I fully accept that there are many fine Artisans who can test the pips out of a jellyfish and they are worth their weight in gold. Some of the most popular people in our practice are specialist like this…..Olympic standard numerical tool builders……people with a civil or structural engineering degree who are able to make us a numerical tool to study raindrops falling on bus-shelters, predict the path of daylight down into an underground station, or show the pattern of moss growth on buildings. They specialise in being a specialist, and delight in it. Arguably we were all trained to be Specialist Specialists at university.
What engineers are 3 (the Specialist Generalist)
 

On the contrary, the “Specialist Generalist” is someone who specialises in being a generalist, and I think we are a bit short of these. In temperament they are often Philosophers or Artists. I am probably one of these. So is a friend of mine who trained as a civil engineer. Until 4 years ago he’d never met an architect (or a services engineer)…and he was very happy. Trained to do everything on a project, and to think broadly, my friend takes an overarching view of a project, and would be familiar to Vitruvius, the mediaeval Master Builders, and Brunel. The archetypal Specialist Generalist was Pliny the Elder, the Roman scholar.  Pliny wrote books on cavalry tactics, biography, a history of Rome, a study of the Roman campaigns in Germany (twenty books), grammar, rhetoric, contemporary history (thirty-one books), and his most famous work, Historia Naturalis (Natural History), published in A.D. 77. Natural History consists of thirty-seven books including all that the Romans knew about the natural world in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, mineralogy, medicine, metallurgy, and agriculture.  It just shows you how much the human mind can take in (and, as I’ve said, engineers are still human)
 

The Specialists need the Generalists, and vice versa. It is all just a question of balance.
The importance of tools…..
 

Every generation invents tools, especially if there is a market, or a war:
 

500 years ago, Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press; 
100 years ago: Henry Ford introduced mass production.
50 years ago: James Watson & Francis Crick announced they “had found the secret of life.” DNA was the tool to unlock it.
40 years ago: 4:18 p.m. EDT on July 20^th 1969: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” The first men on the Moon…a tool for inspiration.
30 years ago: “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth”  140 pages in which Robert Lovelock pioneered the idea of the earth as a complete living system, the largest of all known living and breathing creatures. A tool for thought.
10 years ago: 1998: Postgraduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin invent Google.
 

I have been quite liberal in my interpretation of a “tool”, and there are millions more…… each technological wave develops its own tools and does amazing stuff with them. The creation and effective use of tools is a key engineering skill, essential to the art of engineering. Of course,  one of the key C20th achievements of the structural profession has been the creation of tools that enable us to analyse structures of amazing complexity in a matter of seconds……and to go from drawing to fabrication and construction without ever picking up a pen.  It is somewhat ironic that these tools free us from much of what we historically spent our time doing.  So, the better our tools, the less secure are our (traditional) jobs.
Projects……
There will always be projects…..they are the vehicle by which we exercise our art and modify the physical world….(for the use and benefit of mankind of course).  As time goes by, the nature of the projects will change, and so will the tools and techniques we apply to them, but some things underlie them all. First, every engineering project revolves around the activity of design. Second, every engineering project arises in response to a given need (and the conceptual response to the formal expression of the need in the brief). Then there is the art of critical testing and judgment that are part of the engineer’s work before we can know that a good “design” (noun) is produced….then there is the understanding that the best design is an iterative process….and then that the brief is very often a poor expression of the need and needs to be a project in itself. (Here I should say that having spent 20 years rubbishing the project-process fraternity I might now soften to agree that they might be onto something fantastic if only they see it as a tool rather than an end in itself.).
In the context of structural projects, we can speculate about some things dear to our hearts, so:
Hypothesis 1: In structural engineering projects (and other sorts of engineering), specialist testing is reasonably well handled.
We can’t seem to get away from the fact that structural engineers love their special tests. Here we are helped by 3000 years of science and now by computers which are very good at specific tests. But to a computer a formula is just a formula….while we may have chosen to separate the world into “disciplines”, this is a matter of supreme irrelevance to a computer. A computer is simply a specialist specialist in crunching numbers… whether or not those numbers come from the field of structures, fluids, chemistry, maths, genetics, aviation, statistics or climate change or currant buns. By using them only on structures we lessen both the computer and its operator.
Hypothesis 2: In engineering projects, success is usually characterised by effective briefing, successful conception and judgment and not just successful testing…..and failures follow the opposite pattern
Arguably many failures are not failures of individual tests, but failures to conceive a complete set of tests. For example, the Millennium Bridge has sometimes been quoted at me as an example of a failure of a mathematical test….but the maths were essentially correct. And the judgments we made based on an extensive suite of those mathematical tests were also correct. But what was marginally less than perfect was our “specialist generalist” understanding of every single one of the interacting complexities which the suite of tests were designed to address, and so our judgment to go ahead and build was, as sure as night follows day, also marginally less than perfect.  The moral of my own particular cutting edge story is this: “don’t believe you can test your way to the answer”.
Hypothesis 3: To raise our game for the next 100 years, it is necessary to improve conception and judgment
Our friendly computer doesn’t care if it does daft tests for stupid questions….nor does it know what to test, or how to develop a concept, or how to make the ultimate balancing judgment as to whether the concept meets its given need.  In typical engineering projects, I could speculate that the proportion of design effort might be (say) 3% Conception: 95% Specialist Testing: 2% Judgment. I think that balance is fundamentally wrong. We need big help, so we could do a trade: if engineers are well placed to teach others about testing, others might be well placed to teach engineers about conception or judgment …let’s say artists for conception, lawyers for judgment and doctors for the use of precedent.  
Side presumption (the old chestnut): “University is the best place to teach testing (in the virtual, non-physical world)”
It is said that theory is well handled at university, and practice is well handled outside, and that this is the best fit. The tacit assumption is that conception and judgment are being adequately provided elsewhere…but while university is a good venue for learning about scientific and mathematical tests, it remains a very poor venue for physical and spiritual tests, and non-quantitative judgment. Long ago we conceived the Constructionarium residential construction week with Imperial College and John Doyle Construction, and a prototype event showed us that major educational change was possible, but would only succeed when the design and construction professions made a significant contribution. For a multi-billion pound global industry, this participation is still rare. The Constructionarium teaches people skills, programming, financial control as well as an understanding the physical world and also shows that nothing succeeds like success: this year more than 25% of courses will include it in their curriculum, and next year that will rise to nearly 50%, and we imagine it will soon be a core part of all Civils courses for many years. The Artisans have taken over the Constructionarium (and that is great!)
But what about the theory and technique of conception, and the theory and technique of judgment….why aren’t they taught at university?  Where are the Lecturers in Conception and the Professors of Judgment? Vital though it is, this thinking certainly isn’t taught in practice either. We all know many projects which don’t work very well despite getting every single sum absolutely and pointlessly right. All of this begs the elephant-in-the-room question over which my teaching and practice partner Ed McCann and I resigned from Imperial College, which is:  “What is the fitting role for university in terms of a C21st engineering education?”
The state of engineering right now
 

We occupy a world in which the engineering profession in the United Kingdom is regulated by ECUK through 36 engineering Institutions, licensed to put suitably qualified members on the ECUK’s Register of Engineers. These titles are protected by the Engineering Council’s Royal Charter. (Like all protected species, engineers are at risk when their habitat changes, Royal Charter or not)  
 

In this climate, Jonathan Glancey wrote in the Guardian in 2007 about “The Extinction of the Engineers”. He quoted the Association of Consulting Engineers (ACE) who say that Britain is 20,000 engineers short, saying that “an army, navy, and air-force of engineers” is needed if we are to “take on ….work that will give pleasure to countless people”. 
 

I’d rather have a few good engineers than lots of poor ones

Well, I am an engineer, and tremendously proud to be so. And I’m not yet extinct. I believe that both Glancey and the ACE are fundamentally wrong. We do not need more engineers. We need better engineers. We need quality, not quantity. We need more thinkers, more engineering designers, more people with judgment who can conjure up something magical out of a complex world and get it out there. I know this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but it is unintelligent to treat engineering simply as a numbers game. Engineering is much more important than that.
 

Before asking, “How many engineers do we need?” we are much better to ask “What will they be doing?” To most people in the developed world at least, the dominant uncertainty of the C21st world is not what happens to structural engineers. The dominant uncertainty of our time is Survival on this planet. I challenge you to name a greater cause. In response, engineers must stand up and say “We helped get the world into this mess, and we are going to make it our mission to get it out again”.
 

I would say that this need is poorly served by research universities who often have a scientific tendency to avoid strategic responsibility, and corporate engineering practice which markets engineering as a series of commodities in artificially separated “disciplines” (of which structural engineering is just one). Diligently solving the wrong problem is the root of the engineering shortage.  I honestly believe you could halve the engineering time spent on projects just by thinking clearly first. Beginning yesterday.
 

Glancey goes on to say that in our “knowledge-based New British economy…making nothing much beyond money…is somehow clever”, and he’s right. If all we have is money, we surely are sunk. We believe that “Science makes our ideas conform to the world”, and “Engineering makes the world conform to our ideas”….and  what the world actually needs is understanding, and that’s why the best engineers of the next 100 years will be much more important than money.  We spent many years working with engineering undergraduates at Imperial College, and they contain a significant number who really do want to save the world. As I have said, their mission is to exercise the art and practice of changing the physical world for the use and benefit of mankind. In this mission, many of the most passionate, and talented, are women.
It is within our power to redesign ourselves
We have a right to be proud of what we have achieved so far. But a comparison between the V&A’s “Unseen Hand” exhibition of 100 years of Structures with (say) the Boat Show, or the Motor Show, or any Electronics Fair shows that we are also very timid as an industry (relegated in the V&A to an architectural ante-room the size of a large cupboard). As the dominant questions change from structure (will it fall down)…to environment (can we globally afford it?)…and perhaps to society (does it benefit mankind?)….so engineering should take centre stage. But the “specialist specialist” world of pure structural engineering has not yet caught up, and this may partly explain why the V&A didn’t give our achievements a fitting celebration. Nevertheless, the talent is there to turn it around. One of this country’s leading environmental engineers even says that (in recent history) the intellectual horsepower of an average structural engineer appears to be twice that of an average environmental engineer (don’t blame me, he is an environmental engineer so he should know). Many engineers will remain temperamentally superb Artisans, numerically gifted people who love logic and mathematical modelling, and I’d love to broaden the targets for their skill.
As I have said, the structural profession has a major skill shortage in its ability to produce well-considered Artistic or Philosophical engineering propositions. In the absence of these skills, the default position of the structural engineer is often subservient and that isn’t healthy for our future. Through the Design Council and the Royal Designers for Industry, I have recently seen the 250 year old RSA (Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) swing its aim squarely away from design and industry and onto society and environment.  The RSA’s Chief Executive Matthew Taylor (ex IPPR and 10 Downing St) has produced a learned essay on the need for what he calls a change to Pro-Social Behaviour (society being our ultimate client), but is the first to admit that he isn’t quite sure how to achieve it. This is where a generation of specialist generalists would have real value, engineers familiar with thinking through complex design and testing processes with their many variables and feedback loops. In public policy, “engineering” needs to be say 33% conception: 33% testing: 33% judgment, but judgment is always very tricky because it is so hard to test in advance. Complex situations like this are often tackled with pilot projects but this is costly and often doesn’t scale up. I would love us to grasp the opportunity and turn those same skills of logic, numeracy, and understanding of natural forces towards solving societal issues of much greater interest and potential satisfaction. I think my friend the daylight-mapping-spreadsheet-guru (one such broad spectrum engineer) would be just as able to design tools for social policy as buildings. As traditional structural calculation heroics become automated, it might be very satisfying for him to do that indeed, and he might not become extinct.
 

Voting with our feet?

We can all learn from the statement in the late 1940s by Thomas Watson Snr, then chairman of IBM who estimated that the world market for computers was about five (or was it six?).  It isn’t that easy to guess what’s going to happen. Do we need to be technological gurus, global business people or back-room bods, or Specialist Generalists? As Darwin put it  “ It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but  the one most responsive to change”.
Arguably, the structural engineer is not alone here …..for example, the architectural profession has to redesign itself away from the myth of “star-chitecture” ……I haven’t yet seen a decent up-to-date model for either the engineer or the architect. This is great, as it means that we all have room to grow (and that in itself is a design activity for which the Artists and Philosophers among us should be well-suited).  We are participants in the birth of a new profession. Form follows Function follows Society. 
Structural engineers have historically occupied a spectrum from the bridge hero grappling with waves, wind, dynamics, fatigues, fracture mechanics, complex erection (but possibly not aesthetics),  to those who enable dreams to be fulfilled, like the talented archi-structural engineer Peter Rice. Most engineers sit somewhere in the middle…..and it is this area that has most to fear as it may well largely disappear. Routine work is already threatened by a combination of cheap engineering labour elsewhere, and even that work will soon become fully automated. Nothing lasts forever….look at Hi-tech architecture, once the sexiest thing on the planet and characterised by the marriage of architect and structural engineer, vibrant for 40 years from say 1965 to 2005……but no more.  I can see this reflected in our nominally structural office when we get half a person who wants to go to a tall building conference, but 10 to a conference on green buildings or infrastructure. Our engineers are voting with their feet…but we owe it to them to design a path for them to walk along….or at least help them discover it for themselves by thinking fundamentally about the purpose of it all..
 

The next 100 years

In tomorrow’s world: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe” (H. G. Wells).  We can’t know what’s coming, and I would be a fool to speculate. But, without wanting to preach, we should get ourselves ready for it anyway, expect the world to change more than once in our lifetimes, and properly educate ourselves about the underlying intrinsic things I have suggested.
 

Chris Wise (with grateful thanks to Ed McCann)
Expedition Engineering, April 2008
 

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