the Art of Engineering
I love technology, I really do. But I don’t adore it. It is just mankind ‘s way to distinguish from the rest of this planet’s inhabitants. Our species have been creating tools since … well since we started to identify them as humans; homo habilis, which loosely translates as the … ‘handyman’ 🙂
And we never stopped doing so. The human species has evolved and so did the tools we made. We even make tools… to make tools and everything else we can think of. We are in fact ‘homo ingenerare’ (see picture above)!
How can one not love technology?
Modern tools are often complex machinery’s, abstract data structures, huge constructions and infrastructures that stretch out beyond the horizon. It’s quite impressive, when you come to think of the masterpieces of modern engineering.
Masterpieces created by artists; the engineers. A special breed of humans that combine creativity with science to challenge nature and, bit by bit, stretch the limit of what is normal.
How we live today, was science fiction a century ago.
Engineering as an art, the engineers as the artists. Well… if that’s the case, why are so many engineers busy producing reproductions? Demoting themselves to copyists. What happened to the artist within?
The art of engineering lies not within reproducing the same solution over and over again, but to find a smarter solution, find a better tool, make new mistakes instead of repeating the old ones, learn new ways instead of confirming what you already know.
If you’re an engineer and stuck in daily challenges to ‘get the work done’, just lean back for a moment and think of what could be done ‘better’ but more important, how it could be done ‘different’. ‘Cos you can’t expect change if you keep doing the same things…
