Sunday, February 24, 2019

Not an engineer and don't want to be

I have an education in science, mathematics and technology. I can plan, design, analyse, evaluate, and manage both established technologies and new technologies.  But I am not an engineer, nor am I an engineering technologist, an engineering associate or engineering technician. I don't have an occupational title, I don't need one, and I don't want one. People who get sought by occupation rather than by name, are expendable and replaceable.

I have always considered the new age things called "engineers" to be less than competent, that their knowledge lacked breadth, and that rather than solving problems they implemented technical solutions. Unfortunately the technical solutions were not the proper solutions to the real problem, and thus they are responsible for creating problems in our world: not solving them.

Equally well, Engineers Australia and WFEO can take their concepts of engineering technologist and engineering technician and keep them to themselves. They can choose what to call themselves, but they have no right to assign occupational titles to others. These organisations are hampering the progress of technology and societies ability to solve the world's problems.

We need people with ingenuity, people who can plan, design, and manage, we do not need members of professional cults, nor people whose desire is to align themselves with such cults.

Engineering takes place at the frontiers of science and technology. Engineering is not about adapting established technologies to be suitable for a specific purpose: such activity is simply rational scientific based design, or technical design. Where technical is typically replaced by reference to the technology being designed such as: structural design, bridge design, mechanical design.

At the very minimum engineering requires developing new technology at the same time as developing a rational scientific methodology for its design and developing the method of assessment of the design. Since there is no prior art, prototypes have to be built and tested in a controlled environment to verify and validate, the science and the design models. There is a high risk of failure.

In some situations the technology exists but there is no rational scientific method to allow adapting the technology for some specific purpose. Developing this design method in the process of adapting  the technology can be considered engineering. (Using FEA/FEM software is not engineering.)

Developing new technology based on the established technical sciences is not engineering. Carrying out routine technical tests is not engineering. For example, a beam is a generic technology, it can be employed in a multitude of larger technologies not yet invented, inventing those technologies is not engineering. We do not expect failure, we expect the technologies to perform as required. We can design and evaluate the technologies entirely on paper, in the abstract. Though we may need to collect data from some routine testing, to complete our assessment. We may build prototypes and test them, but not to validate the science, but rather to verify we didn't miss anything. Also to check if the whole is different than the sum of the parts, and calibrate the mathematical models if needed.

At the simplest if a technology is described in published literature along with appropriate technical science, then its design is not engineering: the engineering is complete, the engineering is over, the engineering has been done already.

  1. EWB Australia | Redefining Engineering - YouTube
  2. The Most Successful People Explain Why a College Degree is USELESS - YouTube
  3. Inspiring the next generation of female engineers | Debbie Sterling | TEDxPSU - YouTube
  4. Are engineers human? | Patricia Galloway | TEDxManhattanBeach - YouTube
  5. How Much Math do Engineers Use? (College Vs Career) - YouTube
  6. What is Engineering?: Crash Course Engineering #1 - YouTube
  7. Civil Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #2 - YouTube
  8. Mechanical Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #3 - YouTube
  9. Ending poverty - what engineers can do: James Trevelyan at TEDxPerth - YouTube
  10. Re-Engineering Engineering Education: Stephan Athan at TEDxUF - YouTube
  11. TEDxUIUC - David E. Goldberg - 7 Missing Basics of Engineering - YouTube
  12. Why We Need Engineers Now More Than Ever | Elanor Huntington | TEDxSydney - YouTube
  13. We can end poverty, but this is why we haven't | Teva Sienicki | TEDxMileHighWomen - YouTube
  14. How do the poor see life? Uneducated, not stupid | Rajen Makhijani | TEDxNTU
  15. The interesting story of our educational system | Adhitya Iyer | TEDxCRCE - YouTube



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Revisions:
[24/02/2019] : Original
[26/02/2019] : Expanded content
[25/03/2019] : rephrased
[10/04/2019] : Minor Edits
[17/05/2019] : Added more description