If You Were An Engineer What Would You Do? Chief Engineer returns from judging Leaders Award

We were delighted to have had our Chief Engineer judge this year’s LeadersAward at the annual If You Were an Engineer What Would You Do? competition.

Hosted by Edge Hill University, the event saw aspiring leaders in the field of engineering (aged 3 to 19) set their minds to creative problem solving. The result was an array of original, imaginative, and, above all, exciting ideas and inventions. The level of engagement and ingenuity of these young individuals should stoke great optimism for the future of our discipline and its power to steer us towards a better tomorrow.

The ingenuity of children is something that we should look to foster and celebrate, both for its own sake and if we are to bring new perspectives to the problems facing our world. But we should also seek to learn from it and recognise in it something essential to emulate. Play represents an integral component of creative thinking, which continues in the best engineers to live at the surface of their daily experience. Events like this remind us that the best engineering solutions are not arrived at by brute force calculation, but by asking the kind of questions that put a problem under new light. They should remind us that the engineer—future and present—is someone who, to borrow from Oscar Wilde, can ‘play gracefully with ideas’.

The complexity and ostensible urgency that characterises modern life continually threatens to force out the simple, nebulous, and honest lines of thought typified by the young, exploring mind in favour of a concrete approach. But the truth is that the problems facing us today require both, working together and in opposition.

Congratulations to all those who participated in the competition, and, who knows, we might see you at Hooper Quinn some day.