Engineers+inspiration+innovation=heroes

By Ian Bell (Technical Marketing Manager, National Instruments UK and Ireland)

The mainstream media outlets are full of depressing news stories about high profile bankruptcies, factory closures and redundancies.  Even the technical trade press has an air of panic around it. You could be forgiven for feeling that the world has gone into meltdown, that we’ll all be out of work soon and facing a bleak future.

All this comes on top of the twin prospects of climate change and energy demand outstripping supply in a few short years. And, just to heighten the sense of crisis, politicians are trying to persuade us that, “It’ll all be over by Christmas”.

But despite all this and, paradoxically, because of it, this is a great time to be involved in engineering. Engineering and engineers are needed to undertake all of the high-tech and green-tech initiatives which were announced in the April budget. We are set to become the new heroes, helping to save the planet and bridge the energy gap at the same time as saving the economy. In the process we are going to fix the whole “engineers don’t get the recognition we deserve” issue. Society will value the role engineers play in the modern world and school children will be heard to exclaim “I want to be an engineer when I grow up”.

But before we get too excited and full of ourselves, we should recognise that there are still some potential roadblocks in front of us. Getting to this utopia relies on engineers and engineering being successful across a wide range of large and challenging projects and we need this to happen quickly. What we need is more engineers and more pragmatism.

The need for more engineers now is somewhat of a “chicken and egg” situation. Before we can get the respect we deserve, and get more kids going into engineering; before we can fix the economy, the environment and the energy gap; we need more engineers. I have seen estimates that we will need up to 400,000 more engineers over the next few years. We need these new engineers to work on new renewable energy and energy efficient technologies if we are to have a fighting chance at achieving the 34% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020 that the UK has signed up for. 

Whilst there is a role for government in helping to fill this skills gap, you also have a responsibility as an individual engineer: talk about what you do; be excited and passionate about your work; explain how cool your job is; enthuse about how “sexy” your latest project is. I don’t mean go into detail about how you are resolving complex timing issues in your latest FPGA design. But ensure that everyone knows that it is you, and people like you, that make all the cool things like mobile phones, iPods, hybrid cars, fuel cells and wind turbines a reality. 

If we all take personal responsibility for promoting engineering, we will achieve so much more than by asking the government to do it for us by enforcing the legal status of the title “Engineer”. And if, by unhappy circumstance, you find yourself out-of-work, you should seriously consider these emerging technologies as a career opportunity.

We need to be pragmatic  because it is now time to start delivering solutions. Not in five or ten years time, but now. When beginning a new project to develop the latest clean or green technology, whether it is renewable energy, improving machine efficiency or a system to reduce emissions, we need to stop thinking we have to design and build everything from scratch. That takes too long and we cannot afford the time or cost anymore. 

We need to make use of the latest rapid application design and development tools and commercial off-the-shelf modular hardware where we can and only design bespoke systems where we absolutely have to. We need to use this approach to take the masses of measurements that are needed to start designing and developing new greener devices, technologies and processes that will fix these problems.

This “measure it – fix it” approach is often called green engineering, which has been defined as the use of measurement and control techniques to design, develop and improve products, technologies, and processes for environmental and economic benefits.

It is time to innovate, not reinvent. Why get bogged down in the details of designing your own unique data acquisition system when you can buy off-the-shelf and start taking measurements in a few days. Then, instead of coding standard signal processing and analysis routines from first principles, you can use the latest software-based mathematics and design tools to engineer a new control algorithm that will form the heart of your solution. 

In the next step, rather than developing, validating and supporting a custom design, you can take commercially available rugged, embedded systems and the same high-level design tools to deploy your first prototype and prove to the world - and your potential investors - that you have a winning solution. 

When it comes to the final, possibly high-volume deployment, you may need to reduce the unit cost of the final product or satisfy other constraints such as size, and this may force you into more custom engineering, but at least you now have a validated design and the financial backing to make it a reality. And this is even easier when your high-level graphical design tool automatically generates code for your chosen processor target.

I should declare an interest here. I work for National Instruments and we enable this pragmatic approach to green engineering with our graphical system design platform by providing off-the-shelf measurement, automation and design tools in software and hardware. Where measurements, automation or embedded systems are concerned, our goal is to let engineers get to the first measurements in minutes and first prototype in weeks, not months.

One last thought. Whether the challenges ahead leave you energised or daunted, I have learnt that, as engineers, we should not take ourselves too seriously. So keep watching “The Big Bang Theory” and take a look at An Engineering Mind (anengineeringmind.com). Yes, Todd is an NI colleague of mine, but he is quite funny – for an American.

We can be the heroes. We can save the day. We just have to get on with it.