• Question: have you got sany inspriations

    Asked by roguee offical to Hannah, Oliver, Lesley, Leah, Graeme, Aleks on 6 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by $umm£r.
    • Photo: Hannah Griffin

      Hannah Griffin answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Ooh…zany source of ideas… I do a lot of thinking about different possible options for approaching a problem while I’m in the shower. Sometimes I get so distracted I end up losing count how many times I have washed my hair! 😂

      Normally though the best ideas come from chatting to people I work with. I particularly like it when we get someone new join the team (e.g. apprentices, graduates etc) as they usually ask some great questions about why we do something the way we do and this makes us improve it. Sometimes it is too easy to get stuck in old ideas which is why it is important to have a mix of women, men, old, young, in-between, different backgrounds, different experiences etc. Everyone has a different point of view and spots different problems or things to overcome. This makes the product (whatever kind of engineering you’re doing) the best it can be.

    • Photo: Graeme Burt

      Graeme Burt answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Its important to get inspiration from everywhere. Many of the best engineering product are inspired by nature. Often you can get great new solutions by using solutions to other problems or combining two things together.
      The best ideas come from when you are driving, trying to sleep or in the shower and you can;t get an idea out your head but you are not actively trying to think about it.

    • Photo: Lesley Colquhoun

      Lesley Colquhoun answered on 12 Mar 2019:

      yeah! it is crazy how many things i look at around me and can apply the same movement to a completely different thing!

      We had one recently where we had to fix and release a massive structure onto a ship and couldn’t figure out how to do it, we then put a similar arrangement to that of a gate handle (just much bigger!)

    • Photo: Leah Morgan

      Leah Morgan answered on 14 Mar 2019:

      Well I like to keep myself busy doing lots of exercise and general dumb things. That way my brain kind of relaxes and works much better! Usually I come up with really great ideas while having really silly conversations with people – particularly the other graduates, they are so entertaining!

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