• Question: what does engineering mean

    Asked by aswat to Ashwanth, Jeni, Mark, Natalie, Stephen on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Stephen Richardson

      Stephen Richardson answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Aswat,
      thats actually quite a hard question to answer! It obviously originally has to do with engines and designing or making them. Engines can be anything that turns energy into movement.
      But these days engineering can be any sort of technical activity that relates to making or designing stuff (literally any kind of stuff you could think of).
      So you dont just have mechanical engineering, you have electrical engineering, software engineering and even things like genetic engineering
      So engineering is everywhere – you could say its what makes the world go round (not literally though, thats more to do with physics!)

    • Photo: Natalie Wride

      Natalie Wride answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Aswat 🙂

      I always tell people Engineering is finding solutions to problems for the things around us. Like Stephen says, Engineering is all around us and it’s a really practical subject. There’s so many different types of Engineering! I used to think Engineering was just people fixing cars in overalls with a spanner but it literally is providing solutions to every problem you can think of – things like renewable energy, transportation, buildings and even things like hip and knee replacement joints and protecting your computer from hacking!

      In Civil Engineering we design and build houses, schools, roads, bridges, railways to shelter people and provide them with transport links, we treat water and sewerage, build treatment plants to provide people with clean water, we build foundations for wind turbines … the list is endless!!

    • Photo: Jeni Spragg

      Jeni Spragg answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Engineering means using maths and science to do practical things. So, sometimes, when maths or science seems a bit pointless, it’s quite likely that an engineer somewhere is using those ideas to do something helpful.

      All the food, medicines, buildings, cars etc. that we rely on would have been influenced by the work of an engineer.

      I always like to think of it being related to the word ‘ingenious’. Engineers find creative solutions to problems – they have ingenious ways of doing things!.

    • Photo: Mark Gowan

      Mark Gowan answered on 17 Jun 2016:

      The term Engineering is derived from the Latin ingenium, meaning “cleverness” and ingeniare, meaning “to contrive, devise”

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