• Question: Helloo... Does your job include a lot of creativity?? Can you go into more creative engineering???

    Asked by shefali29 to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 20 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Being a PhD student means that I have to be creative in order to come up with new ideas and solutions to existing problems, and the same applies to engineers working for companies. This isn’t quite the same as being creative in the artistic sense of the word – I won’t be painting a picture or creating a sculpture as part of my work any time soon, although I do enjoy painting and photography in my spare time.

      If you’re interested in how art and engineering could work together I’m afraid you have to choose one of the two to study at a higher level and keep an active interest in the other. (Unless you go to university somewhere like America where you can initially study more than one subject)

      That said, design and architecture could be seen as subjects where art meets a more practical application and there are plenty of courses out there covering a huge range of different types of design. There are artists out there that combine engineering or science with art. A couple of links that I quite like follow:

      http://www.exploringtheinvisible.com/ looks at using bacteria to create artwork

      http://www.stschwabe.com/work.php creates artwork using cellulose produced by bacteria. Check out the video for The Kernels of Chimaera – a real example of engineering meeting art!

    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      What do you think creativity is shefali29?

      I think I’m quite creative – we know some of the treatments for ankle arthritis need to work better – so we have to be creative in thinking of new ideas. Also, when we want to test new designs/devices or implants, we want to make sure they would work ok in a patient – and withstand the forces and conditions they’d be subjected to. The best way to see how an implant works, would obviously be to put it in a patient and see how it goes but we can’t do that for a number of reasons – some obvious, and some less so! So we have to be quite creative in how we do test these things, and we’ve designed machines that do a similar job.
      If you’re interested more in combining art and engineering, then perhaps something like product design might be for you. I teach some product design students each year as we have that course run in mechanical engineering.

    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      Hey shefali29,

      I like to think I’m a fairly creative person. My life as an engineer all started from building my own creations as Lego as a kid.

      I chose to study Product Design Engineering (PDE) at University because wit was the most creative course I could find that was still in engineering. Next up from PDE is Industrial Design which can be studied at Design departments at Universities.

      During my course I did a lot of freehand drawing and CAD work to create new products and devices and develop a ‘portfolio’ of all my ideas. I also learnt about mechanical and software engineering so that I knew how the things I designed should work and manufacturing engineering so I knew how they would be made.

      There are loads of different types of engineering to consider. Being an engineer is kind of like being a professional problem-solver, so the more creative you are the better solutions you can think up! 🙂

    • Photo: Kate Niehaus

      Kate Niehaus answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      Hi there! Well first of all, I think that creativity helps in nearly any job. I always try to be creative in how I present my work to others – for instance, I often include hand-drawn illustrations. In terms of my daily engineering work, it also is important to able to pull together different types of methods to new applications or to think of new ways for an existing method to be tweaked to make it work better – I would call all of this creative.

      Possibly you are thinking of something more along the lines of cool designs, which is what people often associate with creativity? If so, there are definitely branches within engineering that focus more on design. As the others have mentioned, product design (often a subclass of mechanical engineering) comes to mind.

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