• Question: How do you feel about creativity and individuality?

    Asked by zoha to Ant, Dan, Matt, Mike, Steph on 15 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Matt Maddock

      Matt Maddock answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I’m a big believer in both! I wanted to fit in when I was in school, but I wasn’t very good at it – so I gave up and just tried being me! I was much better at that – witness my scraggly beard and long hair even though I’m supposed to be a grown-up professional!

      Creativity is vital even in engineering – a lot of the job is solving problems and to do that you have to think of things that nobody else has thought! You have to design things, the way they work, they way they look, which you can’t do without creativity!

      And at the end of the day, if you’re like me, you might want to go home and relax by drawing a cartoon of a Jedi teddy-bear for your niece!

    • Photo: Stephanie Tomlinson

      Stephanie Tomlinson answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      I completely agree with Matt. Indivduality is very important – life would be very boring if everyone were the same. Also you need people with different skills and ideas to make change happen. some people are brilliant at coming up with ideas but teriible at implementing them. In contrast – some people can take other people ideas and make them work even better than the idea creator ever imagined.

      With some of the problems presented to us as engineer – it is imperative to be creative. For some problems there are many ways to solve it and the challenge is picking the best (most efficient, cheapest, lightest etc). However, sometimes it seems like there is no way to solve the problem – this is where creativity and seeing the world in different ways is required.

    • Photo: Anthony Hollingsworth

      Anthony Hollingsworth answered on 15 Mar 2012:

      a job in engineering encourages creativity and rewards it so I love it! individuality is a basic human right (if you want it) so lets just say there are a lot of countries around the world you wouldnt catch me working in!

Comments