Apr25th
This one brings a lot of Engineeringtalk favourite topics together: domestic rapid prototyping, collaborative open-source design …it’s all here.
The prospect of the average person having the equipment to manufacture stuff in their own homes has fascinated a lot of us for a long time. Is it really that great a leap to draw parallels between the current state of rapid prototyping (or “3D printers”) and the fledgling, home-brew early PCs from 30 years ago? With PCs back then, industry had no idea that there would ever be a demand for computers in the home, while enthusiasts just got on with it and built their own regardless. And now it’s happening with rapid prototyping equipment, only this time with the aid of the internet. (more…)
Apr18th
Engineeringtalk has been published for over 7 years now, and one of the most frequent suggestions we get from readers is for the addition of a jobs section. It would of course be a natural extension to our services. However, last year we joined the Centaur Media group, becoming a sister publication to one of the world’s best-known printed engineering magazines, The Engineer. And as many of you probably already know, The Engineer already operates one of the busiest engineering jobs web sites in Europe.
So those of you thinking about career development or relocation are strongly recommended to visit The Engineer Jobs (Link) and perhaps even sign up for their excellent “jobs by email” service. (more…)
Apr11th
How has engineering higher education and training improved over the past twenty-five years? I often ask myself that, because it’s the length of time since I began studying engineering at university. There were commendable initiatives back then to attract the brightest talent into engineering, and especially to ensure that the talent got a good all-round training in management as well as engineering. Indeed, I was lucky enough to be one of the first ever undergraduates on a five-year course in Manufacturing Engineering and Management - that’s five years, the sort of university course length only normally associated with disciplines like medicine.
Since then, new initiatives have come along at frequent intervals, and many have been highly commendable. But they’ve barely managed to make things stand still. The problems are greater than ever. When I read the Sainsbury Management Fellowship saying last month that “it’s time for the professional bodies to portray the opportunities for youngsters to contribute to the value of UK companies”, I couldn’t agree more, but hasn’t the same demand been made for all of our working lifetimes?
The SMF continued: “We need to show them that engineering can also mean being involved in business unit leadership or start-ups, enjoying the excitement of innovation or using project management skills on large scale developments. We also need our universities to revise the way they structure their degree programmes and market them to students. We’re dealing with the Y generation who are motivated by the fun and excitement offered by life as an entrepreneur. They need to be shown that life as an engineer offers them the same level of variety and the ability to make a tangible difference to UK commerce and industry.”
As usual, worthy aims, from one of many organisations which does what little it can. We all agree that what the professional institutions, government and universities themselves have done to attract more and brighter talent into engineering has failed; some would say they never really made the effort. But if you ruled the world, what would you have done?
This comment was originally published in the Engineeringtalk Newsletter
Apr4th
OK, it’s fairly early days, and maybe this is a concept which has nothing but novelty value ahead of it, but what if we could start to design any type of product on a free, collaborative basis? The idea has already been a runaway success in the software world, with products such as the Firefox web browser “designed, built and tested” for free by the product’s own user community. But could users start to design anything, using the collaborative opportunities offered by online communication?
A couple of projects are already under way to design a car this way. OScar (Link) and c,mm,m (Link) both aim to create “open source” vehicles, where the plans are developed and made available along the way. Of course, all sorts of problems spring to mind instantly, but who’s to say they won’t be overcome? The whole ethos of open source community development in the software world has been that no problem is that serious if there are enough people to work on it. Indeed, the Linux software development community has a pool of creativity which its commercial competitor, Microsoft Windows, could never justify matching.
Perhaps an open source car design is too ambitious (we shall see), but I can think of many other areas where there’s enough hobby and home-build interest that the concept should be much more straightforward.
This comment was originally published in the Engineeringtalk Newsletter
