knowledge W
Looking beyond the
Sharing information is one thing, says David Fisk, but keeping up-to-date with both engineering and scientifi c knowledge via a shared database is central to CIBSE
A core component from the very beginning was specialist knowledge on user requirements, whether for thermal comfort, good vision or good hygiene
CIBSE president David Fisk
hether clients translate Sir Francis Bacon’s famous latin quip, Scienta potestas est, as ‘Knowledge is power’ or ‘Skill is
capability’, what they want, above all, is someone who knows how to get things to work. We often think of technical progress increasing knowledge of how to do things. But how we get to know what we know has been changing, too. The opening of the CIBSE Knowledge Portal to members has been one stage of a long journey. But the rate of travel looks to be ever-increasing. Below, we explore where CIBSE has come from – and the challenges for the future.
Taking stock Francis Bacon not only wrote down memorable quips. He penned Of Building, the earliest guide in English to writing a client brief. He also stocked his library with what he thought was all the knowledge anyone would need to know. The difference between Bacon and a reader in a modern university library is that he had read every book. Yet within a few years of his death, knowledge had expanded so rapidly that it could only be a collective enterprise, and has remained so ever since. A shift from individual to collective knowledge
is not necessarily a bad thing. Join a CIBSE evening meeting and you will discover that sharing knowledge and experience can be fun. But once we exchange information and knowledge, we have to be a little more careful. One frequent confusion is between engineering knowledge and scientifi c knowledge. Both rely on empirical evidence to draw conclusions, but the scientist has the luxury of concluding that ‘more research is necessary’, whereas the engineer needs to get on with the job. The scientist and the engineer agree how
4 CIBSE Journal November 2012
heat fl ows through bricks. But the engineer needs to decide on the size of the heating plant long before the real bricks are ever in place, and so needs an engineering value for conductance. In CIBSE guides, you can fi nd a U-value that will have been wisely set as a worst case value. The depth of winter is no time to fi nd that the boiler has been undersized and a court no place to defend an engineering judgement. That is why a shared knowledge base, created specially by professionals for professionals, is so central to organisations like CIBSE.
Doing the knowledge CIBSE, like other professional organisations, accredits capability to perform tasks. Possessing the appropriate level of knowledge is part of that capability. So CIBSE, from its earliest days, began to codify good practice in building services engineering. It would be pretentious to assert that this was best practice, because what is ‘best’, in truth, depends on circumstances. Nor is this kind of knowledge necessarily innovative, because only time can distinguish mere novelty from true innovation. But good practice is something that can be agreed upon. We recognise we could do worse, but we should aspire to do better. A core component from the very beginning
was specialist knowledge on user requirements, whether for thermal comfort, good vision or good hygiene. But engineering systems were also an integrating theme. Modern services engineering is becoming dominated by the ideas of systems engineering. It is one of the reasons I have started a new Masters course in systems at Imperial College, London. To the systems engineer, it does not really matter what is actually inside a pump or chiller. That is in the knowledge base of the manufacturer. What is critical is to know
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