Design Ambassador Ambassador’
I am delighted to be able to write to you in my new role within the IED writes Blair Hutton, the IED’s Design Ambassador.
IED engineering award winners (left to right) Neil Harris, Philip Tierney, and Keith Winning receive their prizes from Blair Hutton at Bucks New University
Prior to undertaking this role, I may have thought ‘Design Ambassador’ was a project brief issued to British Leyland’s finest engineers at Longbridge some time in the late 1970s! Plenty of other (equally trite) quips have been aimed at me by friends on learning of my rather grandiose new job title: “Mais, Monsieur! With this Institution of Engineering Designers, you are really spoiling us!”
This new position has been created to promote design engineering as a career to those not already ‘in the act’, as well as Membership of the IED towards professional registration and beyond, to those who are.
Simply put, I will be travelling the country over the next few months with a ‘toolkit’ of presentation materials which I have been working on in collaboration with the Institution. These are tailored to each job at hand, as I aim to enthuse young students as to the benefits of design engineering and the excitement that can be had from it. In doing so I can speak from the heart after almost 15 years in the industry myself, in which I’ve learned where some areas of an engineering
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education may be more readily applied to a career ongoing.
During this time though I have had plenty of conversations with my colleagues and realise that, unlike in other domains, a certain apathy pervades towards continuous professional development. If the ‘coalface’ is an outmoded term, I do at least feel like I’ve been on the shop floor for the last few years, in terms of measuring perception of our professional engineering institutions and what they stand for. Here, I have been struck by a lack of awareness as to the importance of registration through the Engineering Council, membership of a relevant institution, or even their existence.
‘IED’ on its own remains far from enough of a household name, even among my engineering peers, and has been further confused phonetically by the recent rebranding of what is now the ‘IET’. In the last couple of months I’ve been rattling off the Institution’s full 13 syllable name (along with my six syllabled job title) to anyone who asks, and many more who don’t, in a bid to increase our profile.
Another challenge is effectively increasing the profile of such an articulately challenging brand; no mean feat! Even ‘Manchester United Football Club’ is commonly abbreviated (whether affectionately or contemptuously) to just two syllables! I pity whoever it is who has to market the Burkina Faso Synchronised Swimming Association. If indeed there is such a thing.
At least mention of the IED, with accentuation of the differential ‘D’ and the explanation which invariably follows, forces the conversation, providing a platform on which to explain our purpose and I would urge you all to do the same. We do well to play to our strengths in providing a friendly, proactive and personally considered level of assistance to any of our applicants. I was pleased to read our Chairman’s address in the recent issue of ED in which he proposed that the Institution provides ‘an exciting offering for product design engineers’ as I believe this is one area of focus that sets us apart from alternative bodies. Also, that this needn’t be at the
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