Design Ambassador
Back of
the net!
A friend of mine is equally average, but no less keen in the many sports which we enjoy. We were recently discussing, while playing a typically protracted round of golf, what might be the most satisfying sensation of any sport: serving an ‘ace’ at tennis, curling a free kick into the top corner from 25 yards or catching the perfect wave? Speculatively, better still perhaps to watch the long sought hole-in-one finally drop into the cup – as experienced only by a very lucky few.
If my friend and I were in similar occupations, we might have added to this the similar mixture of anticipation, excitement and ultimately unrivalled satisfaction that can arrive in varying degrees as we engineers fulfill our daily roles. This may result typically from the initial identification of a problem, the realisation of a solution or triumphing in arriving at a final
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Blair Hutton, the IED’s Design Ambassador, describes the anticipation, excitement and satisfaction that a career in engineering design can bring.
design after years of adversity. Such feelings can arrive when we least expect, even when performing the most mundane daily tasks. After toiling for months on end, over sometimes fruitless testing and countless false summits, the moment of clarity can often creep up on us.
With this level of effort, however, can come a less healthy side-effect. Those who are deeply embroiled in design may be familiar with the grotesque ‘gurning’ visible on the face of anyone deeply concentrating on a CAD tube. Listening to music at the same time, can result in the designer entering something approaching a ‘high beta’ state, where only the content of the screen matters, at the expense of any attempt to communicate with the outside world, including those at adjacent desks. Many is the time a colleague will have leapt out of their chair, apparently struck by a deep-rooted
terror that dare not speak its name, at being asked whether they would like to interrupt their tolerance stack and go for a cup of tea.
One such engineer was working on a simple, but function-critical part for several weeks, zoomed up on his comfortably sized monitor to 20 times its actual size (about the same as a 50p piece). One morning he appeared at his desk with large bags visible under his bloodshot eyes; he’d had a bad night’s sleep, culminating in a most disturbing nightmare. Trapped inside his own CAD part he ran hither and thither, slamming in vain against the many surfaces he knew so intimately in a bid to escape! Being woken by his wife, sweat dripping from his brow, he must have struggled to explain his malaise.
Perhaps more than in other jobs, being an
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