Posted to News on 4th Feb 2009, 00:00
Casting rigidity aside to think outside of the box...
On a bleak, cold February day, there's nothing sets you up for busy afternoon quite like a wholesome, nine-vegetable winter soup. I like mine good and chunky with gargantuan lumps of carrot, celery, parsnip and potato, with flavours of tomato and onion, and with a splash of white wine for added fortification. The recipe describes it as the king of all soups, and I'm certainly not going to argue. But, chowing down this afternoon, I did wonder when my soup would stop being a soup at all, and instead be better defined as a small casserole. Or, if I chose to run the whole thing through a blender, when would it cease to be a soup and instead become a purée? Or, if I took out all the big chunks of vegetable, when would it instead be better described as a stock?
>Before now, at various restaurants, eateries, friends houses, etc, I've had hot liquid fare taking the form of all of the above, all of which were served up as soup. So, as definitions of foodstuffs go, this single-worder is more than a little watery. How can you and I share a conversation about soup that makes any kind of sense when we're both picturing something entirely different? To have a meaningful discussion we have to have a common frame of reference with tight definitions.
>The language of engineering, you would think, would be the most precise of all, and yet time and again I come across instances of product definitions and device descriptions that could apply to any of a number of different technological approaches. And globalisation only seems to have made the problem more acute, when a word in one language that could mean five or six possible products or approaches actually means an entirely different set of products or approaches in a second language. Also, don't even get me started on the problems of lack of standardisation in the units of measurement around the world: if I can only picture mbar and you can only picture inches of mercury, then how are we going to have a meaningful conversation about pressure? And then, of course, we have the reworking of the Machinery Directive, where the wording seems to have been designed to be as woolly as possible so as to confuse the maximum number of people.
>But maybe I'm looking at this whole thing backwards. Perhaps a lack of tight definition and a dearth of common frames of reference around the world represent an opportunity rather than a challenge. One of the greatest strengths of the UK's designers and engineers is our ability to look beyond the rigidity of assumed definitions and to work much more fluidly to come up with creative solutions to the most challenging of problems. When engineers across the rest of the world are arguing about whether the soup mug is half full or half empty, it is the UK's engineers who realise that the mug is simply twice as big as it should be.
>So in these challenging economic times, we should celebrate our creativity, because more than anything it will be our abilities to look at engineering problems in a unique way, to think outside of the box, and to come up with world beating solutions that will see us through.
Mark Simms, 4 February 2009
