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Prisk suggests UK's vision needs better communication

I think Will Butler-Adams MD of Brampton Cycles, in his analysis of the perceptions of engineering is way off the mark. I’m sure that he and his ‘boys’ (and girls?) have lots of fun in their office pandering to a burgeoning market of customers who are deluded into paying over the odds for a ‘stylish’ mode of transport that allows them to appear ‘holier than thou’ in that they are saving the planet/and or avoiding the drive home through congested streets. But let’s face it, did the people who worked on the Apollo (or even the Soviet) space programs (or in the UK Concorde) care if their desks were made of steel or not? I guess they also has a bit of respect for the ‘old guys’ and their wisdom too. I guess they were more concerned with producing an ambitious end product – which delivered The Moon, not a few minutes shaved off the journey home. If we made more ambitious products and had more ambitious projects that were visible and had real impact on how we live, then people would see engineers’ imaginations and real ‘creativity’. Designing and producing bikes may be ‘fun’ but real engineering actually requires people who may have to spend years not having ‘fun’, but who may in the end may achieve something that the next generation has real respect for.

8 Mar 2012

1:25 pm