Why We Need Creative People in Engineering

Be honest with us - when you picture an engineer in your head what do you see? Was it someone in a white shirt tapping away on a computer or a calculator? What about someone hanging out in an art gallery, or working in a hoodie and jeans?

Engineering isn’t just about cold, hard facts and stats - it’s about coming up with ingenious solutions to everyday problems. In other words - creativity! If you consider yourself a bit more of an artist than an egghead, here’s why you could bring that amazing mind to engineering.

Great design isn’t just about how things work

We humans are a funny bunch. We’re often not satisfied with something that works well but doesn’t look good, which is why we have products that are considered so iconic that they end up in museums. Think about stuff like the VW Beetle, or the old transparent iMac G3s.

Good design turns everyday objects into art, and it takes collaborations between teams to make something work as beautifully as it looks. This also happens a lot in areas such as architecture. An architect might come up with an amazing concept for a building, but a construction engineer or a structural engineer will need to think about which materials and processes are being used to make sure the plans come to life and hold strong. Just as an example, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building needed over 320,000 custom-designed bricks to give it its curved, organic appearance.

Loads of great inventions come from combining old ones

There’s a lot of myth-making about creativity and invention. You might look at someone creating art or designing a product and think to yourself ‘how did that person come up with this idea from nothing?’. The truth is that most new products or ideas usually come from combining old ideas and products in new and exciting ways. An invention like Wi-Fi, which was developed by the CSIRO here in Australia, uses technologies from 16 different sources to make a wireless network just as fast as any wired one.

They took ideas from mathematicians, radio wave specialists as well as computer scientists to make it all happen, and now it’s considered to be one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

Engineers don’t just work on factories, bridges and tunnels

Don’t get us wrong - there’s nothing wrong with building a great bit of infrastructure. But, we also totally get it if that’s not exactly your idea of a good time. Thankfully, engineering is a field which pretty much interacts with just about any industry you can think of. There’s the well-known, super-exciting fields like aerospace engineering, but many people don’t know about the stuff that engineers do for movies and television.  In show business you have engineers working on practical effects to make amazing sets like the rotating hallway in Inception, or developing new ways to make CGI look ultra realistic. You’re working with practical problems to create something that looks completely out of this world!

As you can see, while from the outside engineering can seem to be all about crunching numbers, creativity is a really important part of a successful career in the industry. If you’re keen to learn more about how you can find your passion and change the world as an engineer, make sure you check out our Academy Engineering Your Future. It’s full of info about different types of engineering, pathways to join the industry and more! Take a look over here.