The name Engineering for the Real World is in honour of
the Book 'Design for the Real World' by Victor Papanek.
Victor describes how, just by using good design
principals for product design, the world could be made a
much better place. The human beings desire and skill at
industrial design needed to be harnessed to improve the
world around us.
The same can be said for engineering. Every human being
has a natural engineering instinct and yet so often the
skills that we have are not harnessed because of lack of
confidence or training. It is also the same problem for
practising engineers, in the cut and thrust of the modern
world, sometimes it is far to easy to forget those basic
principals.
I want Engineering for the Real World to try and deal
with some of those problems. I want to try and give
people who are not practising engineers some insights
into the world of engineering and how the basic
principals of engineering are built into us as human
beings. Hopefully that way everyone can benefit in one
way or another from the site.
I am a practising engineer in many different fields
including Civil Engineering, Software Engineering and
Rescue Engineering. Whilst I would not claim to be the
best in any of these fields, I'm hopeful that I can give
practising engineers something useful from this site as
well. Diversity is as important as depth in learning and
I believe that I can give some useful information from
all of the different disciplines that I deal with in my
daily life.