Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
technical, management and leadership skills to plan, manage and
that a small fraction of his decisions are based on the kind of
analysis taught in engineering schools. This is not to try and
belittle the importance of analysis. Everyone recognizes it as
an essential tool of the trained engineer. It does not, however,
answer all or even a majority of the questions an engineer must
answer in a typical design problem, particularly a new one.
It seems unlikely that numerical analysis will ever answer
more than a small proportion of these questions. The remain-
der must be decided on the basis of ad hoc experiment,
experience (the art of applying knowledge gained by former
experiment on the same or similar problems), logical reason-
ing and personal preference. The subconscious reasoning
process, which we call intuition, can play a large part.
MIT Committee on Engineering Design (1961, p. 650)
■
direct human, material and financial resources;
commitment to the public interest in all aspects of their work,
■
including health, safety, risk, financial, commercial, legal, environ-
mental, social, energy conservation and sustainability;
effective communication and interpersonal skills;
■
knowledge of the statutory and other regulations affecting current
■
practice in structural engineering;
a significant base of information technology skills;
■
■
commitment to the profession of structural engineering, partic-
ularly with regard to the Institution's Code of Conduct and the
requirement for Continuing Professional Development.
A few years ago we explored this in a review of student per-
formance in our third year group design projects at Imperial
College, London. These students are now growing up in prac-
tice and approaching or are beyond professional chartership.
At the time, there was little correlation between their assessed
ability to perform our quasi-realistic design projects and their
ability to do other more theoretical subjects (see
Figure 1.3
).
This led to a tentative conclusion that if they are any good at
design it isn't because they are transferring skills from their
theoretical course but because of things they have learned
elsewhere. This supports the view that the preoccupation with
engineering science is somewhat misaligned as preparation
for today's mainstream engineering practice. From this we
concluded that to improve the ability of the students to carry
out real engineering projects the curriculum should be rede-
signed so that relevant non-theoretical skills were properly
taught and rewarded.
Discussions with the academic staff and experience in
design classes showed that most students could not cross-link
Arguably only two of these ten characteristics are formally
theoretical (they are shown in italics). The rest depend on con-
text, relationships, technique, projects and construction, and
give an insight into the limited role of engineering theory in
the practical life of a twenty-first century structural engineer.
This is not the same situation as, for example, just after the
Second World War when the likes of shell mathematicians
Ronald Jenkins and Felix Candela, geotechnical engineer Alec
Skempton and their contemporaries justifiably prided them-
selves and their profession on their ability to do 'hard sums'
by hand, with minimal artificial aid.
My view is not new. Fifty years ago, the MIT Committee on
Engineering Design said:
The designing engineer who remains on the frontiers of engin-
eering finds himself making only a small fraction of his deci-
sions on the basis of numerical analysis. When the problem
becomes older and more decisions are based on numbers, he
moves on to a new and more difficult field where he again finds
3rd year design project against overall
performance: 2001 graduates
90
final degree
80
3rd year
project
70
60
Linear (3rd
year project)
50
Linear (final
degree)
40
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 3134 37 4043 46
Order of merit number
Figure 1.3
Typical lack of correlation between design project and overall course marks
