Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Stakeholder
What need should we be answering?
What happens if we fail?
Everyone on Earth
The need to keep things in the same physical and functional
Schools collapse; hospitals topple; offices crash; walls
■
■
relationship to each other under the actions of natural forces
come tumbling down
Everyone again
The need to use the Earth's resources wisely
Some go without now
■
■
Others go without later, perhaps very close to home
■
Wars over energy and water, fossil fuels, and maybe
■
renewables
Any country
The need to generate a successful part of the country's creative
High unemployment
■
■
economy, a key plank of any county's global trading platform
The need to be proud of our generation through our
A gradual relative decline in living standards
■
■
If we don't continue to invest, we'll lose our place at
■
achievements
technology's global top table
The country loses out in the global competitive
■
environment for technology, with major new investments
going elsewhere
Any public sector
Need to use taxpayers' money wisely
State support for technological and non-technological
■
■
projects will be cut
Private sector
The need to use technology wisely to meet business needs,
Our cities and communities will become fragmented by
■
■
with all of the positive ripple effects that enables, through
such things as employment generation, income and trading
enabling, without compromising the well-being of others
self-interest groups and physical artefacts
Academia
The need to arm up the next generation of engineers with a
We will teach people to do things that were important
■
■
contemporary skill set
The need to do research that is directly relevant to the part and
once but were long ago automated
We will miss developing the knowledge and skills people
■
■
practice of contemporary engineering
The need to think independently and develop techniques that
need for their own and everyone else's survival
■
challenge vested interests (see the example below)
Industrial conglomerates
The need to develop new technologies to conserve resources
High embodied carbon
■
■
High first cost (narrower investment)
■
Ourselves
The need to broaden the use of our skills of numeracy, literacy
Someone else will
■
■
and creativity to meet the world's big challenges including
resource depletion, climate change, global poverty, population
growth and international security
Our children and their
children
The need to provide for the needs of the present without
Persistent reduction in the standard of living
■
■
compromising the needs of the future
Table 1.2
What can structural engineers do for their stakeholders?
1.8 Note
1
Please note the artwork for these chapters feature the author's hand
drawings as would be done in practice during the design stage.
MIT Committee on Engineering Design (1961). Report on Engineering
Design.
Journal of Engineering Education
,
51
, 645-660.
Mitcham, C. (1978). Types of technology.
Research in Philosophy &
Technology
,
1
, 229-294.
Royal Academy of Engineering (2007).
Educating Engineers for the
21st Century
. London.
Šmihula, D. (2009). The waves of the technological innovations of the
modern age and the present crisis as the end of the wave of the infor-
mational technological revolution.
Studia Politica Slovaca
,
1
, 3247.
Smiles, S. (2002).
The Life of Thomas Telford
. McLean, VA:
IndyPublish.
UK Office of National Statistics [http://www.statistics.gov.uk/].
1.9 References
Ferguson, E. S. (1994).
Engineering in the Mind's Eye
. Boston: MIT
Press.
Institution of Structural Engineers. Initial professional development,
Chartered membership. [Available at http://www.istructe.org].
London.
Lovelock, J. (2000).
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
. Oxford
University Press.
