Opinion piece by Isabel Duffy GradIEAust, Chair of Young Engineers Australia Sydney.
If you ask a room full of people to tell you something they don’t like about Sydney’s CBD there won’t be a shortage of answers. When we asked this question from a group of young engineers we got everything from ‘there’s no sense of community’ to ‘not enough sustainable energy is being used’. Coming up with solutions to these problems is a little more challenging - but would you have us leave it to the politicians?
Engineers are usually good problem solvers – when the problem is one that can be solved through science and logic. Unfortunately, the problems Sydney will face over the next 50 years don’t come with a rule book and won’t be like anything we’ve seen before.
With a few exceptions, engineering degrees are all about following the rules – of physics, council regulations and building standards. The recent trend of ‘innovating’ is not something that is taught at university or really practised in a day-to-day sense, but is something that will be required to disrupt current development trends to create a city that will survive problems like climate change and population growth. The workforce designing our roads, railways and buildings to be fit for the future, need new and different tools to ensure these issues can be tackled.
Luckily, innovation can be taught. Engineers Australia recently partnered with tech start-up Atlassian to run a design thinking workshop, aimed at providing young engineers with the tools they need to start approaching real world problems in a new way. These tools are easy to use and force the solver to reconsider the problem. For example, ‘Sydney is too dark’ could be interrogated and reconsidered as ‘grey is used too much on building facades’. This identifies a more specific and solvable problem. The solutions were focused on the end user by storyboarding their journey through Sydney CBD to identify pain points during their trip.
The most innovative solution was awarded to one team who came up with the idea of creating mobile data black spots around parks and common areas, such as Martin Place and George Street. This solution would force people to interact with each other, increasing the sense of community in the CBD.
Director of Engineering and Design at Data61 Bill Simpson-Young, nominated the above concept as his personal favourite. “I particularly like the approach of providing a subtractive rather than an additive solution” Mr Simpson-Young said. “It focuses on taking away the problem instead of creating something new”.
Do you have an exciting idea on what engineers can do to tackle the future of design in Sydney? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please email Young Engineers Sydney.
Photo: Young Engineers Australia Sydney team with guest judges at the Design Thinking Workshop. (L – R) Aurelie Bazard, Confluence Design Lead at Atlassian | Beck Dawson, Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Sydney | Lisa Thom, Structural Engineer at Lendlease | Greg Ewing, General Manager of Engineers Australia Sydney | Isabel Duffy, Structural Engineer at Northrop Consulting Engineers | Bill Simpson-Young, Director of Engineering and Design at Data61 | Becc Roach, Workshop Facilitator and Senior Designer at Atlassian and Desiree Conceicao, Designer at Atlassian. Photo courtesy Chris Morgan from Atlassian.