Blogged too soon... CEng!

Breaking news - within an hour of that last post going up, I received confirmation from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers that I've been elected to Membership of the institution. I'm officially approved to be a chartered engineer. This is a really, really big deal for me.

In practical terms, the main difference it makes is that I pay a higher subscription fee, and I can be struck off as a Chartered Engineer if I don't abide by the code of conduct. That might not seem like a big deal, but it is. In the UK (unlike some other countries), engineer is not a protected title - anyone can term themselves an engineer. So, though I've always said for the last nineteen years that I was an engineer, on paper, at least, I was just the owner of two engineering qualifications, both over 11 years old who worked in academia and taught engineering. So, I doubt many would quibble with my describing myself as an engineer, but there's no guarantee that I'm a good engineer, or a safe engineer.

Chartered Engineer on the other hand, is a protected title. You can be prosecuted for claiming to be chartered if you aren't, so having chartered status acts as a badge of quality assurance. It also commits you to a code of conduct which includes continuing professional development, and to not making claims that are beyond your expertise. Just because I studied thermodynamics sixteen years ago and can still give you the basic principles, doesn't make me competent to design a complex heating system. So in some ways, just as you would expect a surgeon, or a doctor, or a lawyer who abused their position or misbehaved to be struck off, a Chartered Engineer can. Unlike a qualification, chartered status is something that has to be maintained.

The Engineering Council offers a good discussion of these issues and why they haven't pushed for engineer to be a protected title here:

https://www.engc.org.uk/glossary-faqs/frequently-asked-questions/status-of-engineers/

Why does this matter so much to me? I'm an academic, so CEng status is largely, well, academic. I teach on a Product Design programme, I don't need to be chartered to do my job. Yet, it ties in strongly with the whole concept of the Engineering Imagination. About what engineering is for, and why we do it. I've increasingly come to think of engineering as an identity, not just a profession: a way of looking at the world, for better or for worse.

Anyway, enough rambling - I just think it dovetails nicely into the writing I hope to do here on the Engineering Imagination. Here's to an interesting summer on the blog...

weeks commencing 11th July: Back to the Imagination

A slightly belated update - largely because holiday, graduations, and meetings haven't left me a lot of time to write, and partly because there isn't much to say of great interest. PSAT (the postural sway assessment tool) continues to tick along nicely - some of the key technical hurdles that I feared we'd hit have proven surmountable, so it's looking very promising. I've grappled with LabVIEW simulations to put the finishing touches to a paper, and with MS Project as I put together a gantt chart for an EPSRC proposal (a very involved process, since it's inevitably only in putting the gantt chart together that you spot a lot some of the issues that arise - this is where tools such as MS Project or Open Proj are much, much better than just drawing bars in Word or Excel).

Perhaps the most interesting thing that has cropped up in the last couple of weeks, have been discussions with people like Stuart Murray and Sita Popat on robots and their applications, on phenomenology, which have had me thinking once again about the Engineering Imagination - the concept that really started this blog. Between Margrit Schildrik's talk, a robot being used to deliver a bomb to kill in a police operation and attending the Robotic Surgery workshop, and picking up a copy of "Think Like an Engineer" that I spotted in Blackwell's opposite the University, I've been coming back to a lot of the issues around intent in engineering, and the time seems ripe to start unpacking that a little more, and I'd like to do that on the blog this summer. I had set myself the task of reading up on some of these issues again, but I thought that actually, it would be better for me to give my gut response first, and then do the reading up. So (touch wood), I'll be putting in some extra blog posts that contain some of my musings on these issues, rather than just updates on my week...

w/c 4th July: Back in the Saddle

It's been a busy week, but at least it's been a week of kicking things off for the summer. My PhD student Oscar Giles is now starting a 7-month placement rebuilding the postural sway assessment tool developed as part of Ian Flatters' PhD. We're under way with two networks, and I've been starting on a particularly exciting paper (alas - the details will remain on the QT until it's published!). I've been finalising a fellowship proposal - though this has largely meant grappling with first Open Project and then MS Project. It's not exciting, but it's a good discipline, and one you're very, very glad of when you actually get funding and suddenly have to deliver!
    Most significant, though were a lecture from Margrit Shildrik on Rethinking Prostheses and a workshop on Robotic Surgery. Both thought-provoking and interesting, and both more than I can write up here. I think they'll each take a  blogpost in their own right...

Busy, Busy, Busy

I was going to call this post "The Beginning of the End", in honour of the gradual winding down that occurs as exhibitions and exams finish. So manic has this period been, however, that it has now wound down and, er, ended before I got round to pressing send. Such is blogging: there is an irony that when things are at their most interesting, you're too busy to blog. At times like this, micro-blogging through Twitter is a lifeline - a reminder that you haven't died, fallen off a cliff or fallen seriously ill (and it is now fully twelve months since I returned to work!).

But why have I been so busy? Exams, coursework, exhibitions, of course. Exam boards, too. This week has seen course and module reviews, not to mention planning for the summer, and the background chaos of our current politics, which is hard to avoid - especially as it increasingly resembles an episode of House of Cards or Game of Thrones. Truly, these are interesting times.

This week has been one of those liminal spaces that crop up in academic life. The exams rush suddenly over, you emerge into the summer - things that have been dropped must be picked up, new projects started. Planning is frustrating, and not very rewarding, but very necessary. I learned long ago that you can't just drop your teaching and work on the first (or most interesting) piece of research that comes along.

It hasn't all been planning. After much effort, we've finally got a multidisciplinary reading group together, which has now met three times, involving Stuart Murray from English and Sita Popat from Performing Arts. Its focus is on technology and the body, particularly in terms of post humanism. We've read and discussed Johnny Mnemonic, Tony Prescott's response to the EPSRC principles of robotics, and Louis Bucciarelli's Between Thought and Object in Engineering Design. Some great and varied pieces - I'll try to get my thoughts written up here at some point. It's been a great experience, very thought provoking, and good to get the views of other disciplines. It has also won us  small amount of funding from the University for a series of seminars on Augmenting the Body over the next academic year. It should be good.

I'm also part of an AHRC network on the Technical and Ethical challenges of Electronic Tagging, focusing on offenders, dementia patients and children with Anthea Hucksleby (Professor of Law), Kevin Macnish  (researcher on the ethics of surveillance), and Justin Keen (healthcare). You'll notice that I'm getting closer to a full house on my multidisciplinary bingo card...

Anyway, we're organising a series of workshops over the next academic year  (it's going go be a busy academic year...), and held our first proper meeting to plan it his week. We held on til after the referendum, in the hopes it would provide some clarity.  Much help that was!

So that's this week. Next week, it shifts to being all about delivery: I'm looking forward to it!