Today’s engineering challenges are veering away from the “bigger, faster, taller” extremes of the last decades and heading more towards lower impact design. Designers are including the use of building materials from renewable sources, using efficient and affordable materials.
Engineering responsibilities include working with familiar materials in new ways, such as using permanent styrofoam forms tethered together with rebar and filled with concrete for a well insulated, high mass building that is less costly to heat and cool. Given enough money and time, almost any engineering conundrum can be solved, but today’s engineer has to think like Henry Ford; constantly looking for a more efficient method or material.
A new outlook from new talent can help see a “problem” as an “opportunity”. When the engineers at IBM developed the computer, they had no idea that something like “FaceBook” would ever develop. It took looking at the situation from a completely different angle. Mark Zuckerberg was a person whose life had always been impacted by the personal computer. He can hardly remember a time when they weren’t around. Because his connection to computers was so personal, he managed to come up with a “social” method of interacting over a “network” of computers (aka the internet), something else the IBM engineers of the forties and fifties had no way of imagining at the time.
One way to share ideas and meet like minded engineers is to attend an engineering conference, such as “Engineering Unplugged”, an annual “green engineering” conference hosted by Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Events like this green technology event, bring together some of the strongest voices in environmentalism and engineering to lead round table discussions and show leading edge technology and groundbreaking advances in “green technology”, “green engineering”, and “green practices”. Green engineering conventions are one of the ways green designs get turned into green applications.