This week televised ceremonies announced the Australian Engineering Excellence Award winners. Once again, the engineers and engineering were invisible. Just like the tunnel photograph. Tunnels are invisible from the outside, and we pass through them in darkness.
Here is the Create Magazine article that announced the winners. I read it and immediately noticed that both the engineers and the engineering were absent from the stories and photographs. None of the photographs of the winning achievements show any people, let alone the engineers whose efforts we are supposed to celebrate. There is little about the value generated by these achievements. None of the descriptions tell us inspiring inside stories from the inside. Other than the implication that these were recently completed projects, there is not even much we can discern about the reasons these achievements were chosen ahead of others.
These awards could be such an amazing opportunity to engage with our community, especially the opportunity to inspire school children thinking about engineering as a career. Naturally, with some achievements representing combined efforts by perhaps hundreds or thousands of engineers, it's not possible to tell the full story in a series of online articles for short attention spans.
Most of the real challenges in these achievements were just as much about people and relationships as finding technical solutions, the stuff of fascinating human stories. Stories waiting to be told.
Think of the money spent on video presentations for every division, and how much more benefit we as a profession could have gained if only we had seized the opportunity to inspire a new generation of young Australian engineers.And we wonder why engineering is not the profession of choice! Well, there's always next year….