My director maintained that the best way to design something was the same way that it had always been done. He did not subscribe to trendy notions that innovating new and better methods was a central tenet of engineering. What left an impression on me greater than the bruise from his oversized signet ring was the fact that I had just transferred in from the Channel Tunnel project where computers were already being used by many engineers. Circa 1989: Tunnel Boring Machine inching through a subterranean cavern.
Piloted by laser and computer.
Ironically it was only two years earlier that the English and French tunnelling crews of Europe's largest megaproject had been confident that their tunnelling machines were following their correct courses. That was until a team of German surveyors using a new technology revealed significant discrepancies. The Germans' equipment aligned itself to the earth's magnetic poles rather than relying on optics - which were known to be subject to lateral refraction errors within tunnels. The alignment discrepancies were such that without correction the English and French tunnels driven from either side of the Channel would never have joined together. New transition curves were urgently issued to bring the boring machines back on line. A new and better method had literally saved the day.
As a subsequent boss explained; "You cannot blame a blind man for having no vision." One suspects my Design Director saw computers merely as an expensive luxury which had never been needed for design before - so why start now ? He could not see their potential beyond this. His personal justification was that he had never seen computer input or output which he could understand or which could be corroborated. This therefore rendered it all both unintelligible and useless. The fact that other engineers could understand and corroberate the computer data was irrelevant to him and heaven forbid he should learn how to understand computer data for himself. In truth he wanted to see a familiar calculation which he could instantly recognise. Most disappointingly; his seniority meant he was not obliged to make an effort to understand something new - he would simply rather dismiss it.
This was after all the early 90s when, if you searched for 'Boring' in the Yellow Pages it read unapologetically; 'See Civil Engineers'.
In truth almost any other profession was more glamorous. Design offices were staffed by unshowered men doused in Brut 33 who had smoked the day's first cigarette while commuting in their company Vauxhall Cavalier. They sported the untamed sideburns of The Sweeney with the intricate combovers of a public school French teacher. Office relationships provided the mainstream gossip; the Chief Engineer who just married some dreary nun from Accounts, the thrusting young junior secretly romancing someone curvy in Architecture while ostensibly dating someone leggy in Admin. Not forgetting the incorrigible CAD draughtsman who was 40, looked 30 and wooed the typing pool like he was 20.
Typical drawing office circa 1990
The people were actually more colourful than the photo suggests.
It was a time when engineers were all men working at drawing boards while the women were all secretaries working at keyboards. Most drawings were still prepared with pen and ink, explaining why half an engineer's day was spent cursing under his breath while patiently scratching off the ink with a razor blade to reposition one detail to squeeze in another. Most consultants still had their own libraries staffed by young, chatty librarians with whom you could practice your lamentable social skills over lunch. Offices were filled with files, folders and drawing scrolls making every day a competition for shelf space. The in-house canteen subsidised High Mortality Lunches, corporate-branded ashtrays adorned the desks and, although they were now hung discretely, the walls still exhibited glossy swimwear calendars from Pirelli and Ready Mixed Concrete.
That's not to say this was a place without human kindness. Twice a year you were invited to donate blood after which, if you passed out unconscious on your drawing board, someone would thoughtfully prop you up with a few volumes of the Steel Designers Manual to prevent you sliding off the end of the board and pitching head-first off your stool towards the floor.
Modern design office - no calendars necessary
The picture is happily very different today; the design office is no longer a place you can be cuffed, bawled at or thrown out of. The sideburns, combovers and company cars have given way to close shaves, a #2 trim and a good, sturdy road bike. Staff now shower on arrival before selecting a desk next to buddies where they percolate freshly ground coffee while gently exuding wafts of peppermint body wash.
Drawing boards and paper have been replaced entirely by clusters of monitors while meeting rooms have largely given way to personal video conferencing tech. Business travel is reducing since the development of millimetre-precise 3D digital models of project sites. These are reconstructed from millions of data points collected by drone and automated surveys. They allow engineers to peer together into the same virtual model from displays in their own offices. Alternatively they can suit up with virtual reality goggles, step into their Immersion Rooms and enter the model virtually together. Perhaps now more than ever, engineering is a place where new technologies are continuously assessed for their potential to improve the quality of the project.
Of course, it is not unusual that when a whole industry moves forward, someone inevitably gets left behind. It is however particularly frustrating when the stragglers turn out to be the most powerful parts of the whole process; namely the regulators.
Modern projects are subject to extensive regulation, eg; environmental, planning, building and fire regulation to name just a few. Projects require close review by multiple, often disjointed, always overloaded government departments through which a project has to wind and grind its way laboriously towards approval. After the project gains overall consent, then the months stretch into years as the fine details of the project are examined more closely; the soil investigation, the foundation design, the structures, the fire sprinklers, etc, etc. The claws come out when one regulatory department refuses to accept a design feature until another dept accepts it first. Then the fur really starts to fly if one department declines to accept something which was already accepted by another. The pitfalls are endless and project managers all wear the scars of the lessons learned.
This June finally saw Hong Kong's Building Dept (BD) "… spearhead the development…" of a platform for electronic submission of building applications; albeit for a rather narrow range of above-ground-only building works.
Alas, documentation for every other type of project still has to be submitted as multiple copies of huge packages of paper drawings, calculations and reports. A visit to the inner sanctum of a Building Officer often reveals tables, desks and filing cabinets piled high with towers of these submissions. Even more lay stacked on the floor under every desk, behind and beside every chair. One unfortunate sneeze would be sufficient to bury a Building Officer clutching his 14" square monitor under a landslide of paper sufficient to crush the life out of him.
When Building Consent is finally given, it is invariably conditional upon drawings, calculation and rpeorts being amended by hand inside the Building Dept office. Amending a submission of ~100 documents can require engineers to toil for up to a week, standing hunched over documents for 14 hours per day, Tippexing-out details, to ink in revisions. In terms of 'Now and Then' some regulators are still living in 'Then', ie; the 13th Century, when work like this was only ever seen in monasteries.
Over the years the reach of many regulators has grown beyond their original remits, so it becomes incumbent on them to develop or hire the necessary expertise to review the new types of designs coming under their control. Composites such as Glass Fibre Reinforced Plastic have been used structurally for decades on ships and aircraft. It is somehow sublime for a building regulator in 2020 to advise that he does not know how to validate the structural integrity of GRP in a building and even more ridiculous to suggest that the GRP structure must therefore be supported by a steel frame which be does know how to validate. Similarly if a 6m high concrete ring beam is designed to support a huge machine, it is somewhat cheeky to insist that the ring beam must be redesigned as four separate concrete walls because this is the limit of the regulator's experience.
This is a precariously delicate age; the legacies of the 20th Century have created unprecedented competition for space and resources, not to mention an as-yet ununcertain impact on the environment. In an ideal world every project would strive to use the most efficient design, the safest methods and materials which are sourced as locally as possible in order to minimise their footprint. Regulatory bodies would not only ensure that projects meet minimum code requirements, they would be open to the latest innovations, embrace them and arguably even drive those which have a positive impact. After all, motorists would not buy new cars designed to the minimum standards of a decade ago, so why should we accept new buildings whose design has not improved on a 20 year old code ?
Regulators potentially have a huge role to play in setting new, higher and better expectations from all developers, rather than merely ensuring that new projects meet the same standards as everything which went before. This is a tone which needs to be set from the top and aimed at developers from the outset. While the minions in a regulatory body may well have the knowledge and appetite to embrace new ideas, this means nothing if they are not encouraged to raise such ideas through their seniors. Hence a culture of rewarding initiatives at the grass roots level is another tone which has to be set from the top.
Back in the real world many regulators are either still trying to play catch-up or simply not trying at all. For the time being Project Managers need to remain philosophical that the regulators have a job to do, even though they do it with no accountability for the cost or time impacts that their deliberations have on a project. Meanwhile engineers need to remain philosophical as they learn never again to design something differently to how it has always been designed before. The Building Officer can be philosophical that when a new design finally resembles previous approved designs, it may not be an improvement on anything which went before, but at least his senior will not cuff him over the back of the head for presenting something new.
Ultimately, the regulation process makes philosophers of us all.
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