Making space to engineer profitable 'playtime'

Seminar aims to get the slide rule set to think like creative artists, writes Gabrielle Monaghan.

A decade before The Da Vinci Codereawakened the reading public's interest in the Renaissance artist, Bill Gates paid $30.8 million (€23.1 million) for 18 pages of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. When the Microsoft founder bought The Codex Leicester in 1994, he described it as "a monument to scientific curiosity and innovation".

For da Vinci, a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer and scientist, creativity was a function of the marriage of art and science. It is this creative dynamic that forms the basis of a seminar being held in Dublin today by Engineers Ireland as the professional body aims to inspire innovation in a significant area of Ireland's knowledge economy.

The seminar, entitled The Art of Innovation - Engineering your Way up the Value Chain, will feature talks from artists such as Kevin O'Dwyer, a former biochemist best known for abstract sculptures that blur the boundaries between fine art and craft, and Niamh Shaw, an engineer and comedian, to highlight the creative similarities between art and engineering in the area of innovation.

The engineering body, which boasts almost 22,000 members, is striving to harness creativity in the profession to help Ireland ward off a growing threat from Asian economies that are moving aggressively into high-tech sectors.

"At the research and development and the marketing and sales ends of the supply chain, we've got to become more innovative to get ahead of the Far East, which is already in the middle of the chain with manufacturing," said Una Parsons, industry director with Engineers Ireland.

Engineering a Knowledge Island 2020, a report published last year by a task force that included Engineers Ireland, found that, if Ireland was to achieve its goal of becoming one of the world's top five economies by 2020, the State would need to increase the number of engineers almost threefold to 110,000.

"The key message for engineers at this seminar is that they need to take time out to innovate and be creative, even if it's on the back of an envelope," Parsons said. "We've become so used to using systems and automation. For engineers to get ideas, they need to be stimulated in lots of different ways and looking at the art world is a way for them to be stimulated."

O'Dwyer, who works with Bord na Móna engineers and artists to create sculptures in the cut-away bogs near Lough Boora, Co Offaly, agrees that time and space for creativity are paramount in engineering innovation.

"Under the pressure of the Celtic Tiger, there is little time to stand back from your work and develop new concepts," he said. "If engineers are working for a company, which they usually are, it's the firm's responsibility to give them a sabbatical or time during the week to work on new ideas and concepts instead of being under pressure constantly.

"Between the sixth and ninth century, there was great innovation in Ireland in the use of bronze and gold but people were not under the same pressure then. People working on the Book of Kells were very innovative but they too had all the time in the world.

"I need time myself to be innovative. When my daughter was 10 or 11, every time I asked her to do a manual task, she told me that all I did was sit in my studio and play!" O'Dwyer's "playtime" resulted in artwork that features in permanent collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.

He designed the cast glass and hand-forged silver Grand Prix Trophy for the Eurovision Song Contest in 1995 and was commissioned by former president Mary Robinson to make State gifts for Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton.

The artist's talk at the seminar will focus on alchemy and how early alchemists had the power to transform something common into "something special". Other speakers at the seminar will include Cathy Lasser, vice-president of industry solutions and emerging business at IBM in New York, who will provide an insight into the successful applications of innovation in the high-tech sector.

During the one-day event, Engineers Ireland will also host its first innovation awards and present honours for Innovation Engineer of the Year and Innovation Company of the Year. Entrants to the competition range from students and local authorities to large multinationals, according to Ms Parsons. The awards have been designed by students from the National College of Art and Design.

"The more you promote and showcase innovation in engineering, the more innovation will take place," she said.