A Postcard for ENE

Roman Aqueduct over the Gard River, France retired November 9, 2010 from

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/44052812_a0e766a843.jpg

With the recent email we received from Loretta about submitting our personal postcard for the ENE department, I have been thinking back to the first day of class when we presented our personal pictures on what is engineering… So now we have to submit a postcard on what is ENE and on top of that what pictorially represents our ENE research… Quite a task.

As I sit with my laptop and look around the room, I think engineering has touched most of the things I am looking at, even my little pets are microchipped. Engineering has profoundly touched my life. But is it my life? Engineering is an integral part of my world, but is it the world? This made me start thinking about Jeff’s post about the “interrelatedness” or the importance of the concept of the meso-level of analysis when considering engineering. Engineering (as well as most human activities) both shapes and is shaped by society. It is between the micro (individual) and macro (societal) levels. While it impacts these two levels profoundly, it operates between the levels… I really appreciated Jeff’s picture of the bridge and then I started thinking about engineering as a bridge between the individual and the society. By and large, it is engineering that allows me to bridge my life between Purdue and my home in Dayton, Ohio… Engineering creates a bridge between my home office and the virtual world so that I can complete my work, and yet engineering is neither the origination nor the destination…

Thinking of Hadi’s elegant post, this brought to mind the image of the Roman aqueducts over the Gard river: the layers, the space, the tensions. These artifacts are beautiful representations of elegant solutions. Along with this, this bridge is a beautiful visual metaphor of structure and agency. The physical structure of the bridge is permanent (structure), but the water is fluid and changing (agency). For the most part the water, the water follows the rules and stays within its engineered parameters, but occasionally it overflows and at times, has been known to take out the entire structure…

Another visual representation that I like is that these arches are built on top of one another. They need each other to accomplish their task, and somehow, in this elegant solution and visual pattern, they seem to acknowledge and pay tribute to those who support them…

These mental meandering really bring me no closer to a single image that represents engineering, but I do love the visual image of this ancient elegant solution…