Ep. 14 - Emphasising the ‘A’ in STEAM: How a Passion for Fine Art led to Human Factors Engineering

And I think that one of the things I do love about my degree is that we were constantly... taught to recognise the importance of listening and the importance of really being able to understand whether it's the person, whether it's your client or a customer or someone who is interacting with what you're making or someone in the community or the context of where you're creating and it's, I think, something that's hard to measure and hard to quantify and therefore it's sometimes just ignored.

It's been stressed a lot to me, which I'm grateful for.

Some of the projects that I've really enjoyed where I've got to sort of deviate out that stereotypical engineering realm, there's been a few.

I got to explore mycelium compounds a lot so that was creating whether it's sort of insulation boards or basically materials from organic waste in mycelium which is the sort of root structure of fungus and you can create some very very interesting compounds from coffee grounds or coconut husks they can have compressive strength stronger than concrete relative to their weight, they can be fireproof, waterproof and that whole theme of biomimicry is I think something that you're seeing more and more and definitely something that I didn't appreciate before I got involved into engineering.

I explored ceramics a wee bit so making bone china from oyster shells instead of bone ash Growing up on the west coast of Scotland we are sort of known for our oysters and shellfish.

It makes me quite homesick being here in Manchester sometimes.

But we're very lucky to have that.

It's a very important part of our ecosystem.

I got the opportunity to do a food project in uni and I selected these oysters that I enjoyed quite regularly when I was home and by processing them and then turning them into ceramics, And then firing them on the beach in front of where those oysters actually grow on the west coast of Scotland was not only a sort of holistic engineering process, but it was pointing towards that circular economy and that consideration of the full life cycle that is recognised as being as important in sustainability these days.

And then this led me to my master's project,

which

was... using a bioluminescent algae um so i'm sure you'll see lots of fun videos where people are splashing about the water it's very

pretty isn't it it's got a lovely lovely look and everyone likes the look of it and hopefully they go and visit and

yes yeah go

and see the bioluminescence

so i thought that was an incredible thing and and felt a bit left out.

So I figured, let's try and bring that here.

And so I created a sort of a kinetic sculpture.

It's the fancy art school way of saying an object that moves, but doesn't do much else.

But it was designed to act as sort of a mix of an aquarium which can hold these living organisms and utilise that sort of physical motion in a way to directly take sort of kinetic energy and through chemical processes turn it into light which with no waste heat, which you can't really do with any electronics or modern technology.

You can only really do that from an organism.

Yeah, the engineering in life itself, right?

Exactly, yeah.

It's interesting to see around you.

People would laugh and say it was just my way of avoiding doing coding and any sort of complex calculations.