Human fascination with 3-D printing – extruding plastic, sintering metals, and layering custom wax moulds – continues onto the realms of food, ink, and stuff.
Strucut3D Printing in Kitchener hit its Kickstarter campaign goal of $30k for a paste extrusion attachment (Discov3ry Extruder) for consumer desktop 3D printers. It allows users to print with soft materials, including wood filler, silicone, clay, and Nutella. It costs $249 and will ship in September. Supposedly its advantages over the competition include a shorter clean-up time.
Meanwhile, an ink pen (Scribble) has been invented that, theoretically, would let you doodle in any colour in the world. It costs $150 and is not available for sale yet. An RGB sensor on the pen works in conjunction with a five-color ink cartridge, allowing artists to color-match any real-life object. Hopefully it works better than the foundation matching cameras at Sephora and will still write in black after the yellow cartridge runs empty.
Have you ever noticed that few of these made-for-clickbait products are ever in the realm of civil, environmental, and geological engineering? It’s tragic. What gets the most most exposure nowadays are toy-like gadgets gimmicky enough for Fox Morning News hosts to understand while staving off xanthine alkaloids withdrawal symptoms. Don’t get me started with apps. Seems like there’s an app for everything. My brickphone and I are practically Luddites nowadays.
I think the closest thing I’ve seen to C/E/G Engineering news lately is that couple who made an IndieGoGo campaign for roads paved with solar panels. So far, they’ve built a prototype parking lot with funding from the US Federal Highway Administration.
But looking at the investment that the University of Waterloo puts into its promotional materials, how often do civil engineers make the front page of UW promotional materials? How often are Civils mentioned on Macleans?
(Hint: we’re not. Going solely by media exposure, Civils don’t exist in the Silicon Valley of the North, except as potential janitors.)
Furthermore, when’s the last time Civils got new buildings? The CEE offices are in the oldest and most poorly climate controlled buildings on campus. The 4th year civil dungeons are reliably freezing. The second-floor civil lab vacillates between swampy and frigid.
Perhaps civil engineering is simply not considered a very marketable academic path? Civils get most of the dirtiest jobs. Civils at work are covered in dirt, cement bits, and are not sexy. In a recent GradComm calendar, the Civils were represented by two individuals wearing business casual shirts, pants, and hardhats. In contrast, ManEng was represented by four women in suits and dangerously low-cut tops. I am pretty sure that there were also some nice shirtless men for other programs (I believe there was also one representative from mechatronics, doing a kegstand, but I digress). Perhaps in the next GradComm calendar, Civils should take some inspiration from the Bloodhound Gang video for “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” and wear hardhats, eye protection, and not much else (maybe also a safety vest, for modesty). Nonetheless, the point I’m making is that civil engineering is not as sexy as, say, nano, or the incoming UW darlings, biomedical. Yeah, I definitely foresee Biomed all over the next few years of promotional materials. Shiny lab coats and gleaming glass pipettes and stuff. Not dusty asphalt or polluted lakes.
(I am also pretty jealous of everyone who goes to work in California. When I graduate I am going to spend two weeks there as a hipster, and then return and scoff about how everything there is overrated.)
What’s more is that civil engineering as a whole, does not have as innovative a reputation as, say, ECE or Nano. During my Jobmine search I found that maybe only three of the hundred-odd civil jobs in the GTA were research and development based. Which is not to say that requires no creativity – every civil engineering project is unique in its own way, presenting new challenges, new constraints, and a dizzying variety of potential solutions. But implementing these – experimentation costs money. With great money comes great bureaucracy. With great bureaucracy comes great discouragement. It is very sad.
Effectively pushing the frontiers of the field is more difficult in civil engineering. The solar panel paving project on IndieGoGo is the exception, not the rule. There are very, very few civil startups to cash in on what students might have developed under the shelter of an ivory tower. Angel investors would like to minimize capital investment and risk. But infrastructure projects are magnitudes more expensive than, say, a smartwatch firm or a new app developer. As such, innovations are harder to sell to investors and clients. Who wants to risk lives on untested technology? And slapping a factor of safety of 10 on new, untested materials is probably not cost efficient either. Conversely, what kind of investor wants to fund such exhaustive testing, when there’s a glut of software developers who might show a return on investment much more quickly?
I think only the likes of Elon Musk or Richard Branson might do so – and only for glamorous projects. Elon Musk proposed last year to implement a (flawed) Hyperloop high-speed transit system in California. I don’t think he would be too into methods of nondestructive testing methods or construction site safety management. Neither would Fox News anchors. They’d rather fiddle with their color-mixing pens and 3-D icing extrusion. I’m not sure what Richard Branson is doing nowadays but it’s probably more exciting than listening to a handful of nerds talk about concrete.
Indubitably, innovation is still present in civil engineering, although new techniques take longer to reach the industry due to longer development cycles. Long development cycles do have advantages. Long lead time means that civil engineering projects are unlikely to fail on the level of Windows ME or Google Plus. The infrastructure we design and construct will be around long after the last Nexus 5 has been sent to Wall-E for recycling.
It does take some seriously hard heads to persevere in civil engineering. The delay before gratification is far longer than in any other engineering discipline. One often feels like they are a cog in a machine, or at the very least, an obsessive-compulsive spec-reading super robot. Later on in one’s career, though, one may be able to hire a co-op student to do the manual work. Do you know what happens to older software engineers? The common opinion is that they peak early and are thus forcibly retired, because they can’t fit into the youthful culture in SoCal. In comparison, old civil engineers stick around, get crusty, and tell war stories to wide-eyed co-ops. They also either become extremely well dressed or start wearing muumuus and track suits to work.
I didn’t choose civil engineering to be innovative. I didn’t choose it so I could be rich either, since I have no intention of going to Alberta and Google still has no intention of hiring me as a janitor and feeding me to the gills. I chose it because I felt that I would be doing something useful. I thought I’d rather be a small fish in a big pond than a big fish in a small pond. I thought that I might be able to contribute something permanent to the fabric of the world, and then gloat silently as it performed useful functions day in, day out. Muahahahaha. In contrast, 3-D printing food is cute but is unlikely to lead to the next green revolution. 3-D printing in general is aimed at hobbyists and custom dildo makers. And that colour-matching ink pen is one of the stupidest, most useless gimmicks I’ve ever seen. Also Google is totally going downhill ever since it ditched Reader. I feel better about my life choices already.
Stay strong. Fewer than 250 days til IRS.
Leave a Reply