Engineering Matters is two years old!
For the past 24 months we have been telling stories about engineering that is solving some of the world’s biggest challenges from technology to stop the spread of COVID 19 to renewable energy and prevention of flooding. To celebrate this momentous milestone the team has chosen their five favourite episodes and given some unique behind the scenes insight about their picks.
Do you agree with our choices? If you’d like to let us know which your favourite episode is, please let us know via twitter, LinkedIn or email.
And to help you make your choice, here is our free-to-access archive, containing every episode from the past two years.
Thank you for listening
Enjoy
1) Episode #26: Saving Rossington
By Bernadette Ballantyne
Listen here: https://bit.ly/31FtfzQ
When someone tells you that a road is their saviour it really makes you realise how critical infrastructure is, and what valuable work engineers do every day. I went up to the old mining town of Rossington near Doncaster expecting to do some technical interviews about sustainable development, but I found myself surrounded by local people like Ken and John who told me that that times were desperate, that there were no jobs, that they felt cut off from the rest of the world, until a new 4km access road was built that transformed life in the village connecting it to Doncaster, Sheffield, the local airport, a massive new logistics hub and the M18 motorway. The interviews were all so amazing that the story told itself but what really made this podcast come to life was the music that my colleague Jon selected. The boom time for Rossington was the 1980s and so he selected electropop tunes that really helped us understand where the people of Rossington were coming from. I love this episode and big thanks to consultant Mott MacDonald who told us all about it.
2) Episode #28: Building for Biodiversity
By Bernadette Ballantyne
Listen here: https://bit.ly/31CZY8F
When ecologist Caroline Maghanga shared a post on LinkedIn that explained just how hard ecologists on construction projects work in spring we wanted to find out more about what was keeping her so busy. This led to the first podcast with animal sound effects! And it also led to the discovery that the government is trying to push through a new law that will force any project that needs planning permission to improve the biodiversity on their site, a requirement known as “Biodiversity Net Gain”.
This means that new projects are now a real opportunity for environmental regeneration instead of potential destruction. I only hope that this law will be extended in future to cover nationally significant infrastructure projects approved by the central government Planning Inspectorate.
3) Episode #32: The Untold Story of Eiffel and his Tower
By Bernadette Ballantyne
Listen here: https://bit.ly/2VFE0OO
Three years ago on a bright spring day I walked along the Avenue de la Bordonnais in Paris approaching the Eiffel Tower. I was visiting the city with my son who had never been there before. As we got closer I saw flashes of gold and it wasn’t until we were just a few metres away from its curving iron legs that I could read the gold panels running around the perimeter of the first floor. Here, at the apex of the wrought iron legs, were the names of famous French scientists and engineers whose discoveries had changed the world. In an age where fame is often celebrated over substance, I was delighted to share with my son the names of these heroes of knowledge. Right then I knew that there was a lot more to the tower than met our eyes, I needed to find out more.
Thanks to Professor Andrew Saint and French architect and writer Bertrand Lemoine we uncovered a story of extremes – a story of engineering genius, mired in political controversy. But most crucially of all, in part thanks to structural expert Ender Ozkan of RWDI, we discovered that Gustav Eiffel was really the world’s first wind engineer and the designers of today’s tall buildings owe much of their understanding to Gustav Eiffel, a railway bridge engineer from Dijon in France.
4) Episode #43: Virtual Reality: transforming design
By Ross MacPherson
Listen here: https://bit.ly/2NLPA6y
This was the first episode that I got asked to work on when I first joined the Engineering Matters team back in October 2019, so it holds a special in my heart. Initially I assumed that Virtual Reality (VR) was a leisure tool and I didn’t realise the presence it has within the engineering industry. It was great to learn how the implementation of VR saves time on project completion, how it identifies potential errors efficiently (therefore saving money on construction re-work) and how it offers great collaborative features for design teams.
I also wasn’t expecting it be so much fun to make. When driving to Peterborough to interview Anglian Water about their experiences of using VR within the delivery process of their projects, I didn’t think I would be trying on a VR headset myself, but I did! To my surprise, Mark Hedges (digital strategy manager for Anglian Water) and Tony Palmer (digital asset creation project and VR lead for Anglian Water) had a full VR experience laid out in front of me to try out.
I hope you enjoyed listening to the episode as much as I did making it!
5) Episode #57: Printing versus the pandemic: Covid 19
By Alex Conacher
Listen here: https://bit.ly/31D0TpD
As the newest member of the team my choice of episodes was more limited. For most of us the past few months have been lived in lockdown, sheltering at home from the pandemic, so my choice of episode had to be our look at the mass response to 3D-print PPE of the NHS.
In this episode I spoke with Tony Thompson, an Engineering and Electrical Assessor at Northampton College and former navy engineer who was printing shield in his ‘man cave’, or as his wife Lyn Thompson thought of it, the conservatory!
We were just getting used to recording interviews remotely, and if you listen carefully you might be able to catch the whirring of Tony’s equipment as it churned out another face shield. Sound quality rightly matters less than PPE!
I also talked to Mark Hester, Technology Directory at The Imagination Factory, who was similarly producing face shields for the NHS. He had worked with and followed 3D printing for 30 years and brought it back to the pandemic again as he mused that we might finally see the emergence of the de-centralised manufacturing ‘dream’ as a result of Covid.
It made a lot of sense locked up at home, deprived of hand sanitiser and flour, waiting for the shipments from China to resume.
The episode started at a very human level and worked its way up to the structure of global trade, while showing that the two are one and the same. It’s my favourite.
