16 December 2009

Has complexity killed the engineering bug?

Over dinner with some friends, I'd gotten into a discussion about my earliest motivations to get into engineering and computer science / computing systems.

The conversation read like a page right out of the engineer's playbook. Boy gets curious; finds an early fascination with how things work; boy begins taking things apart to quell that curiosity (mindlessly ignoring the steps involved in putting them back together – dinner guests laugh); boy gets computer; learns to bang out Assembler; graduates to C & other high level languages. Rinse. Repeat. All the way through high school and on to college.

Then, the conversation took a decidedly darker turn. A turn towards what our kids do. Or rather, what kids – in general – don't do any more. "Too much time in front of the TV" or "too many video games" or "they just don't go outside like we used to"… "I can remember when…," etc, etc, etc.

The story is all too familiar on just about every continent and in any developed economy just about anywhere in the world.

Now as a parent, I'm blessed with a bright, talented child who, like I, shows a deep interest in the way things work. And as a good parent, I have sought to encourage my child and nurture his interests. I have also tried passionately to show him some of things that got me excited when I was his age, like pet projects that do some simple function or small applications. But after all my efforts, what I found was an even greater challenge than I had imagined.

Not only did he not praise me (as I had no doubt expected) for my cleverness in designing what must have been the greatest of all Theremins, or my totally engaging console-style multi-user dungeon application. No, he yawned! Yes. Yawned. And more than once. The LED drivers? Not having it. Laser Diodes were a curiosity that didn't go far.

I kept losing him, leaving me to rethink even my own motivations.

But just when the clouds rolled in, a ray of light shone through (kinda).

My problem isn't with what I'm creating (well, at least in part); my problem is what I'm competing against! It isn't that kids have no innate curiosity or interest in how things work, or even the patience to try and tackle them. But the skills required to compete with what we lay at their feet are in the hands of a different class of engineer altogether.

They are no longer the domain of the enthusiast. They are now solely the domain of the truly skilled, highly educated, engineering elite. And anything we might have created even 15 years ago is dwarfed by the tremendous advances in technology since.

And this brings me to my point.

We need to continue the trend toward making engineering accessible again, for a younger generation. Development boards and development systems, high level IP, even software IP are all converging on this. Compare Adobe Flash or designing games with DirectX & XNA with trying to do the same thing in C++ or worse yet, C. Compare Visual Basic today to the Visual Basic even 10 years ago and you'll see we are getting there. We are just in that low period where the enthusiast and the engineering elite are on quite different footings. What we need is the VB for electronics development. And though we might not be there yet, I'm positive we will get there. And engineering will woo a whole new generation of kids with wandering eyes and minds into a world limited only by their imaginations.

About the author
Matthew Berggren has more than 10 years experience in electronics design. Prior to Altium, Matthew gained experience in a number of engineering positions, including roles as a Systems Engineer, Product Manager, Electrical Engineer, and Software Developer. He currently holds the position of Master Electronics Designer and Customer Success Manager at Altium Limited and can be contacted at matthew.berggren@altium.com.

Author
Matthew Berggren, master electronics designer and customer success manager, Altium

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Couldn't agree more. I think Arduino and other entry level micros are filling the space quite nicely in fact. When I first discovered/read about it, I thought to myself "This silly little processor can't do anything!". But then seeing the projects it has been used in and seeing the community that has built up around it, I've changed my mind into the usefulness of such a device. I think the community in particular will help "raise" the next gen of engineers..."it takes a village" and all that. Maybe get an Arduino dev kit and watch some videos on MAKE with your son to see all the cool things people do with them everyday? Seeing the tangible benefits of what you CAN create has been a great driver for me and I'm sure it is for any burgeoning young engineer. ~Chris Gammell

- Chris Gammell, 16/12/2009

Hi Chris, I totally agree about the Arduino! I’ve seen these little things in action (YouTube’s also got some great videos of them) and they are definitely clever. (I wonder how the Propeller - the nephew of the once pervasive STAMP controllers - will fit into that future, as Parallax was always targeting the enthusiast). And I guess I keep asking myself the question: can we be thinking bigger? Or better: just what does this future look like if we look forward say 10 years or even 5? And where I see the shift coming is from ‘function to experience’. Let me explain: Video chat with a webcam is a great example of an experience. Completely ignoring the underlying implementation details, when I want to chat via skype or messenger, the webcam is a part of my ‘experience’ or how I interact with my system (but it’s both not the experience itself, nor does it make up the entirety of the ‘system’ that’ll make that experience possible). Now functionally, we all know that the webcam or video chat requires a pretty complex series of system elements. You have USB hardware and software, you have the camera / sensor, a DSP to process the image, probably some software to adjust exposure and perhaps some more to zoom, the PC side is also overrun with communications and processing, etc. All of these are ‘functional’ elements of the system or ‘functions’ that get you to the experience. As we’ve evolved in engineering I’d argue our mindset around ‘how to engineer’ is still rooted in the ‘functions = experience’ model and at such a low level, the attraction is marred by the complexity or sophistication of the systems. We determine the experience we want to create, then we divide up the system like a dealer dealing out hands. We then faithfully attack each element with great vigor and precision and the result, though no doubt brilliant, can take fantastically long and often requires specialist skills far outside of the domain of the enthusiast… Now my thinking is, all of this needs to shift and it IS shifting. Think of Rabbit Semi’s Ethernet modules or (as you pointed out, Chris) the Arduinos that come pre-packed with functions. Where I see the shift is from what is still too low a system level, to something higher up the function-experience slope. I imagine development systems (whole systems) that prepackage capability as an experience that is then customized to the application. So Video Chat is what I’m implementing and not Camera->Processing->PC->Comms->Internet. Of course those details can still be exposed (giving the system depth for those that still want to dive off the cliff, and something that doesn’t stifle that deeper understanding) but to really capture imaginations of even the youngest kids, I would love nothing more than to see them sit on a PC, pull together the webcam bit, the USB bit, the “chat” bit as blocks of hardware, software -- all the IP in a single block -- and literally assemble a system in hours and not weeks or months. And think then the impact this could have on engineering as a whole (were this model to become more pervasive). As we mock up projects the way marcom teams mock up mailers…The customer wants a, b, & c? Okay, give me the afternoon to pull something like that together and then let’s start feeling out the shortcomings of the system. Imagine bidding on jobs when you’re the guy that shows up 24 hours after the RFQ goes out, with a functional system comprised of the experiences you want to create. And I really think we are converging on this…And it’s really exciting to see it happening! How many great ideas never see the light of day because conflicting priorities, a lack of time, or the learning curve just keeps them steadily out of reach of even the career engineer? If one could rely on complete system elements as we do off the shelf parts (recall, it wasn’t that long ago that our PCBs were dotted with far more individual devices performing fewer and fewer functions per device than they are today) and those elements were designed in such a way as to simply ‘fit together’ (interface standards and APIs in software and hardware have all sought to achieve this, in their own domains…but there’s still an evolution that needs to occur here) then the opportunity to make this universally accessible and relevant to both engineer and enthusiast is indeed possible!

- Matt Berggren, 18/12/2009

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