Thinking Big |
02/04/19
Taking inspiration from Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Thinking big to create greatness.
|
This morning I came across this article in the paper, as newly discovered letters written by Isambard Kingdom Brunel more than 175 years ago have been discovered. In them he expresses concern over pollution and shows awareness of the environmental impact he was having in industrialising Britain. It would be a stretch to call any Victorian engineer an environmentalist, but the letters provide a glimpse of genuine concern and suggest another way Britain's greatest engineer was way ahead of his time. I decided he deserved a blog post, and did some digging to see if his work could provide any insights on what makes great design.
The work for which Brunel is probably best remembered is his construction of a network of tunnels, bridges and viaducts for the Great Western Railway. Energetic and conscientious, Brunel involved himself in every aspect of the project from the route and track to the architecture of the stations and the decorative details. He had to pitch for the project against other engineers and presented an audacious proposal for a high speed railway on which Stephenson’s locomotives could travel at 60mph rather than 35mph. He argued that by developing a track with a broader gauge than the then-standard – the centre of gravity of the carriages would be lower thereby allowing the engine’s driving wheels to be larger and the trains to run faster. Brunel’s scheme was highly controversial, and he fought a bitter battle to implement it. |
It is difficult to comprehend the scale and complexity of the construction of a new railway like the Great Western Railway today. Among Brunel’s gifts was to understand that, if passengers were to fully appreciate the romance of the railway, its engineering had to be invisible. The trains should float over the landscape with such apparent ease that their passengers did not notice if they were climbing hills or fording water. To achieve this, Brunel and his team designed numerous viaducts, tunnels, embankments and sea defences. Many of them were considerable feats of engineering in Brunel’s time and are still in use and highly admired today.
While working on the Great Western Railway, Brunel persuaded his directors to adopt his audacious proposal – to establish a transatlantic steamship service operating from Bristol to New York as a natural extension of railway services – and he was commissioned to design and build ships for this purpose. The SS Great Western, a wooden paddle steamer, was launched at Bristol in 1837 and was to miss, by three hours, being the first ship to cross the Atlantic under steam, beaten by a rival steamship that had departed four days earlier. Perhaps lesser know is his design in 1855 of a 1,000 bed pre-fabricated field hospital to be shipped for use in the Crimean War at Renkioi. |
Few engineers have matched Brunel’s achievements in the scale and range of his output – from the largest steamship of the age, to the most ingenious railway. Some of his works, for all their technological superiority, caused serious financial difficulties to the shareholders. All the same, by the time of his death his reputation as an illustrious engineer was firmly established.
|
'The commercial world thought him extravagant; but although he was so, great things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.’
- Daniel Gooch (Friend and Colllegue ) |
In a talk on great deign Nicholas Oddy (Design Historian) told us that there was no question that James Watt had achieved greatness since his portrait decorates the £50 banknote. By this reasoning Brunel deserves the same status – his face adorns special £2 coins, stamps, and it even watched over the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. What I think made Brunel great was his design thinking. He was thinking big. And not about products, but about people experience. He wanted to create the best possible passenger experience on a journey that wasn't limited to railways but continued across the ocean to New York. It's interesting because Brunel was working years before the emergence of the design profession, but he was using design thinking to solve problems and create world changing innovations. Perhaps as designers we should take note. Design seems to have become small. Focus is on aesthetics, image and fashion. But if we want to tackle today's problems in climate change, education, healthcare and so on I think we need to think big. Brunel big. |