x Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
Mathematical Bridge, Cambridge
Every autumn about thirty graduate students arrive at the Engineering Department in Cambridge to join the Advanced Course in Design, Manufacturing and Management. They expect to spend the year walking among the city’s hallowed spires, attending lectures, bumping into Stephen Hawking and punting on the River Cam.
Instead, they get quite a shock!
In 1989, I joined the course. There were twenty-six engineers, a psychologist and a physicist — me. There was no prescribed syllabus; instead the course used learning-by-experience and lectures from the experts ina given field. To study advertising, you might visit a top London agency, for shipbuilding a shipyard on the Clyde. If you were unlucky enough to find these two lectures scheduled for the same week, you had to travel the length of Britain. The course runs a half dozen minibuses to solve this transport problem. Every four weeks we would undertake a project in a different company. I remember designing pit props for coal mines and imaging software for a weaving company. At the end of each project we presented our findings to each other and, with eight projects and thirty students, this made for a great many presentations. To keep the process manageable, the course put great store in teaching us the art of communication.
These days I design large complex systems, and clear communication is extremely important. My ideas are often turned into working products and, if those products have flaws, a post-mortem usually shows the cause
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