The book I am currently reading on the train to and from work is Backroom Boys - The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford. It is a fascinating read, and it reads so much better than I ever imagined it would. It deals with the British foray into Space Travel, the collaboration with the French building Concorde, the emerging computer games industry of the early 1980s, the birth of Mobile telecoms and genetic bioengineering - to name but a few subjects. It has some really exceptional passages that I really wish I had a pen to mark them with (yes, I mark sections in book, underline things, highlight passages and so on). But one in particular has stuck in my mind:
Engineering is poetic, in the ancient sense of the original Greek word our “Poetry” derives from. Poesis meant making. And so every maker is a kind of poet; everyone who wants to subject ideas to the tempering of existance, and is willing to stay with the process as the ideas are changed by being realised, and cares enough to labour until the creation comes right. The words that might be used to describe a piece of engineering are secondary things, limping attempts to convey an act of making that didn’t happen in the medium that’s now being asked to express it. The poetry isn’t in the description. It’s in the numbers, it’s in the algorithms, it’s in the system design. It’s intrinsic.
