Opinion
What does success look like to an engineer? Often, it looks like nothing happening. A bridge carries traffic. A building remains standing. Clean water arrives. The power stays on. The fire remains contained. Life continues without interruption.
Much of engineering’s success is invisible. Its greatest contribution is often not what people notice, but what they never have to experience: the collapse that does not occur, the flood that is contained, the warning that arrives in time, the local failure that does not become catastrophe.
Engineering succeeds by allowing extraordinary complexity feel ordinary.
In many professions, achievement is visible. Architecture can command attention through form, space, light and beauty. Engineering often recedes behind the finished work. The structure is covered, the services concealed and the calculations absorbed into something people use without needing to understand how it works.
We experience the result. We rarely see the work.
In an earlier piece for Future Campus, I argued that engineering has always been socio-technical. This raises a related question: if engineering is both technical and human, what does success look like and what kind of professional judgement must engineering education develop?
One of my lecturers once reduced the construction professions to a memorable sentence: Architects think about beauty. Builders think about money. Engineers think about safety.
Like all memorable sayings, it simplifies. Yet it captured the engineer’s distinctive obligation: when beauty, cost, time and competing demands collide, someone must continue asking:
Will it be safe?
Not only when it is new. Not only under ideal conditions. Not only if every assumption proves correct.
Safe as materials age. Safe when maintenance is imperfect. Safe when workmanship varies. Safe when nature exceeds expectations. Safe enough that one error does not become catastrophe.
Before engineers can design something well, we must understand how it may fail.
What will fail first? Where will stress concentrate? What happens if the load is greater than anticipated, the material weaker or the ground different from the model?
This is not pessimism.
It is responsibility.
Engineering begins by acknowledging that the world will not always behave as expected. Materials vary. Systems deteriorate. Information is incomplete. People make mistakes. Extreme events occur.
The future does not read our calculations.
Engineers therefore do not ask only: Will this work?
We also ask: How might it fail and what will happen if it does?
Good engineering does not always make failure impossible. No material, person or system is infallible. Instead, it seeks to prevent one weakness from becoming catastrophe.
A component may crack while the structure remains standing. A barrier may fail while another continues to protect the public. A system may deform, warn and redistribute forces rather than collapse suddenly.
Understanding vulnerability is where responsible design begins.
Many of us begin introductory structural engineering classes with the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
More than eight decades later, students still watch the bridge deck twist violently before it fails. We show it so early because failure makes otherwise invisible behaviour visible.
When a structure performs as intended, its load paths, stiffness and dynamic response remain largely unseen. It simply stands. When behaviour departs from what was anticipated, the mechanics reveal themselves with startling clarity.
Engineering knowledge is cumulative. Every significant failure leaves behind more than wreckage. It leaves evidence, questions, revised standards and lessons that become part of the education of engineers who were not yet born when the event occurred.
The point is not that tragedy is desirable. Loss is irreversible. The point is that successful operation can conceal fragility.
When failure occurs, the profession has a duty to convert loss into knowledge. What one generation learns must not disappear when that generation leaves.
This is one of the deeper functions of engineering education. Universities do not simply transmit current methods. They carry the profession's accumulated memory: what failed, what was misunderstood and why particular safeguards now exist.
Engineering decisions also become embedded in the physical world.
There is no Ctrl+Z once an engineering decision has entered concrete, steel, soil, machinery or infrastructure.
It may remain there for decades, carrying consequences long after the calculation was completed.
The tools may produce an answer.
The engineer must still decide whether it makes sense.
Engineering has never been the mechanical production of answers. It requires judgement: the ability to interpret incomplete information, recognise uncertainty, test assumptions and understand the consequences of being wrong.
Our decisions enter the world.
That permanence gives engineering judgement a particular moral weight.
A long-time family friend, Mile Pešut, is a forestry engineer who worked in the forests of Mala and Velika Kapela, in what is now Croatia and was formerly Yugoslavia.
Mile recently recounted a story about the father of one of his university colleagues.
The man, a Slovenian forestry engineer named Škorjanc, had designed a railway viaduct in those forests more than seventy years ago. At the time, forestry engineering degrees included the design of the roads, bridges and railways required to work within and manage forest regions.
Before the viaduct was opened, it underwent a maximum load test. Fully loaded timber wagons were positioned on the viaduct to represent the maximum load scenario.
As the test began, Engineer Škorjanc stood beneath the viaduct.
No one had instructed him to do so.
It was not a formal requirement.
It was his way of expressing professional responsibility.
Without saying a word, he was declaring:
I trust my calculations.
I stand behind my work.
I accept responsibility for what follows.
The viaduct was later demolished in 1961, not because it had failed, but because the railway was no longer needed.
I do not tell this story because engineers today should literally stand beneath the structures they design.
They should not.
Modern engineering is safer precisely because responsibility does not rest on one person alone. Projects are delivered through multidisciplinary teams, independent verification, peer review, certification, quality assurance and regulatory oversight.
But the story captures something that should never be lost.
A calculation is not merely a calculation.
It is a promise that someone has considered uncertainty, consequence and the lives of people they may never meet.
Perhaps that is what a professional signature is meant to represent.
Not certainty.
Responsibility.
More than seventy years separate Engineer Škorjanc's viaduct from the systems we design today.
The tools have changed. Calculations once completed by hand are now supported by advanced modelling, digital platforms and artificial intelligence. Projects are larger, more interconnected and more multidisciplinary. Engineers must respond explicitly to climate change, sustainability, human-system interaction, cultural context and long term societal consequences.
Professional practice should evolve as knowledge and society evolve.
So should engineering education.
Students must learn systems thinking, sustainability, risk management, collaboration and human centred practice. But these contemporary capabilities do not replace engineering's enduring foundations. They expand the conditions under which those foundations must be applied.
Beneath modern expectations are principles Engineer Škorjanc would have recognised:
Understand the fundamentals.
Know the limits of the analysis.
Ask how the system might fail.
Exercise judgement when information is incomplete.
Protect the public.
Learn from what goes wrong.
Stand behind the work.
The methods evolve.
The responsibility does not.
Today's engineer should not stand physically beneath a bridge during its load test. But every engineering graduate should be able to stand beneath a decision intellectually and ethically: to explain its assumptions, acknowledge its limitations, identify its risks and accept responsibility for their contribution.
Contemporary engineering depends on collaboration, but shared work does not erase individual accountability.
Distributed responsibility must not become diluted responsibility.
A signature should still mean something.
Success in engineering is rarely spectacular.
It is quiet.
It is found in a structure that continues to stand, a system that tolerates imperfection, a warning that appears before collapse and a failure that remains contained.
It is found in maintenance undertaken before deterioration becomes dangerous, knowledge shared before it is lost and judgement exercised rather than outsourced.
It is found in people living ordinary lives within systems they can trust.
The tools will change.
The standards will evolve.
The challenges will become more complex.
But the foundations of trustworthy engineering should remain recognisable: first principles, judgement, due diligence, humility, learning, responsibility and care for people we may never meet.
Success is not measured by applause.
It is measured by trust.
The greatest compliment to an engineer may be silence.
No headline.
No inquiry.
No emergency response.
No lives interrupted.
The bridge carries its traffic.
The building stands.
The water flows.
Nobody knows our names.
Invisibility is not the absence of achievement. Perhaps it is engineering's highest expression.
Professor Zora Vrcelj is Head of Built Environment & Engineering at VU