Editorial

Citation

Loughlin, C. (1999), "Editorial", Assembly Automation, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.1999.03319baa.001

Editorial

A man's world?

All the world's a stage,And all the men and women merely players:They have their exits and their entrances;And one man in his time plays many parts...

On a recent trip to the theatre to see a production of Cameron Mackintosh's musical Martin Guerre, I realised that a theatrical production is actually a very good example of concurrent engineering.

The producer, directors, technicians, actors and stage designers and stage hands all need to work together to produce the final performance. The artistic direction, choreography, stage and lighting design and music all evolve as rehearsals take place. All are interrelated, and meaningless in isolation. On top of this there are financial constraints and irrevocable timing deadlines that have to be met.

I imagine that plays and musicals have been produced in this way ever since Shakespeare's time. Although the technology of the day would have meant that he had no need to be concerned about hydraulic and pneumatic rams operating the scenery, or audio and visual feedback for the actors, or lighting dimmer circuits.

So if putting on a play has involved the use of concurrent engineering design practices since long before the term was ever first conceived, what can we as engineers now learn from our Thespian friends?

Perhaps this has something to do with the nature of the people concerned. Our brains are divided into two halves ­ the left logical side and the right creative or emotional side. As a general rule, women are stronger on the emotional side while men are more left-side dominant.

Despite this sweeping statement there are also enormous variations between different members of the same sex, and we will all know logical ladies and creative men. From the nature of the work it would seem to me to be reasonable to assume that those involved with the theatre will tend to be more right-side dominant (creative) than say, engineers working in the automotive industry. But perhaps creative is the wrong term to use and emotional or romantic or artistic may be better. As an engineer, I see the work I do as being very creative; however, it is a creation which is born out of logic, with perhaps the odd flash of inspiration, rather than artistic flair.

It is well-known that the male and female minds are very different. Males tend to be more competitive and will aim to progress themselves as individuals, whereas women have a more natural tendency to work together as a team, with the success of the team being more important than the success of an individual. This is not controversial, not should it be considered good or bad; it is simply the way that we've been programmed by natural evolution.

Engineering used to be almost exclusively a male profession, and it is still very heavily male dominated. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that engineering companies used to be segregated into various departments with a preference for working in isolation as much as possible while minimising interdepartmental exchange of ideas and information. And within each department the various subgroups and individuals within those groups have all worked to promote their own ideas and concepts.

In meetings, are we not all guilty of seeing the adoption of our own ideas as a success and the adoption of a colleague's alternative suggestion as a failure? I know I am.

And so, does the above mean that all male engineers should resign to make way for their female counterparts? Perhaps not; but an appreciation of our own natural weakness for working in a concurrent manner may make us better engineers.

It came as something of an ironic twist that a third of the way into the second half of the performance of Martin Guerre, a fault developed in the visual feedback system which allows the actors to see the movements of the otherwise hidden conductor. Even after a 20-minute pause, during which there was doubtless frantic activity back stage, the fault had not been fixed and the show was cancelled.

A few left-dominated engineers would certainly have come in handy.

In the end we all got our money back but I was disappointed that the old philosophy of "the show must go on" did not win the day.

Last scene of all,That ends this strange eventful history,This second childishness, and mere oblivion,Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything(As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7, William Shakespeare (1599).)

Clive Loughlin