Aurecon Design Academy, 2017

Building the Future Engineer

The Aurecon Building the Future Engineer Workshop. Photographs by Matt Houston and Katrina Mulcahy.

Within the Aurecon Building the Future Engineer workshop we used the Tactile Tools™ approach to help participants embody the principles of the ‘T-shaped Aurecon Engineeer’: Creativity, Empathy, Transdisciplinarity, Collaboration, Design Thinking and Communication, while working on a human-centred design problem. The Aurecon Design Engineer was defined as someone who is able to contrast both the macro and the micro in a symbiotic way, balancing end user expectations with a sense of the larger scale impact of decision making on social, economic and environmental systems.

The workshop embedded participants within one of five key communities in the Latrobe Valley who would be affected by the closure of the Hazelwood Power Station: the retired and aged care communities; local indigenous populations; local businesses; cultural, sporting, tourism and education groups; and the farming and agriculture community.

Working from within community the participants defined a goal (intervention, program or process) that would assist the regional adjustment process. The team then built a pathway towards this goal using the toolkit to represent roadblocks, work-arounds, and pathways. A specially designed leaf tool was introduced to the activity as a physical reminder for the participants to solve problems in the manner of the Aurecon Design Engineer. The leaf was placed at strategic moments when participants were embodying the desired behaviours, and balancing the micro and the macro, as they problem-solved in a human-centred way.