Introduction

Recognizing that effective communication with external people is more important than ever for engineers. Professor Ian Phillips from ARM Corporation had delivered a presentation focused on the importance of communicating engineers’ role to public. Despite engineers had done marvelous achievements since the first Industrial Revolution in 1750, however, they failed to present these accomplishments to public so that people could not give enough credits for the hard efforts.

One important factor is that there seems to be a significant gap between the effectiveness of delivering the right impression. Even through electronics are everywhere existed, they usually covered by human interface and do not directly show in sight, which makes them invisible to the public. The whole UK electronics industry is just recovering from a major global downturn and did not have enough confidence to gain catholic concern.

Part of the failure of communication might be related to technical thresholds. Most populace does not have professional knowledge about engineering. And they normally mislead by politicians and media. After all, politicians and media are not expertise in engineering and they are just the representatives of the public. From a UK government 2011 report, 92% of men and 84% of women erroneously consider that engineers play an important role in tacking climate change. And even most of them think engineering have a significant impact of the last 50 years, they could not name one specific contribution. Moreover, the conservative government mixed the concept of technology with IT in their administrative regulations.

Another factor presenting a communication challenge is social prejudice, including whole value system. In collage, courses related to science, physics and engineering are declining and the quality is under questioned. The engineering subjects are considered hard and boring while engineers are treated as geeks. What is more, there are no accurate statistics to evaluate the contribution from engineering and no one is questioning about that. The situation turned worse in 2004 over time. Engineering industry was lost between manufacturing and IT but not be recognized as a creative industry or frontier science like nanotechnology which has the potential to evolutionally change the world forever.

Failing to address such communication problems between engineers and the rest of world can seriously affect the bottom line. The professional engineers can not seal themselves to a tiny circuit otherwise the ignorance of the public would seriously damage this industry. Down to the essence of Engineering is about equations. Take computer as an example, computation with figures is the main activity within a computer. It had been developed and interpreted by engineers since 1947 when digital computer was first invented. And even the computer was theoretically possible; the engineers were still need to integrate manufacturing procedures and minimize the cost to an acceptable level. In the end, all these efforts converted raw materials to a computer magically if the public do not know the procedures. The people will take the products for granted because that is what they had seen. If people get used to existing situation and pay less attention, the development of this industry will never conduct.
The responsibility of recognizing communication’s importance and improving the situation are falling to everybody. Metaphorically speaking, the people are like Cro-Magnons which have some influence around. The people who received strictly technical disciplines need to use their excellent intuitive understanding to explain engineering without technology details to the public. For example, it should be understood that with electronics system’s huge direct and indirect contribution to the society, smart electronic system could service the world instead of all the traditional businesses.

Findings

1, In 1975, when semiconductor electronics first appeared in the world, domination factor of successful engineering is technology. While they are replaced by several of human computer interfaces.
2, The UK electronics industry is invisible, uncoordinated and unquantified but internationally respected to users in the EIGT report in Electronics 2015. It was also mentioned that UK electronics had contributing 2% of GDP and had 250-500K employers in 2004 which also regard as a conservative estimates. The employer number increased to 4.5million in 2009 after a series correct adjustment action since 2005.
3. ARM Cooperation had been aimed become the global standard for embedded CPUs and in 2011 it supplies products to more than 90% of smart electronic systems

Recommendation and suggestions

University of Liverpool is one of a leading edge of world class research institutions, especially engineering department. The research projects are cutting edge topics and frontiers technologies. Take bionanoengineering research group as an example, using Atomic Force Microscope to observe self-organization of materials at nano-level study has tremendous potential in developing practical value in electronics’ fabrications. Despite the information about this research group had been posted on the website, there is no notification inside of the department building. The research groups need more publicity towards public and students both internal and external of the department. Besides, the department will eventually benefit form more brief introduction and department presentation fairs because of that could attract more exceptional studentship candidates to join in.