Small and Beautiful: The Engineer within Us All

The innovations that gave birth to the world’s ancient civilizations are fading into dust.

Basillica Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: Tyler Durden

The Greater Tragedy: Not only are we losing the knowledge and inventions that first allowed humans to adapt to life in the world’s great deserts and on its snow-capped mountains, but the communities responsible for these innovations now feel ashamed of them.

In many regions, advertisements of foreign cities and technologies have generated a sense of inferiority that has discouraged even the most talented traditional craftspeople from continuing their trades.

Nowhere in the dialogue are these traditional lines of innovation labeled ‘science’ or ‘engineering’. Instead, they are called ‘history’, ‘art’, or ‘culture’, put in museums rather than studied in workshops. The great irrigation systems of the Incas that allowed them to flood the Ollantaytambo valley (Peru), drowning their conquistador rivals, have not made their way into contemporary texts on sustainable agriculture.

Valley beneath Ollantaytambo, Peru. Photo: Luke Redmond

Our task is to inspire confidence within communities to recognize the contemporary usefulness and future potential of their design traditions. We do not want to preserve cultures, but rather to reinvigorate them.

Although all our efforts aim towards this goal, one is deserving of special attention, our engineering workshops run by One Earth Design’s (OED’s) Chief Engineer, Amy Qian.

Amy Qian holds up disassembled early prototype of the

SolSource 3-in-1. Photo: Scot Frank.

The daughter of two computer scientists, Qian began her career as a mechanical engineer as an eight year old; by whittling pointy sticks in her backyard. She graduated to carpentry with power tools in her garage, then to the metal shops of her high school and the robot building laboratories of MIT (Media Lab).

Qian’s passion for practice and design has never waivered because “it has given [her] the power to build tangible solutions for the problems [she is] presented with”. Now, she is working to inspire that same passion in others and to empower those around her to engineer solutions for their own communities.

Last week, Qian held a series of design workshops that seemed to be destined for failure. A landslide blocked her way into the city for the workshop, forcing her to spend an extra hour crossing the nearby river and finding a car to take her the rest of the way. At the markets, none of the vendors wanted to sell a duffel-bag full of wood to a woman, and for various reasons the location of the workshop had to be changed three times just hours before the sessions began.

Finally, the group gathered. The son and daughter of a carpenter who had been sent away to school as young children, two women’s group leaders from farming families, and a nomadic man who started a rural education association huddled around Qian, listening attentively to her explanations of wood working tools and design principles. Then, they built.

This is what they had to say after completing the woodworking portion of the workshop:

This is a small start but, to us, it is a beautiful one.