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Making is in my blood.
From a very early age I was interested in combining practical things with fun things. At school I was in the Great Egg Race club, named after a TV programme, where we would make a contraption in which to race a chicken’s egg across the classroom. Sadly, the career option for Great Egg Race participant was not available at age 18, and so my physics teacher suggested a degree in mechanical engineering instead.
I went on to play with bubbles, after completing the graduate training scheme at Rolls-Royce.
In a joint project between Lancaster University and a small fire-fighting equipment manufacturer I researched how to make foam that could smother petrochemical fires. Using a 40,000 frames per second high-speed video camera, which was so large that I had to transport it in a Volvo Estate, I could see in slow motion how bubbles were made. I wrote it up and was awarded a PhD in bubbles or, more accurately, fluid dynamics.
I wanted to make gadgets and gizmos as a living, but for 10 years I ran a computer consultancy with a friend, which paid well but was really boring.
The light-bulb moment came when I was introduced to a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. The door to a world of electronics was then swung open to me. One of my hacks was a toy dinosaur that I programmed to react when someone tweeted me. Living on the Isle of Wight at the time, the owner of Blackgang Chine Theme Park came to hear of this and asked if I could ‘hack’ the park’s full-sized animatronic dinosaurs to interact with visitors.
I love making science and engineering fun but it did not always come across that way.
I remember having a part-time role lecturing electronics to first-year students and boring myself senseless. Realising that professional doesn’t have to mean dull, I joined Toastmasters International to improve my public speaking. It was there that I learned how to inject humour and fun into my lectures and talks.
Having the confidence to believe in myself has always been a big challenge.
As a judge on my first series of BBC’s Robot Wars I kept thinking, ‘what am I doing here?’ The other two judges were professors and I was Lucy who had played with robots in a theme park. But, by the third series, I realised that I didn’t need to be a professor – I was an engineer who had made stuff and could actually say what would and wouldn’t work.
I’m naturally nosy and so I’m always looking at how things are made or done, and often will look at things from a different angle.
By looking widely you can also adapt something from one industry to solve a slightly different problem in another. For instance, I met a bespoke dressmaker who originally wanted me to put LEDs into dresses but instead I solved another problem – that of having to lug around suitcases full of life-size dresses to shows and exhibitions. By 3D printing mini-mannequins that I hacked with gaming software, she could showcase her dresses in an eight-inch tall format.
I think it’s also important to learn how to fail.
If something doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. I still get a buzz out of getting some electronics and code to do what I want it to. Sometimes just an LED flashing makes me smile. It was a thrill to have been recently recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering for my “innovative promotion of engineering to the public”. To think that I can, and have, made a difference just by tweeting interesting facts and blogging about things I’ve been playing with and making does help spur me on.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.