It’s not a secret that I like the IABSE Future of Design conferences. Normally my pre-conference build-up focuses on the speakers, however today I’d like to just quickly draw your attention to the two, now open, competitions that are run before, and as part of the event.

The One Page Paper Competition

Since I’ve been attending there has always been the paper competition. Whilst this might sound the least inspiring, it’s something that I would urge more engineers to enter. One thing we’re really bad at doing is both recognising and sharing our achievements with each other– and frankly, where else are you going to find a room full of people who might get excited about that complicated bolt connection?

I think the most important bit about the paper competition is that it’s only one page.

Yes engineers are busy people. But it only takes 300 words to fill a page (if you throw in a diagram; and everyone loves a diagram). Even if you only wrote five words every minute, you’d still finish your entry before an episode of Game of Thrones was over. Almost by definition you, as an engineer, solve interesting problems; so don’t underestimate how exciting your work is by thinking it’s not worth the competition!

The Design Competition

The newer of the competitions is the design competition, which I first saw last year. For this, teams of up to three young designers bandy together in an attempt to put forward an A2 poster outlining their proposed solutions to an unusual design brief.

This year the entrants are challenged to support a sculpture of Alex Chinneck. Perhaps most famous for “Take my lightening but don’t steal my thunder”, the building that appeared at the front of Covent Garden, apparently cracked straight along the middle with the top half hanging eerily in the air…

For the 2016 brief the teams must work out how to support an inverted pylon. An idea iterating Chenneck’s “A bullet from a floating star” (pictured in the post header), which sees a pylon sticking from the ground, point down- like it had been harpooned from the sky. The question is, how are you going to keep it up?

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Both competitions are now open, and run until the 11th of July (although the Design Competition has a shorter ‘questions’ period that closes on the 15th of June.) The short listed entrants will be part of the IABSE FoD 2016, either as presenters of their papers or having their designs exhibited; with prizes on offer for the winners of both.

• More about the IABSE Future of Design 2016
• Details of the Paper Competition
• Details of the Design Competition / Registration Form