From Theory to Practice
Many of our solutions are driven by research from various scientific entities, other engineering firms, academic engineers, and academic architects. We have a huge library in London where we are subscribers to most of the academic journals in the world. We have people whose only job is to scan those journals for ideas about how we might take ideas and put them into practice. This is not to discount the contribution of anybody's research. It’s that we need to have help. If you're worried about Arup's success, and you all should be, we need help in the rapid translation of ideas from the academy into practice. And we need to have ideas that are prepackaged, in terms of their relationship with other disciplines, if we are going to be much more effective at solving problems.

One of the things that I do for the firm is help both our staff and our clients ask better questions. Too often we're limited by the questions the client asks, which are largely based on conventional wisdom. If we pursue those simple answers without helping the client understand that if they thought about their problem differently, we can not add more value. Over time to pursue additional value we help our clients reformulate their questions.

This is an unscientific number, but in my view, the problems that really vex us now and into the future—climate, water, poverty alleviation—are about 40 percent technical and about 60 percent political. They have to do with people actually choosing to behave in a different way, getting the incentives lined up appropriately, getting them to understand the nature of the problem and their contribution.

We don't believe that we can actually move forward on any kind of solution without having the human equation as part of it. We talk a lot about happiness, fear, and nostalgia; we think about these projects because in order to get the public to actually accept that things need to change, their behaviors foremost among them, solutions have to appeal to how they view themselves in the world.

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