More on our image – and the need for a revamp.

Today, in between meetings with people about forming a cohesive ICT community and defining our identity, I saw a billboard as I walked along the streets of the Melbourne CBD.

A picture of a woman’s torso, naked except for a bra, with the slogan “Who said engineering was boring?”

Says it all, really, doesn’t it? I’ve long said that associating a verb in a sentence with a negative is the best way to get people to think about the verb rather than the more complex semantics of the negated verb. Now, for a whole lot of people, a vaguely leery billboard is going to put the words “engineering” and “boring” together.

Some of these people will be young people in our target recruitment group – mid to late school – and this kind of stuff sticks.

The building the billboard was on was built by civil engineers, using systems designed by mechanical and electronic/electrical engineers, the pictures were produced on machines constructed by computer systems engineers and elecs, images constructed and edited through digital cameras by tech-savvy photographers and processed on systems built by software engineers, computer scientists, electronic artists and many, many other people who are all being insulted by the same poster they helped to support and create. (My apologies because I didn’t list everybody, but the sheer scale of the number of people who contributed to that is quite large!)

Today, on my way home, a giant hunk of steel, powered by two big balls of spinning flame, climbed up into the sky and, in an hour, crossed a distance that used to take weeks to traverse. Right now, I am communicating with you around the world using a machine built of metal, burnt oil residue  and sand, that is sending information to you at nearly the speed of light, wherever you happen to be.

How, in anyone’s perverted lexicon, can that be anything other than exciting?

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