merlin:

TED: Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity Yeah, I know you’ve seen it already. Me, too. Still, every time I watch it, this line makes me laugh: Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer, and I don’t recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer….”That chemical engineering block, John — how’s it going?”

Awesome TED speech. And yes, I like Merlin Mann chuckled at the Chemical Engineering bit.

But the truth is.

In my brief experience in the ChemE field I saw a ton of “Chemical Engineering” block.

Chemical Engineers are out there afraid of these same things writers and artists and painters are afraid of. Afraid of their creativity. Afraid of it’s fleeting nature.

Maybe the stuff a Chemical Engineering father is working on is too esoteric for anyone to think to ask “how’s that creative block”? Or you aren’t attending enough Chemical Engineering parties :)

It’s probably because you think of us Chemical Engineers as your math geeks from highschool, who you assume isn’t sweating creative challenges, and more typically is punching in numbers into our HP-48Gs. Which by the way is the best graphing Calculators for all you carrying Casios :)

I used to be a Chemical Engineer (ChemE), but gave it up early (as soon as I graduated college). I’ve instead been developing and designing web-apps for the last 10 years (inkling and tgethr being the latest). You’ll probably get an idea why I’m no longer a ChemE from this post too.

A huge part of my ChemE life is informed from an internship I spent working in a uranium processing plant. This is a place that takes uranium ore, does stuff to it, and then ships it to a separate facility/company for enrichment.

Of course there’s “non-creative” things that you can imagine ChemEs are dealing with here and might be scared of too. Here’s a few of those types of things you better believe I was scared of, if you’re interested.

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I wasn’t fooling with stuff that was insanely radioactive (that’s after enrichment). Although still more radioactive then sitting in an office developing Ruby on Rails web applications all day.

We still had to walk through Geiger counters ever day out of the office (though largely probably to make sure we weren’t stealing this stuff). And go through radiation tests every 3 months or so.

And then the place was pumping hydrogen fluoride (HF) everywhere.

HF is one crazy acid that burns through you real quick, and in my 3 months at this plant, there was an accident where someone got a hole burned through their shoulder because of some leak dripping above them. We’d have to wear acid suits around stuff like this, and its already over 100 degrees out. You can’t even be in the suit for more than 15-30 minutes without being forced to take a break so you can rehydrate yourself.

Not to mention the gas masks we’d carry wherever we went. Or drills we’d go through if there was a gas leak. Drills the entire town would go through since a gas leak could cloud up and float into the town.

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But during this internship I definitely saw the creative block you might have thought was just reserved for your writers or your artists or your designers.

I got to work directly for the head of all engineering at this plant.

I watched this executive tasked with figuring out how to reinvent a uranium processing plant.

Uranium just wasn’t making money like it used to.

Every day he worked his ass off looking and looking for a new derivative of some process around the plant or some way to make the plant produce something from it’s current tools to start bringing in more money.

He was a boss so I didn’t get to ask “is this scaring you”, but I’d bet money it was. You could see it in his face and in his mood when his boss from some corporate headquarters would call him up.

A new young executive trying to make a ton of new money for this plant is a challenge that not only has to obey the laws of chemistry and physics, but something that needs at least an equal part inspiration.

And it’s probably the laws of physics that make this harder in some cases on engineers then artists. Imagine as a painter if not only you had to paint something, but that painting needed to survive in 200 degree heat with acid vapor surrounding it. :) A lot of creative thoughts just end up in the trash because they just don’t physically work.

I had my own personal needs for inspiration too during that stint.

Being his employee I was tasked with figuring out how to optimize certain processes so we can save a bunch of money.

I got to deal with the process of taking that HF acid and turning it into fluorine gas.

This process consists of these “blocks” (anodes) needed to be replaced quite often because they sit in the acid and melt like crazy. But to make the process more efficient, we needed to know sooner when those blocks needed replacing.

We had some promising ideas that we could measure and see if they lead to any correlations. And so I tested and tested and tested. And I had to test in those friggin acid suits. I had legal pads of hand written data (not a lot of portable computers around acid) and then all that data ended up in spreadsheets. No correlation found. I poured and poured over other research and data on these blocks and on acid.

3 months of looking at this problem. Measuring stuff. Experimenting with ideas.

Had a couple visits from the creativity genii. But still no solution. Never found one that summer.

So yeah, I know there’s chemical engineers out their sweating about creativity and for inspiration. And not having it. Or having it only for it to get thrown out after experimentation. Experiments that could take months or years.

And even outside of the uranium processing plant, I know ChemEs making cheese or fooling with diapers. Same thing.

Folks spending countless hours groping for inspiration on solutions or product ideas, and when they get them, sometimes they don’t coagulate right, or hold enough baby urine :)

I also think this is a good reminder that these labels or boxes of: I’m a creative or I’m an engineer - Suck.

I know a whole lot of engineers that would benefit greatly, if they also considered themselves artists. And a lot of creative designers that could spend some time thinking of themselves as engineers. I think the best ones do.

So yeah, engineers watch this TED speech.