Heinz Wolff and the future of technology
After a high profile and life-long career in engineering and science, Professor Heinz Wolff thinks that technical innovation is only part of the solution to the challenges facing future society. Words and portrait by Nick Smith
How the article appeared in E&T magazine, October 2011
Walking into Heinz Wolff’s office in Brunel University I can see that there’s an engineering crisis of sorts. ‘I’m fashioning a new set of spectacles,’ the 83-year old professor informs me with a twinkle in his eye.’ In fact, he’s recycling components from two broken pairs to produce one functioning unit. It’s slightly bizarre to see this variant of the Theseus Paradox performed by the hands of a man more used to solving complex scientific challenges on our television screens. But it’s a conundrum he evidently enjoys. He informs me that the original products cost no more than ‘£1.99 in Boots or something such,’ as though analysing a critical line in a project build-cost spreadsheet.
Proud of the economies made by the simple use of his hands, Wolff explains that ‘all western nations will have to adjust to what is essentially a war economy, where we will need to make things that last longer and repair what is broken.’ He tells me that he lectures at the department of Human Centred Design at Brunel, ‘where I explain that the future of design will be to make things better – maybe more expensive – but with the potential to have a longer life cycle and less waste of materials. All this without removing the adventure of having something new.’
We’re sitting in Wolff’s office surrounded by photographs of several generations of his family, gadgets he’s invented (including an early prototype electronic book) and a much-modified moped. I ask him if today’s universities have got it right when it comes to delivering opportunities for young engineers.
‘I tend to think of things ten years too early. But I do think that we might teach people the wrong things at university. Of course, we need to produce engineers to maintain the technology systems we already have in place. And we need to produce bright people, and the UK seems to be very good at that. But whether there is a real need to produce a lot of engineers that we are going to notionally employ in production of one form or another, I don’t know.’
But that’s not the real question, he tells me, because the issue is why schools don’t produce people who want to be engineers. ‘In the development of a child, when the brain is still plastic, the feature of their education that we neglect is to nurture the ability to manipulate things.’ After the brain, Wolff explains, the ‘most marvelous thing we have’ is the hand: an actuator that can thread a needle one minute or wield a sledgehammer the next without modification. ‘I firmly believe that the continual iteration of hand-eye-brain is how we became Homo sapiens. We started to make tools, acquired manual skills and could imagine a tool that would be better. And then there was a very important point in our development, which was that we could imagine a tool that could make a tool, which could then make something. This is a very sophisticated way of thinking.’ His obvious Implication is that this is the origin of engineering.
Professor Heinz Wolff in his office at Brunel University. Photo: Nick Smith
His hands flash across a QUERTY keyboard. ‘Apart from typing, we don’t use our hands. Girls don’t embroider; boys don’t play with Meccano. With these things you effectively develop an eye at the end of the finger, and you do this when you’re seven years old. And it’s really very clever. But it’s gone.’
Wolff has lectured on the ‘death of competence’ and he thinks it’s brought about by the abandonment of micromanipulation – doing something small and critical with the hand. ‘Our engineering students can’t make things. They might be able to design things on a computer, but they can’t make things. And I don’t believe that you can be an engineer properly, in terms of it circulating in your blood and your brain, without having a degree of skill in making things.’ He explains that this is why apprenticeships were so good, because ‘you actually made things while learning a bit of the theory.’
In neglecting to teach basic manual skills we are producing a generation that carries within it the seeds of its own impotence. Wolff believes that while all teachers agree that children should be articulate and use language with precision and skill, ‘they don’t attach the same values to the use of their hands.’ Is this a health and safety thing? Wolff accepts this might be a part of it, ‘but even a three-year-old knows to stop sawing before his finger falls off.’
This is one of the reasons why our engineering capability is less highly developed than it might be. He knows he’s going to upset people when he says it, but ‘engineering isn’t going to be as important to your future as it has been to our past.’ Interest in SET subjects, he tells me, is in inverse proportion to the wealth and comfort of the country. ‘So in Japan it is quite low. And so also in Britain. In Botswana it’s enormously high. Maybe we’re just growing out of it.’
Professor Heinz Wolff in his office at Brunel University. Photo: Nick Smith
‘I should state that I’m 83 years old and I joined the university late in career terms having worked on the Medical Research Council for thirty years.’ He saw the dark clouds of civil science coming under financial pressure gathering on the horizon. It was obvious that we he was going to run into ‘financial buffers and I thought that if anyone were going to trim my wings I would trim them myself.’
Wolff’s response was to head to the nearest university where he offered to found an institute that would be financially self-supporting. The Vice Chancellor agreed to the proposition and ‘I started off in two rather broken down Portakabins that you can still see at the other end of the campus. We did quite well financially because I was working a great deal for the European Space Agency where I had a split personality job: I was chairman of a number of policy committees, but I was also a contractor. We made things for astronauts to use to do science in space.’
As the project became more successful Wolff scoured Exchange and Mart for more Portakabins and ‘so started a village that we called the Brunel Institute of Bioengineering.’ His growing team set up space research programmes and also a project called Tools for Living. ‘I’d made a forecast that elderly and disabled people would require technology to assist them and at the time this kind of technical research seemed to be rather downbeat. We formed a company as well as a charity and we became an appreciable sized institute within this university.’
This burst of activity occurred in Wolff’s late fifties and by his mid sixties he retired ‘for the first of many times,’ and the institute became more absorbed into the university. The modern building that houses the faculty today concentrates on biosciences of ‘various kinds.’ The building, he informs me, only bears his name because ‘I have a certain degree of notoriety.’
Profess Heinz Wolff. Portrait by Nick Smith, nicksmithphoto.com
‘If there were to be an epitaph for me and it had to appeal to the public, it would refer to the Great Egg Race. I was on the screen for the best part of 30 years. I would be remembered for that, and not as the scientist that worked for the Medical Research Council. This is unless I bring Care4Care off.’ (See box.)
Wolff cheerfully admits that he’s a ‘TV science boffin’, but is critically aware of the serious point that lies behind this: the advocacy of science to the wider public. I put it to him that in a world where the majority of young people have aspirations no higher than becoming a celebrity or a footballer, it’s vital that technologists are visible on television. ‘Yes, but it doesn’t happen any more. I used to get an audience of 2.5 million on BBC2. People interacted with it, some even recorded it and went into their kitchens after the problem had been set.’
Experience taught Wolff that ‘you don’t have to be a Nobel prize-winning scientist’ to be an effective communicator. ‘This doesn’t impress children or even adults. They have to like you. They don’t care two hoots about how famous you are. It’s much more about the frequency of exposure and a degree of trust. Of course, you need to have a certain talent for explaining complex concepts in a domestic analogy. But don’t have to be a great scientist to do this.’
I put it to Wolff that in the UK at least it is not very conventional to have a TV presenter who is a German Jew with a heavy European accent. With his unconventional hair and spectacles, the bow tie from another era and an apparently distracted manner, Wolff satisfies in the public the desire to be educated by an eccentric. We laugh as we agree that Albert Einstein wouldn’t be half so well remembered if he’d had sensible hair. Virtually everyone outside the technology community knows more about the photo of Einstein poking his tongue out than they do the Manhattan Project.
But what of Wolff’s appearance? ‘Oh I think I’m guilty of being a notorious eccentric. But, I don’t get my hair cut that way, if that’s what you’re asking. And I don’t put on my accent. I think in English. Although I might sometimes count in German. There are reasons for this connected with the archaeology of the mind. If you drill down into people’s memories you’ll come across a few words that were very important to them when they were young. The memory erodes in a certain way and concepts like this can be important in researching Alzheimer’s.’
Wolff on the end of technology in the western world
‘I’m not far off a century old,’ admits Heinz Wolff with allowable exaggeration. He was born in Berlin in the late 1920s and has clear memories of standing at the window of his family’s library in 1933 watching the torchlight procession that put Hitler into power. ‘I was five at the time and as such a conscious human being. And so I have an overview of what the world is about that a 20-year-old doesn’t have. For a 20-year-old even the Moon landing is history.’ He marvels at how something so recent to him, exploiting technologies that have been central to his career, can seem so remote. ‘It’s like a forgotten war. Exactly where did it come in the order of things?’
He can’t remember the author, but he can remember the title of the book. The prediction made in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (‘The Downfall of the Occident’, by Oswald Spengler), Wolff tells me was that the West would cease to be the epicentre of science and technology, as it migrated to the East.
‘There still seems to be an overwhelming conviction that the way to alleviate the economic problems of this country is to intensify technological research.’ He tells me that while a lot of clever technology will be developed in the UK, ‘I suspect that, because of the numerical superiority and enormous investment the tiger economies are making in technology and education, we will face considerable competition in innovation.’
But it is not so much the challenge of the East that bothers Wolff, so much as the societal trends that affect the way we think about technology. ‘If I had to explain this in historical terms, you could see it like this. Clearly Britain and other parts of Western Europe had the Industrial Revolution, with their spinning Jennies and steam engines… and we got through that. And then we had the information revolution and we largely speaking got through that to the point where – and many people won’t like me saying this – much of the communication equipment that we produce are simply toys.’ He looks at my iPhone and pronounces it ‘a fantastic device, but I wouldn’t argue that the world can’t live without it.’ Increasingly, technology is being driven by what people want, rather than what they need.
Now we are at the beginning of what Wolff calls the Human Revolution. He tells me that in one of his lecture presentations he shows a slide ‘which I use to annoy my engineering colleagues.’ It’s the one that says: ‘Innovation in the 21st Century is not going to be in science and technology, but in the way in which society organises itself.’ He tells me that he’s reached the conclusion that if his career is to have a lasting and beneficial effect on society, ‘it’s unlikely that it will be by devising some form of technology. It’s much more likely to be achieved by assisting in real cultural change.’
Social engineering – reciprocal care
‘Three or four years ago I made a resolution that was almost like a religious conversion,’ says Wolff. This was when he reached the conclusion that the problems facing Britain, in terms of caring for an increasingly aging population, wasn’t one that could be solved by mechanisms, but was going to be solved by ‘pairs of hands.’
‘I’m now working on a scheme called Care4Care, the basic idea of which is that we have to produce more resources, which the country can’t afford.’ Essentially, this is a credit system where younger people provide care for older generations in order that their care further down the road can be paid for by credits they’ve already accrued.
‘And so it will go on. And we have produced a resource without putting up taxation. There is now real interest in this and I’m spending virtually every waking moment propagating this. This is because for a nation where we are used to the state doing virtually everything for the past three generations, this is a major cultural change. We will have to become much more prepared to become much more self-supporting. This seemed to be in line with the idea of Big Society, which has largely disappeared.’
Because of the way in which modern career structures tend to move people about geographically, ‘we have to overcome the reduction in kith and kin care, and the way to do this is to get people to take out insurance. But this insurance needs to be paid in kind: you invest hours and not money.’
Wolff thinks that this is going to be ‘possibly the most important thing I will have done in my life.’ He admits he hasn’t ‘got many years left to get this to happen,’ but as we sit at his desk he tells me that there is someone coming to see him this very afternoon ‘from the banking system that deals with alternative currencies.’ Wolff explains that the ‘hour’ is an alternative currency with the merit that it cannot be inflated or deflated.
For further information on Care4Care visit www.care4care.org
For further reading, go to Nick Smith’s other interview with Heinz Wolff:
Nick Smith interviews Heinz Wolff in IET Member News. Photo: Nick Smith
nick smith photojournalist 