Have you ever passed by someone on the street without realising they quietly changed the world?
This week, we had the chance to spend an evening with just such a person. You might not recognise his face, but his invention touches your life every single day.
I’m talking about Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web!
It felt surreal listening to him talk so modestly about something that has completely transformed how we live, work, and connect. What struck me most wasn’t the technology itself, but his vision of a web built for openness and collaboration and how the World Wide Web is intangible.
You can’t touch it, but you experience it every day. It began as a conceptual design, a framework of ideas that became a lived reality for billions of people.
In structural engineering, we also start with the intangible.
Before steel, concrete or timber are ever put in place, there’s a concept: lines on paper, models on screen, ideas of how people will move through and experience a space. Like the web, those designs only become powerful once they shape human experience.
Hearing Sir Tim reminded me that the greatest innovations aren’t always about what you can touch they’re about the concepts that change how people live, connect, and grow.
For engineers, it’s a call to design not just for stability, but for the experiences and futures our structures will enable.
It left me reflecting: Are we giving enough weight to the intangible concepts in our work the vision and experience before they become physical reality?
And if you’re curious, I’d recommend picking up his book, I think it’ll be a fascinating read.
