Introducing the E3
The E3 is Trinity’s Engineering, Energy and Environment institute. It announces a major new engagement between the School of Engineering and the School of Natural Sciences in Trinity.
The E3’s vision is of an engineering-enhanced environment, and its mission is to propose and implement optimal technological and human interventions that will enhance our planet and our relationship with it.
Engineering and evolution are together the key agents of change in our resource-constrained world. Experts, teachers and innovators across the two Schools will respond by inventing new knowledge, systems, methods and devices that achieve optimal change.
The E3 will ensure that Ireland is at the vanguard internationally in addressing the great emerging challenges and opportunities for this technological planet, and in securing the welfare and prosperity of all life on Earth.
The vision of the E3 is a radical and powerful one:
- To understand that human technology and policy designs are evolutionary responses which can be optimized through feedback and selection
- To envision a human-mediated evolution, and an enhanced evolutionary trajectory for all life and environments
This vision is one that gains strength through marshalling the expertise of natural scientists and engineers in this joint endeavour.
The E3 is:
- A strategic priority for Trinity College Dublin
- Engineering as evolution: driving optimal change in our technology-enhanced world
- A vector of growth, sustainability, competitiveness and job creation
- A new and radical way of educating students
- A landmark building planned for the Trinity campus
- A new home for the School of Engineering and the School of Natural Sciences in Trinity
Evolution through Engineering
The E3 will, in essence, focus on evolutionary change, expressed not only through the natural environments of Earth and the life it sustains, but also through the ingenuity of humanity and the technology we develop. This vision is a unitary one: that of an ecosystem comprising nature as well as human technology and action. The E3 will concern itself with guiding such human interventions sustainably, by proposing anthropogenic designs that enhance the welfare of the planet. These design solutions must achieve optima set by the environment of constrained resources that surround and sustain them.
Constrained Resources
The constrained resources that determine our optimal designs embrace traditional definitions of energy production (renewable or carbon-based) and energy consumption by the electromechanical systems of our technological planet. They also embrace the Earth’s resources of minerals, clean air and water, as well as the plants, animals and services that the Earth provides. Our designs will also be guided by economic and regulatory constraints. However, the E3’s holistic vision looks beyond these conservative definitions of resources, to the resources of bandwidth, computation and data that form the digital habitat of our 21st-century lives. All of these contexts fall within the expert remit of the E3. Together they will inform a new way of thinking about how we mediate humankind’s experiences within our environments through optimal design and action.