Like most successful engineers, Burroughs traces the beginnings of his passion for engineering back to early childhood, when he frequently built and fixed all types of objects and machines.
"I loved working with my hands more than anything else to create three-dimensional objects—toys, initially, but also sculpture," he says.
He received encouragement from his parents, who refrained from interfering with his tinkering and taking apart of household objects. He kept a chemistry set in his bedroom, was fearless around fire, and, in one memorable instance from his childhood, attempted to brew whiskey in a bottle on his bookshelf with, to put it mildly, less-than-successful results.
Burroughs was also fortunate to spend a good deal of time traveling throughout Europe and North America as a child, an experience he believes helped bolster his desire to understand the world and broaden his general perspective. It is worth noting that he came from a family comprised of artists and mathematicians but no engineers. So when did the impetus to pursue engineering solidify?
"I spent one memorable day with a friend of my father in London, walking the streets and talking about what interested me, and made up my mind after that to pursue engineering as a career," he recounts.
He completed his formal education in London, first at the Imperial College of Science and Technology and then, as he put it, "through serendipity" at the Royal College of Art. He had, at the ICST, fulfilled his ambition of earning a degree in mechanical engineering. But it wasn't all smooth sailing from there. In fact, Burroughs hit a serious, though perhaps not uncommon, roadblock after graduation.
"I was having trouble seeing [my degree's] relevance to the modern world I lived in and stumbled across a blue poster advertising the Industrial Design Engineering course at the RCA," he says. "It made the connection I was looking for, combining my interest in art with my technical training in a way that made me feel I could be employable in something that was also enjoyable."
In between earning his engineering and master's degrees, Burroughs decided to take a year off to reevaluate his life and ended up changing it in significant ways. He did what few would expect an engineer to do; he and a close friend agreed that what they both needed at that time was to fuse their academic training and personal passions and find an outlet for their combined talents.
So what did they do? They planned a 90-day field survey to Bangladesh, where their objective was to study the "performance and applicability of mechanical wheat threshing machines." This experience proved to be a transformative one for Burroughs, who learned of a culture and way of life completely alien to those he was accustomed to.
For the next six months he traveled around the world, visiting Southeast Asia and hitchhiking across Australia and New Zealand. His final trip during this life-changing period was a bus ride from Los Angeles to New York. Later, he also ended up meeting his wife, Michelle, on a bus before settling down in Wisconsin, where he worked for a small design consulting firm in Madison for five years.
| Q. What do you do for fun? A. Play with my kids and tinker in the basement—sometimes they are the same thing. Q. What CD is in your CD player right now? A. Ringleader of the Tormentors by Morrissey. Q. What is the last magazine you read? A. Smithsonian. Q. What is your favorite TV show? A. The Andy Griffith Show. Q. Who is your role model? A. Steve Jobs, for his unerring pursuit of his dream. Q. What makes you laugh? A. The Andy Griffith Show. |
In 1991, international design consultancy IDEO established a branch in Chicago, and Burroughs joined the firm the following year. To his surprise, he found many of his university classmates working with IDEO.
"It felt like home and has ever since," he says.
One individual he singled out as having had extensive influence on his development as an engineer is, surprisingly, an art teacher who went on to become a professional potter and with whom he spent much of his vacation time.
"We would start from scratch in his back garden and construct kilns that were wood, oil, or gas-fired. Then we would carefully load them with raw pots and take them up to temperature and down again over an intensive period of a couple of days. He taught me many things, not least the value of following your passion and being willing to fail, which we did, sometimes spectacularly," he explains.
In terms of his most memorable career achievements, Burroughs cites work he has done that most would not consider "traditional engineering":
"I have spent years working on projects that are not necessarily highly visible. I've done a lot of work in the healthcare field, including groundbreaking surgical tools and a device for transporting human kidneys for transplant. Something I'm very proud of is the design and engineering of the first insulin pen for people with diabetes to be widely sold in the U.S. In a product like this, that ultimately makes the lives of real people better, the majority of the effort goes into making the manufacturing process fast enough and the pen reliable and cheap enough that it makes sense to distribute it widely."
Of course, there have been important lessons he has had to learn over the years, many of them about the delicate process of design.
"I've learned over and over that it's easy to design something complex, but the simpler you try to make something, the harder it is to meet all the competing constraints," he says.
Much of this and other facets of engineering are discussed in Everyday Engineering, which he describes as a text "which contains a glimpse of the world through an engineer's eye." Divided into two parts, the book covers a variety of topics, including the challenge of making common objects, such as mailboxes, fire hydrants, and swing sets, function as they should. The second half of the book discusses how engineered objects are frequently mishandled or deteriorate over time, which, when examined and understood, can prove to be useful to future designs.
The book also explains to the reader the various challenges engineers have faced over the years in their pursuit of simplicity; among the examples discussed are the "shark fin" shape that wipers make on a car windshield, screws loosening on a train window after many rides, and those pesky plants that sprout in the cracks of windowsills.
To those craving the same type of success he has experienced, Burroughs declares, "The best advice I can offer to someone starting out in their career is to go after the thing that really excites and motivates them most. If you do that, even the biggest hurdles will seem smaller, and you will be the one deciding where to go next. But if you end up picking a career that 'pays well' or that someone else thinks is right for you, you probably won't be happy in the long run."
