Tomorrow’s Acoustic Engineers
Shape Our Future - designing a better future will need collaboration, creativity and innovation.
This week is Tomorrow’s Engineers Week, 9th – 13th November 2026. Lottie our Tomorrow’s Engineers Week mascot has been busy doing a project tour and checking out how we are applying today’s engineering solutions to help deliver solutions for a brighter future. Spot Lottie monitoring sound levels at The Rinsing Machine.
As we celebrate Tomorrow’s Engineers Week, it is worth asking not just what the engineers of tomorrow will do, but what kind of engineers we will need. This year’s theme is Shape Our Future, focussed on how we can inspire our young people to choose STEM careers and help us tackle the real-world issues we face today to create a better future.
We are entering a period of profound change. Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource pressures and growing challenges to human health and wellbeing are reshaping the way we think about our buildings, infrastructure, energy systems and the places in which we live, work and learn. The built environment must adapt. Engineering professions have a critical role to play in delivering that transformation and bringing about the system changes we need to deliver circularity and regenerative living.
Meeting these challenges will require more than technical expertise. It will require a new generation of engineers who are creative thinkers, curious, collaborative, open-minded, AI capable and able to work across traditional professional boundaries. This will require engineers who understand that the best solutions rarely come from working in isolation.
Acoustic engineers have an important part to play in this future. Acoustics has traditionally been perceived as a relatively narrow engineering discipline, concerned primarily with controlling noise, meeting regulatory requirements and ensuring buildings achieve acceptable sound insulation.
Yet it is so much more than that. It is fundamental to how we experience the world around us. It influences our health, sleep, concentration, communication and emotional wellbeing. It connects us to places, to other people and to nature and all living systems. The soundscapes of our towns, cities, homes and landscapes are an important, yet often overlooked, part of socio-environmental quality.
Natural sound is also an indicator of ecological health. The presence, diversity and seasonal patterns of birdsong, insects that we hear, and other wildlife sounds can tell us much about the condition of an ecosystem.
In today’s world, as we increasingly recognise the interconnections between human health, animal health and the health of our environment, acoustic engineers have an opportunity to contribute to a much broader conversation about what makes places genuinely healthy and sustainable. Although these are concerning times to be living through, they can also be full of hope and renewal.
The buildings and infrastructure we design today must remain fit for purpose in a very different climate and environmental context. We need buildings that are energy efficient, resilient to overheating, well ventilated, low carbon, adaptable and healthy to occupy. We need infrastructure that supports the transition to clean energy, protects biodiversity and makes better use of existing resources. Much of this transformation will involve retrofitting rather than simply building new, as most of the built environment of the future decades, has already been built.
The challenge and opportunities for tomorrow's acoustic engineers are to understand the bigger picture and help ensure decisions made in one area do not inadvertently undermine progress in another. Creating future-fit places and spaces requires a fundamental shift away from traditional siloed approaches. We need whole-system thinkers who can understand the complex web of inter-dependencies. When it comes to acoustic engineers, we need to be part of the conversation much earlier, working alongside planners, architects, building services engineers, ecologists, developers, contractors and the wider communities to deliver places that create genuinely liveable places.
To help inspire those interested in STEM careers considering acoustics, we have some photos from Lottie’s Sustainable Acoustics B Corp TEW Tour. Lottie has been on a project tour with the team earlier this week. Check out her site visit as she learnt what makes a career in acoustics so exciting, challenging and worthwhile: and that no one day in acoustics is ever quite the same.
By Angela Lamacraft and Diana Rogers
