General Engineering Introduction/Table of Contents/Artist

The Beginning of Engineering

The original engineers were artists. Ax users had improvement ideas. The engineer/artist would listen and draw. Then the engineer/artist would take the drawings to a blacksmith. A new ax would be made and tested. page 4.

Drawing

As late as the 60's, the first engineering class was engineering drawing. Thomas E. French's textbook "A Manual of Engineering Drawing" set the drawing standards for over 50 years. It was published as late as 1994 (14th edition). It is still a great way to teach K-12 drawing. Most engineering colleges today expect engineering students to learn 3D modeling software such as ProE Wildfire, SolidWorks, AutoDesk Inventor, or Google Sketchup for a project.

Design Art

Modern engineering projects still require engineering artists. As engineering has moved closer to science, specialized artistic professions that combine elements of engineering have emerged. These include architects, industrial design, and environmental design. The 1999 ABC NightLine episode "[DeepDive]" captures the industrial design part of engineering perfectly.

Truth Beauty Goodness

Engineers today have to pay attention to art for two reasons: source of inspiration and implementation success (it sells or project implementation success).

Inspiration

A frustrated engineer has several choices. One is to find a different starting point. Another is to do the same thing over and over again until bored. Then sink into the boredom until the playful spirit can be found. But the third way, the way of symmetry, pattern and matching is that of art. Some engineers see a Fink Truss" when looking at a snake rib cage. Some engineers create a circuit without the QMC design method by merely being guided by beauty.

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars
on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination
- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am
a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little
about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the 
present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense 
spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" Richard Feynman Quote

Engineers know that when their creation is truthful, beautiful and good they have a winner. It is called "elegant". Practice this while doing homework. Skip the design rules of the moment. Focus on beauty. Test whether the result meets all the technical requirements.

This can lead to a study of "form follows function, form factor, and ultimately the Greek philosophy of form".

Success

Something can be Truthful (does what it claims), Good (helps improve the world), and not sell because it is ugly. Something can be a fraud, useless (Pet Rock), and still sell because it is beautiful. Some engineers restore old iron bridges (art) for a living. Others create companies manufacturing and selling [electronic art supplies] or [exotic, expensive wood working tools]. They get involved in [music videos] and [commercials]. Some freshman engineering classes only encourage Rube Goldberg type projects.

Practice

The practice of engineering are the activities of students and working engineers, the books they read, the honors they receive.

Engineering Books

The internet began impacting engineering books in 1995. Before this time, engineers where marked by what technical manuals and books they collected. Chemical engineers had Perry's handbook that has recipes for just about any unit process. There are handbooks that contain statistics on how many cars will enter and leave the parking lot of a bar seating 20 people at 5pm on Thursdays. The TTL cookbook

Reuse

Most engineers collect junk. Anything broken is taken apart, not thrown away. The parts must be examined. Some parts are stored. A good junk pile is inspirational. Junk piles are useful in a freshman engineering class to transition students from playing, through doing things first, to design. Reuse of the junk is a selling point during presentations because the audience already has an understanding of form, function, and life cycle.

Reuse is highlighted in Rube Goldberg projects. For example, a rube goldberg project on laser printers would expose all the motors, relays, switches and re-purpose them. The laser would be replaced with a bright LED and the mirror would distribute it's light. Rube Goldberg projects are great [freshman] projects because they are open-ended. Here open ended means there are no expectations in the sense of maximizing artistic freedom:

He experimented further. In one class he had everyone write all hour about the back of his thumb. Everyone gave him
funny looks at the beginning of the hour, but everyone did it, and there wasn't a single complaint about ``nothing to say.''
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part III, 16

Communication Arts

charts, presentations, performance