Monday 23 June 2014

On Engineering and Art - Systems Thinking and Systems Practice

What is is that Engineers and Artists have in common?

They invent things. They create things. They make things.



This is not as prosaic as it sounds. Engineering and Art both involve the mastery of complex ideas, complex techniques and the application of one to the other so as to eventually reach a desired outcome.

Engineers could learn a lot from Artists. And the other way round.

[Education today misses this vital link. It has been the cornerstone of advances in civilisation since the renaissance and it fueled the industrial revolution in Victorian times. We should be putting Art back into Engineering education and vice-versa, encouraging STEAM, not STEM, but that's another story.]

Let me take two examples, one from Engineering, one from Art and then discuss their correspondence.

Engineering very large systems (Systems Engineering, so called) requires engineers to find the balancing points between conflicting requirements, normally from different disciplines or sub-disciplines. Designing and building a cruise liner, for example, means making something that is big enough, will float, will be a small town at sea and can navigate alone across the globe (i.e, it is a sophisticated electronic beast to boot).

So to design and build a complex system like a cruise liner requires an elaborate mix of engineering skills and an ability to see the whole as well as the ability to combine the parts to produce the whole and to participate in a creative and constructive way as a member of a team.

Where do Systems Engineers learn these skills. Well, today, they seem to learn them by osmosis. They start out in some engineering discipline, moving up over time to participate in larger and larger projects and are eventually anointed by their employer as a Systems Engineer. No training in Systems Thinking and precious little practice at the skills they need to reach a good and cost effective solution.

Engineers could learn a lot from Artists, not least in Systems Thinking. Moreover, Art provides a domain in which systems skills can be learned and practiced both effectively and efficiently.

In Art, an artist takes an idea from conception to completion by the application of a set of skills that they have learned over their career. Just like an engineer.

Consider a painter, faced with a commission (or just a longing) to produce a work expressing their love of trees (for example). They might be skilled in oil, or acrylic, or even digital expression. They will have to decide on a subject, a style, an overall size, a budget and all of the issues that go along with applying their chosen medium. They will have to try out various alternatives and select among them. They will have to make a best-reasoned choice, proceed and be prepared to backtrack. They will have to have developed skills that allow for mistakes and for corrections. And, in a realistic environment they will have to work to a set timescale that will include disciplining themselves to set aside all those brilliant ideas they have for innovative elaborations whose rightful place is in the next project, not this one. Just like engineers.

Artworks are seldom nowadays the work of an artist working alone. Sculptures, plays, performances, film, video and large scale images require teamwork ad compromise. They require engineering. They involve Systems.

Most artists, would, I expect, hate to been considered to be systematic. They think of themselves as intuitive, as emotional, as putting heart and soul into their work. They think of engineering as being heartless and soulless. But artists are Systems Thinkers as much as anyone and they work in mediums [media seems wrong here] that encourage creativity and innovation. Just exactly what Systems Engineers need if they are to improve their performance.

The two examples I have given suggest that Art and Engineering have more in common than they have in differences. Lets look at that a little more closely.

Systems Thinking is the ability to consider the whole along with a consideration of the parts. Somewhere, in the engineering of a cruise liner, someone has considered how the parts will work together to deliver the whole. Somewhere, in the production of a complex artwork, someone has considered how the parts will work together to deliver the whole.

Consideration of the whole requires compromise among the parts. It's when this compromise doesn't work out that things go wrong. Things need to be simple enough to be understood and sophisticated enough to achieve their goal. They don't need to be so sophisticated that they fail or so simple that they are of no use. Getting that compromise right is the  role of the Systems Engineer and in that respect all makers are systems engineers.

[I could go on to say all Art is Systems Art, but that would be of little merit. It is only true in the sense that all made things are systems and are made by systems.]

Art, it seems to me, is a great place to practice Systems Thinking and to develop Systems Theory. It is a place that Systems Engineers could use to explore and develop their own skills. To do that would be to become more creative, more innovative and more broad minded as well as more disciplined.