"If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw.
Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept."
- Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design

Dear world, sometimes I feel like you force artists and engineers to distance themselves from each other.

I cringe when (some) engineers are compelled to say they could never draw, or complain that their roommate is working on some fun stuff with easy grading. First of all, engineers CAN and should learn how to draw. And your roommate is spending all their effort mastering this difficult craft. 

It’s changing, but engineering gets a bad rap for seeming precise and uncreative. I think we can help if artists don’t hog the “creative careers” label. Look around! Creativity is literally everywhere in engineering. The first airplane, the Panama Canal, the glorious Falcon 9, the clever linkage that knocks out every requirement. 

I cringe when (some) artists are relieved that they would have made bad engineers, thankfully escaped math, and poke fun at their “uptight” engineering friends. At the same time, I feel for the artists societally constrained to more “stable jobs”.

Could we have made math something you don’t want to “escape” from while valuing engineering and art more equally?

Maybe if we’d stop grouping artists into “non-technical” and “non-STEM”. This communicates that art is “not-” something. I see it so often!

No thanks. Art is proud to be art. Or, Art is proudly included as part of STEAM. 

A simple change in terminology might alleviate our imposter syndrome. I love and value art but when I hear these things over and over and I can’t help feeling like that part of me is worth less. 

Furthermore, us artists are absolutely technical. 

Have you ever opened a perspective textbook? It’s strikingly similar to a math textbook. Vanishing points, reference planes, precise angles, and ellipses. 

Anatomy? Muscles in motion, the timing of actions, capturing it all into animation. 

An incredibly deep understanding of color and light, that warm lamps create cool shadows, that you need a touch of blue to show the reflection of the sky, or that extra yellow to a gradient of red to black makes it more realistic.

...All the way to the artists who chose to dedicate themselves to complex 3D programs, who push and pull vertices on polygonal meshes, try to create the world of their imagination in VR, pour themselves over music composition theory.