Can art make engineers more effective?

Many engineers will be more effective, especially more innovative and communicative, if they engage in a visual art—not just study one. My experience and research suggest that art’s professional and personal value emanates from actively doing it.

Feature illustration of an eye Vision dominates our other senses—hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and balance. According to neuroscientists, the sense of sight employs connections to more parts of our brain than any of the other senses do. If we want to effectively learn or teach a subject, understand or explain something, we should use images.

Stronger visual abilities can help us be more effective and innovative, work and live smarter. Experience reveals that those of us who practice, as amateurs or professionally, one of the visual arts (such as drawing, painting, sculpture, or photography) develop enhanced observational capabilities. We see what others don’t. Accordingly, we literally and metaphorically define more thoroughly issues, problems, and opportunities, and we generate more innovative resolutions of them. In Seeing With the Mind’s Eye: The History, Techniques, and Uses of Visualization, the authors write, “Learning to see directly affects the ability to visualize. In seeing, the images are external; in visualizing, the images are internal.”

Many engineers will be more effective, especially more innovative and communicative, if they engage in a visual art—not just study one. My experience and research suggest that art’s professional and personal value emanates from actively doing it. Incidentally, I suspect that some of what I share is applicable to the performing arts as well.

More seeing and, relatively speaking, less just looking, is an inevitable by-product of practicing visual arts. Really seeing gradually becomes habitual for artists. When looking at anything, artists, relative to others, tend to see composition, shapes, colors, values, and details. As noted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” And so it is once we engage in visual arts.

Drawing on the History of Drawing

computer monitor

OVERRELIANCE ON COMPUTER-AIDED DRAWING MAY LIMIT A USER’S CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION.

To put visual arts in perspective, consider the evolution of one visual art form: pencil drawing, starting with the freehand version. Drawing, which means converting “a mental image into a visually-recognizable form,” was first employed at least four millennia ago by the predecessors of what are now scientists, engineers, architects, and other similar technical professionals.

Beginning about 1820, US engineers and other technical personnel started to learn projection or mechanical drawing, based on the French system first developed by Gaspard Monge. This systematic manual, but not freehand, form of drawing used tools like straight edges, triangles, and circle guides.

Near the end of the last century, the drawing component of engineering changed drastically, in that computerized graphic tools gradually eclipsed systematic manual drawing. Computer-aided graphics replaced graphite graphics. Therefore, today US engineering and scientific/technical education rarely includes manual drawing, and it is rare in practice.

Advances in drawing, from freehand to the more disciplined projection drawing and into today’s computerized drawing, have been largely beneficial, mainly because they increased the efficiency of drawing and the use of drawings.

However, these changes have had the negative effect of removing some right-brain stimulus potential from engineering education and, as a result, from practice. While computer-aided design and drafting tools are more sophisticated than freehand drawing, they share one characteristic—they are primarily left-brained.

In contrast, “freehand drawing, being free of technical symbols, is dominated by the right hemisphere of the brain,” explains the 1986 book Engineering: An Introduction to a Creative Profession. Further elaborated in the 2009 Successful Education: How to Educate Creative Engineers, “The spontaneity of freehand design, rather than being superfluous, permitted direct expression by parts of the brain that are not engaged by computer-aided drafting tools.”

As visual thinking consultant Dan Roam puts it, “Computers make it easy to draw the wrong thing.” Computer-aided drawing tools might also tempt us to draw the same old things or stop too soon in our creative-innovative efforts. “Technically-perfect, computer-generated drawings always seem to be complete and imply that the work is over,” notes Successful Education. These technically-perfect drawings limit a student’s or practitioner’s creativity and innovation because of the “limited number of objects available in a given computer tool.”

This historic sketch, while recognizing the advantages of computer-aided drawing, suggests that we should also recognize the disadvantages of over- or sole reliance on it. Why? Because freehand drawing, when used in series or parallel with computer-aided drawing, offers engineers, scientists, and other professionals’ significant benefits.

Enhancing Our Effectiveness as Engineers and Artists

What does enhance seeing, derived from freehand drawing and other visual arts, have to do with professional work? Improved seeing, whether literally or figuratively, further enables us to define more completely and accurately an issue to be resolved, a problem to be solved, or an opportunity to be pursued. To paraphrase and expand the expression “a problem well defined is half solved,” a challenge more completely and accurately seen, both physically and figuratively, is half resolved, solved, or pursued. We are likely to gain valuable enhanced literal and metaphorical diagnostic vision because of participating in freehand drawing or other visual arts. That enhanced seeing will also enable us to more thoroughly and creatively visualize solutions to the challenges we face.

Learn from the work and words of some engineer-artists:

As a teenager, Leonardo da Vinci spent time in Florence, where he learned about and aspired to become one of the “ingenios,” the engineer/artists. Later, da Vinci, now the engineer-artist-scientist, dissected more than 30 human cadavers and many animal corpses. He conducted the first documented autopsy, in effect making da Vinci pathology’s founder.

Because da Vinci saw, and could draw, now others could see what they had not seen. He said there are three classes of people: “those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see,” which supports the idea that doing art can enhance the sight of those who want to see more.

The architectural and engineering firm headed by Santiago Calatrava, the famous Spanish-born engineer and architect, designs creative, now-signature structures. Examples include a gently twisted Malm?, Sweden, skyscraper influenced by the human spine; a portion of the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, art museum with wings that open to the sky to moderate interior illumination; and the Lisbon, Portugal, train station inspired by a palm tree forest.

Calatrava earned a degree in architecture and a doctorate in civil engineering. He has held engineering licenses in the US, such as in Texas and Wisconsin. Calatrava draws, paints, sculpts, and does ceramics. He synthesizes some of his interests with this thought: “I have tried to get close to the frontier between architecture and sculpture and to understand architecture as an art.” And maybe we could replace “architecture” with “engineering,” or add “architecture” to “engineering” based on Calatrava’s engineering-architecture masterpieces. As a Smithsonian article noted, “Being an engineer frees him to make his architecture daring.”

Artist Wendy Crone is a professor in the Department of Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison where she also has appointments in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. Crone’s research specialty is solid mechanics, which has connected her to nanotechnology and biotechnology. She does sculpt and pottery and paints with pastels.

In her research, Crone uses microscopy—that is, instrumentation that provides images of objects not visible to the naked eye. She says, “The ability to see detail and attend to subtle changes in images is critical to my engineering research,” and she believes that “these skills are enhanced by my practice of painting.”

As a teacher, Crone uses her art knowledge and skill to prepare visuals that enable students to understand complex concepts. Her art also supports collaboration with professional artists and scientists in preparing presentations, writing articles and papers, and designing museum exhibits.

Stephen Ressler, P.E., professor emeritus for the US Military Academy, works in oil, watercolor, pencil, and pen and ink. He creates mostly landscapes and architectural images.

He says, “doing art has been immensely influential in my development as an engineer and, especially, as an engineering educator.” Ressler describes the benefits of being an engineer-artist as dual-directional.

Doing art helps him be a more effective engineer because now he is more able to develop two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects; see details he might otherwise have missed; use sketches to communicate, particularly in design, and on a chalkboard when teaching; compose presentations; and develop three-dimensional computer models.

And doing engineering has made him a more effective artist because he can see and represent three-dimensional objects in two dimensions, see and represent detail, and master perspective drawing methods.

Like some of the preceding, I am an amateur artist working in pencil and acrylic and prefer realism such as landscapes and animals. A decade ago, after a five-decade lapse, I took a one-day freehand pencil drawing course and enjoyed it. Classes and drawing continued, initially as a diversion but also because I gradually saw intriguing connections between doing art and doing engineering.

Some of my now-learned insights are identical to those already shared, in that, broadly stated, doing engineering enables me to do art, and doing art enables me to be a more effective engineer.

Consider a few more examples of the latter:

The accomplished artist applies rules of composition to draw us in, set a mood, and send a message. We are not sure why, but the human brain tends to respond favorably to classical composition rules traced back to at least the Renaissance. Many of those art rules also rule effective communication by engineers. For example, when designing an image, such as for a slide, put the focus point or principal image off-center, not in the center, though the latter would be a natural tendency.

And the odd-over-even composition rule, when applied to written or visual engineering communication, means favoring an odd number of major points, objects, conclusions, or recommendations.

Too many presentation slides use the format of a statement followed by several to many lines of text, each preceded by a bullet. In light of vision being the most powerful sense and recognizing composition rules, such as create a focus point and use an odd number, why do we make bland, all-text slides? Experience, art, and research indicate that the most effective slides, as determined by audience understanding and remembering, contain a declarative statement and a supporting image.

Benefits and Joys

Because vision dominates our senses, enhanced visual abilities enable engineers to be more effective. By doing—not just studying—one of the visual arts, such as drawing, painting, sculpture, or photography, we develop enhanced observational capabilities. We see what others don’t. Therefore, we more thoroughly define issues, problems, and opportunities and we more creatively resolve them.

Doing art enhances the development and ability of engineers. We see more details; more effectively represent three-dimensional objects with two-dimensional images; compose more-communicative text and images for presentations, published articles, and papers; and produce more creative processes, products, structures, facilities, and systems.

The engineer-art connection also works in the opposite direction. Engaging in engineering equips us to create enjoyable and productive art. Because we readily “see” in three dimensions, we can represent an object in two dimensions, and we understand principles of perspective drawing.

However, please recognize that just as we do some of our engineering for the fun of it, artists do some of their art for pleasure. For me, hours fly by as I enjoyably create images with pencils and paint. If you are not engaging in visual arts, consider exploring it. You may find a new joy—and enhanced engineering capability.

Art In Entrepreneurship: It's Closer Than We Know

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. An entrepreneur is much like an artist. Their expressions reflect the core idea that defines the nature of their work. Unlike an artist, however, their work is more than expressive; it is an endeavor that is both creative and practical.

It is a myth that entrepreneurship is genetic. Instead, entrepreneurs are neither born nor taught; they are released from their selves. The entrepreneurial spirit goes beyond fancy titles and multi-dollar companies; it ignites a desire to create something unique and innovative. It is a manifestation of inner abilities towards the outer world. However, desire alone isn't enough to be a successful entrepreneur. One should also possess risk taking abilities, be able to identify a need in the world and fulfill that need with a desirable solution.

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Necessity is the mother of invention

Take, for instance, the story of Ingvar Kamprad—the founder of Ikea who was also dyslexic. His first venture was to sell matches at age six. At 17, he got some money from his father for doing well in school. With this money Kamprad started IKEA—a mail order business. A few years later, he was boycotted by local furniture manufacturers, who believed he was practicing unfair trade with low prices. Faced with their boycott, he began to manufacture his wares himself. And as he went along with that, he identified a need that was not satisfied. This need was for furniture that could be transported easily and efficiently. And today, that is what Ikea is known for: flat-packed dismantled furniture that may be stacked and transported easily.

Key traits that form building block of an entrepreneur

Hard work: Hard work is the key to success. To practice hard work, you need to focus on things that you can control, work hard to build discipline, examine your own values, and consider all the pros and cons and carefully stack the odds in your own favor.

Risk taker: Entrepreneur needs to take calculated risks and act quickly on them. Once a need has been identified, and a solution is found, an entrepreneur must inspire those around to share the vision.

Flexible: Entrepreneurs must be flexible, and yet persistent. This is the cornerstone of the entrepreneurial spirit. A need has been identified, a solution has been formulated, but persistence is the key to seeing those concepts, those dreams turn into reality.

Time: Finally, while we make our own ‘luck’, for success, timing is everything. We've talked before of certain products being ahead of their times and failing. Timing and being the right person at the right time and place is sometimes a big part of the entrepreneur's success.

Famous British entrepreneur Richard Branson described, "Being an entrepreneur simply means being someone who wants to make a difference to other people's lives."?Anyone can have an idea, and start a business, but true entrepreneurship is about more than that. It is about evaluating risk, making connections and knowing one's purpose. And it is when you remember that purpose, entrepreneurship is truly successful.

Artists are Entrepreneurs: Your Art is Your Business

ART MARKETING BUSINESS & MONEY LIFE BALANCE

Artists, like entrepreneurs, have a product or idea to sell, and they need to get out into the marketplace. In order to do this, artists need (at the very least) basic business skills and a willingness to approach selling art as any entrepreneur would.

Your idea or your approach to your work is ultimately what you will be putting out in the market. By determining what it is you do, how you do it, and the content, subjects, and form/media, you will be defining your signature style. Once you have developed a style, you can then present it seamlessly to your audience. By defining your brand or style, you are unwittingly determining your audience.

There are many methods to pricing and evaluating work. In her book Secrets of the Art World: Getting Real About the Process, Business, and Selling Your Work, Lisa Spanos, owner and president of ADC, breaks down just how to price one’s work on a price-per-square inch basis as well as various other methodologies common in the art world.

She also recommends factoring the cost of overhead, materials, and supplies, as well as a recommended markup for retail pricing. One of the biggest mistake’s artists make is not understanding the value of their work. So often artists either over inflate the value of their work or undervalue it—either way they miss the opportunity to sell their work. Entrepreneurs understand that pricing is a fine art and so should artists.

Every entrepreneur knows the key to getting their idea or product to market is through marketing and sales. You must employ marketing strategies to do that. That means you need a website that reflects your signature style, which includes high-resolution pictures and descriptions of your work, as well as a means to buy the work directly from the site (or has links to contact information or the galleries that represent you).

It should also include an artist statement and a section with a regularly updated blog or newsletter. Keeping in touch with and building an audience is key to selling your work. With social media tools like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook and search engine tools like Google and Pinterest, there are no more ways than ever to reach audiences.

You should also take advantage of resources that will promote your work for you. Art Design Consultants (ADC) owns and publishes Blink Art Resource, which is sent to interior designers all over the country, as well as Curated by Blink Art, which is sent to residences. Both are excellent ways for artists to get their work in front of thousands of buyers instantly. Partnering with galleries, or investing in space at trade shows, and paying for online advertising and optimizing your websites SEO are all ways to increase your exposure and reach potential buyer to ultimately sell more art.

Every business needs to keep track of money going in and money going out, as well as inventory. Maintaining and cataloging your work is key to your success as an artist. You simply cannot overlook the details—often they are what make or break artists. Artwork Archive helps you get started, so you can concentrate on creating and leave the inventory management to the experts.

Entrepreneurs know that networking is more than trading business cards. Business is all about relationships. And, having a network of great people around is a key to success. Most entrepreneurs know they can’t run a business on their own. They get advice from other successful business people and they reach out when they need help or don’t know what to do. ADC is passionate about helping artists thrive, and have created an extensive artist resource page to provide a place where artists can learn about how to succeed in the business of being an artist.

Can art make you a better entrepreneur?

The short answer: in your art inventory system. Having an art inventory system that allows you to keep records of your artworks, sales, and finances is the foundation to a healthy art business. After setting up all your inventory system, you will now be able to clearly see what all your revenue and expenses are over time. “Art stimulates us creatively, which makes us better, more productive, more entrepreneurial business agents. Art can speak so subtly that it forces us to think more deeply, feel more fully, engage more wholeheartedly.

As a business owner you need to be concerned about managing people, money, projects and all the other business functions like accounting/finance and marketing. Even if you don’t employ others you will need management skills to work with others such as contractors, suppliers and even customers! If you are a business owner your overall success depends on having good management skills.

The role of management in your art business The general idea behind management is to get people to work together to accomplish the organization’s goals and objectives in an efficient and sustainable manner. For management to be effective there are principles which need to be followed.

If you are a one man show you probably don’t have to worry about management. Once you add just one employee you are now in the realm of management. As you add more people in your business, the role of management becomes more important for the organization to stay focused on and accomplish its goals.

If you have employees, the management function is a full-time job and not something you need to practice for a minute a day or whenever needed. If you have employees, then management is YOUR job; don’t take it lightly!

How well or poorly you manage your art business has a big effect on your brand. Your employees, customers, suppliers and others will notice your management skills, and this will affect your future success and viability. Your goal with management should be to have the best managed company and turn your employees, customers, and others into brand champions for your business.

Management and its techniques and theories have been around for thousands of years. (After all, it took some management skill to build the pyramids!) The study of management has been written about for years in books such as The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Taylor and numerous books by Peter Drucker including his classic, Concept of the Corporation.

Today there are hundreds of books, seminars and courses on management. Numerous models or theories on management have been developed. At the core of most of these are the basic principles or ideas that make up effective management. If you manage people in your art business and want to build an effective and profitable organization then you will need to learn and practice these concepts.

The five functions of management

The study and practice of management has evolved and is now generally divided into five functions. It is important to note that these functions are not the same as the general functions of a business which are: production & operations, accounting & finance, sales & marketing, and research & development.

The five management functions can and should be applied to all these business functions. You should become familiar with these management functions in your art business even if you don’t have any employees. These functions will apply if you operate as a “one man show” because you will probably need to work with others in a “loose organization” or collaborative environment.

Planning: This management function involves developing an overall plan for the business and plans for each department or business function. These plans include long term strategic plans as well as plans for the short term for projects. The plan period could be years, weeks, months, days or even for tomorrow! You are planning will involve setting objectives and goals, developing strategies and their associated action plans.

Organizing: In order to plan a reality, management must bring together the necessary resources and organize them so that things get done. These resources include materials, financial capital, human resources and technology. In organizing, duties are assigned and delegated along with responsibilities. Think of organizing of having all of the necessary ingredients ready when you need them.

Staffing: Any organization needs the right people and the right amount of people to accomplish its objectives. This function starts with recruiting the right people, training them, making sure they are rewarded and reviewing their performance. Even if you don’t have any employees you can choose the people you wish to work with.

Directing: The directing function is what people usually think of when they describe the process of managing, but as you have seen it is much more. Directing involves supervising employees and motivating them to do their best. Leadership skills are the foundation of effectively performing the directing function.

Controlling: This function is all about measuring accomplishments and performance and taking corrective action if needed. Measuring can come in the form of seeing if you are on schedule (time) or if your costs or profits (money) are on target. Without measuring it is impossible to see where you are and if you have accomplished your goals. Controlling lives in the realm of budgets for time and money and carries all the way to your financial statements which tell you what your art business is worth and how well it has performed.

Can Art Make You a Better Person?

How can art make you a better person? And more importantly, how does it play a role in cultivating decency? I’ve got four reasons to share with you.

THE FIRST IS THAT ART HELPS YOU FEEL CONNECTED TO OTHER PEOPLE

And connection is one of our primal needs. We all long to feel seen, heard, understood, and part of a community, and engaging with art creates a space for us to do all of those things. When we read or watch a story about a character who maybe is completely different than we are–in terms of gender, class, nationality, personality, what have you–but they do or say or feel something we can identify with, it’s a reminder that we are all humans. When we hear a song lyric that reminds us of something we’ve lived or felt, it makes us feel less alone. In this way, engaging with art can be like a hug for your psyche.

ART CAN ALSO HELP YOU SEE LIFE THROUGH SOMEONE ELSE’S PERSPECTIVE

And get your eyes opened to what life is like for people who aren’t you. It’s like an empathy vitamin–you feel for the mother who is searching for her lost child, or the man who got wrongly accused and sent to prison, or the person from the 18th century whose face is gazing out at you through a portrait. And that’s going to help open your heart to people you might not otherwise think much about. It’s like the Grinch–it can help your heart grow two sizes. And now that I think about it, it was the Who’s singing that really got the Grinch in the end, wasn’t it? See? That’s the power of art!

The way a line from a song can make you cry, or a character in a book can remind you of someone you miss, or a painting can make you feel soothed, or challenged. Getting those feels from art helps you acknowledge the emotions you might otherwise want to avoid, and helps you do it in a way that’s low-stakes, so that when you interact with people who might trigger those feelings you’re already well-versed. It’s like taking your emotions out for a nice stroll–you feel healthier afterward.

Whether it’s a documentary about mushrooms, or a movie about drug trafficking, or protest art that’s highlighting an injustice that doesn’t directly impact our day-to-day life but that is nonetheless happening and affecting a large group of other people.

Remembering our connection to each other, understanding another person’s point of view that you may never have considered before, feeling your emotions, learning about things we didn’t know about before–these are all important parts of developing as a human. And best of all, it comes wrapped in these packages that are often beautiful and lovingly crafted, that speak to more than just our minds but also to our hearts and the part of us that transcends blood and bone.

References & Further Reading:

Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing, Chicago and London, Chicago U.P., 1983.

Bahmani, Pardis,

Analytical History of Object Design in Ancient Middle Eastern Art

Baudrillard, Jean, De la seduction, Paris, Galilée, 1979.

STUART G. WALESH, Can Creating Art Make You a More Effective Engineer? 2021

Sanjay Sehgal, Art In Entrepreneurship: It's Closer Than We Know, 2020