My year and thoughts on reuniting art and engineering

Dear 2021,

You’ve had the highest highs and lowest lows.?

I lost my grandpa

His witty jokes and constant smile.?

The unassuming closet tucked in a narrow hallway to the kitchen, sagging shelf to shelf brimming with electronics trinkets and tools. Reach inside and you’ll never pick out the same thing twice.?

His visiting America. Helping with my transformer science fair project. Wrapping copper wire over and over and over.?

His love for chess. I’ve never won once.?

I was 10 visiting Russia. I remember glued to the little TV, mounted above his electronics workbench, the flashy science show with epic swelling music zooming out on the emptiness of space. “A big telescope planned to launch in 2015, we will finally know if life is out there!”—vivid in my mind, I mentioned my anticipation of 2015 in my letter to Father Frost (the Russian equivalent of Santa) that year. Hmm.. could it have been JWST that now drifts to its home at L2??

Maybe that’s where it all started.

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.

Some examples of how artists and engineers can be mutually beneficial:

1. ?Humanistic: Raymond Loewy - Skylab Window

Raymond Loewy, known to many as the father of American industrial design, was brought on to work on habitability for Skylab. He is well known for influencing a skeptical engineering team that a window was necessary.

"When working for NASA on the?Skylab, I insisted that the porthole be installed on a partition so that the astronauts on long missions could have some view of Earth." - Raymond Loewy, 1979

Credit, plus click to hear a snippet of an interview with Loewy https://www.rediscoveredpaper.com/eva.html

2. Practical: A flat color white rocket is hard to track. With dazzle pattern artwork by Heidi Rueff (Virgin Orbit) on the end of the rocket, engineers were able to do data collection easier during a water test + it looks great!

Credit: https://heidirueff.myportfolio.com/copy-of-patch-design-virgin-orbit

A similar effect was inadvertently achieved due to the vinyl name I painted onto USCRPL's Earthshakiier static fire. Upon explosion, the fact that the left side only had one yellow line and the right had 2 yellow lines made it easier to reassemble in the correct orientation for the anomaly investigation. Useful insight for our next attempt!

Learn more: https://www.uscrpl.com/news/esii-update

3. Sparking Discussion:

My favorite part of working on 3D visualization for Orbit Fab is giving the engineering team a jumping-off point for discussion for a new mission. They describe something to me, I interpret it, they get to see the image of it as if it were real and can make comments on its practicality or build upon it with new ideas, and so on and on.

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This year I’ve had a lot of opportunities where people ask me what I do. It’s quite hard to explain. Do I tell them I’m an artist or an engineer? Do I even qualify as either?

I set a goal when I entered college. I want to leave a capable, self-sufficient maker. I gather skills from every common manufacturing and making process to manipulate materials and create what I imagine. Knitting, welding, painting, digital design–as much as resources allow me.?

It’s been with me all along. In middle school I loved woodshop. I got to be a woodshop TA. I got to be part of a team to submit to the 2016 Tech Challenge “Make it Fly”

In high school, I fell in love with robotics and metalworking through FIRST. CAD, CNC, metal lathe, mill, and more, a better grasp of teamwork, systems engineering, and manufacturing considerations.

In college, I have more maker space homes at IYH and USCRPL. I want to know every machine there inside and out before I leave. There’s a lot of ground to cover.?

To me, making is magic. It’s coming up with an idea and knowing how to create it in real life. This takes both art and engineering, but the world usually is set up for you to choose one. I struggle with feeling like a jack of all trades, master of none. Adam Savage’s video “Do You Lament Being a Generalist” really speaks to me:

He says:

-? ? “I love gathering skills”

- ? ?“Every skill is an arrow in my quiver, the more versions of solutions I have, the farther and wider I can look for the correct solution for the problem I’m solving”

- ? ?“I find all skill gathering to be pleasurable! …As you take it and imbue yourself with it, it becomes a mood and a gesture instead of in the individual parts (ex. the feeling pro chess or piano players get) —While I don’t get that with any one of my specific skills, I still get that feeling because my skill IS that I’m a generalist.”

It’s difficult though. This year in college we’ve been making so many things so quickly, both as teams and individuals, that I feel like I lose sight of any overarching goal and my quality in any project suffers from being split in so many directions. But sometimes, out of all those many projects, come the ones that I’m most proud of. It helps to remember that from history peoples' best work (and worst work) came during times of most numerous production output. (my professor referenced this Book )

All the people I look up to in my life are makers, and inspire me to continue to fill my quiver. I’m excited to continue that journey!

Adam Savage , OK Go , Wintergatan ’s Martin Molin (especially this video where he breaks art, engineering, productivity and lessons learned), Mark Rober , Simone Geirtz , Xyla Foxlin , James Bruton , Dean Kamen (My favorite interview with him (esp. 11:28 to ~19:00)), Stuff Made Here ’s Shane Wighton, Psy DeLacy , David Kelley, Destin Sandlin (Smarter Every Day ) and more…

P.S Hope this wasn't too all over the place--Be sure to let me know if any of this resonated with you, or if you feel I'm wrong!

P.P.S a side rant about TRIZ --if you know me you might have heard this already)

Over Thanksgiving I was at home and rediscovered a Russian book on?TRIZ?(Theory of Inventive Problem Solving)?-- ТРИЗ (Tеория решения изобретательских задач). It's an?international system of ways of solving technical contradictions developed and popular in the U.S.S.R. between 1946 and 1985, by engineer/scientist Genrich S. Altshuller and colleagues.

Altshuller spent his early career in a patent office where he studied 200,000 patents to look for patterns in breakthrough inventions.?The core goal of the?TRIZ?framework is to replace trial-and-error and brainstorming methods that take very long amounts of time to generate any breakthrough innovations. Instead, he found out you can train people in specific "roundabout ways of thinking" that can expedite and almost predict those eureka?moments.

The original formulation was based on 40 core principles (https://www.triz40.com/aff_Principles_TRIZ.php ), which are applied in places where you need to solve?technical contradictions?(ex. tradeoffs like a device which gets stronger increases in weight) or inherent contradictions (software with complex features should be easy to learn).?There are other ideas that tie all this together like the concept of visualizing an "ideal system" and "utilizing?idle/available resources", and tons of real-world examples.

(my favorite simple one: T-Drill removed the need for T-fittings on pipes by creating a tool that extrudes the material in the longer pipe up to accept the shorter pipe--using the principle of "utilizing available resources--the pipe material itself")).

2021 Roundup

Highlights:

• Creating 3D visualizations of experimental setups for USC’s Armani Lab
• Virtually watching RPL launch Ctrl+V
• Zed Factor Fellowship, leading to my Orbit Fab internship
• Catalyst Accelerator, meeting brilliant startup founders and getting to know the space community
• Starting my first in-person semester of college, meeting and working with my amazing classmates
• Gazing at the stars with friends at USCRPL’s Earthshakiier static fire
• SpaceVision conference in Houston, feeling at home among space nerds

Mentors:

I want to say thank you to my mentors this year! (+ highlight the first things that come to mind (one thing of many))

Jeremy Schiel (Orbit Fab)

• To dream big, set goals 10+ years out

Rob Palmer (mentor from USC Themed Entertainment Association Pairing)

• How using Blender, you can accurately control the biggest ever animatronic performance (he worked on Crane Dance !)
• The role of the technical director, management, protecting the schedule (+tons of new terminology from theme parks)

Kristin White (Zed Factor executive mentor)

• dynamics of China–US relations in regard to national security
• how to diversify hiring funnels

Vera Demchenko (Zed Factor peer mentor)

• insightful conversations about space sustainability, systems engineering, military involvement in space...

+All the space artists, engineers, and creatives I got to interview this year for my research project

?On to 2022~!

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