The art and craftmanship in engineering and everything else
A while back, I wrote a post about how academics should try and learn to better illustrate their work. I reasoned that well made illustrations have a great impact in the readability, clarity and general pleasantness of research papers and teaching material—meaning that their work will reach and be understood by more people. I now argue that in a similar way, considering oneself an artist and a craftsman when doing engineering work, or any work, will pay dividends in the long run. I’ll also argue this mindset expands into pretty much everything.
You, an engineer, are doing engineering work—either sitting down or standing up by your desk. The laptop is blowing hot air on your hand; it’s doing computationally heavy work. You got lost in thought doing something and now your coffee or tea has gone lukewarm. You can’t be bothered to go and make yourself a new one, but still crave the morning stimulation. You reluctantly push the last half into your stomach. You receive an email: it’s the subcontractor asking you about a drawing that has missing dimensions and other critical information. Great.
Best case? The assembly is still in prototype phase and nothing is fully locked in; you quickly just draw the dimensions on a screenshot, attach the image to the email and fix the drawing later. A 10-minute job, all said and done. Not a terrible botch-job.
Worst case? It’s not even your part, and the engineer who made it is either on vacation, doesn’t work there anymore, or is somehow else occupied. You don’t know the design intent behind the part, and now you’re spending resources trying to think how the thing should be made—while the machinists have their spindles spinning on nothing, cutting air. It took you 5 minutes to take notice of the message, 20 minutes to figure out what the design intent is, and a few more minutes to mark up the information and send it to the machine shop. At this stage you are by no means done—the structure was already set to the production stage. You still have to use 10 minutes to draft an engineering change request. Then, you’ll arrange a meeting with the people (note the plural) responsible for handling the changes. The meeting will likely last half an hour. After this, you can start the administrative exercise of revising the whole structure, because company policy dictates that strict revision rules are to be followed; this took you another 10 minutes. Next, you spend a few minutes adding the missing information to the drawing, closing everything up and sending the drawing for review and approval; a step that takes someone else, again, another 10 minutes. A small oversight cumulatively wasted hours of time, a considerable sum of money and really got on your nerves. We would like to avoid this.
As the engineer, it’s your responsibility that your work not only gets done, but gets done right. Now my argument—why assuming an artisanal mindset in your work will pay dividends and assure productivity—rests on a couple of facts: first, being detail oriented and invested in your product—not necessarily in an obsessive manner—avoids little mistakes. Second, because humans will be reading your documents, barely having all the information on the sheet isn’t enough. We’re prone to visual illusions and our working memories can’t hold on to much. The machinist should be able to figure out the shape of the part they’re going to make, but if the sheet is cluttered with dimensions and the part outline is buried beneath it all, this is now a very difficult task.
Now consider this: you spent a little extra time coming up with the best orthogonal projections to display the part most efficiently. You figured out how to best use sections to unmask the hidden features. You figured out the best dimensioning scheme, and placed the dimensions and annotations such that the part outline was preserved. The sheet layout is optimized and there is nothing that is not needed. The notes are in clear English with no chance of misinterpretation. Everything is in balance. Your drawing and accompanying documentation is, dare I say, gold standard.
Nobody will call you or send you an email. You just saved hours of time, a considerable sum of money, and got to spend your time in calm focus. The machinists machine, parts are produced, managers worry about important stuff, and your coworkers won’t get distracted with your requests for reviewing work. Most importantly: you get to work, in peace, on your next masterpiece.
Don’t just make good drawings, but think about how to do everything well. With upfront effort in teaching yourself the correct and efficient ways to produce good work, you’ll save yourself the time and bandwidth later in your career (or life), and you’ll be able to focus more on making things happen.