Re: Original work [was RE: STC certification program:skepticalcurmudgeonlyness, part II]

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Re: Original work [was RE: STC certification program:skepticalcurmudgeonlyness, part II]

Subject: Re: Original work [was RE: STC certification program:skepticalcurmudgeonlyness, part II]
From: mbaker <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com>
To: Al Geist <al -dot- geist -at- geistassociates -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:41:15 -0400

On 21/10/2011 11:16 PM, Al Geist wrote:

Artisanship is important when you are writing documentation for the consumer
marketplace. It has to look good as well as communicate.

You seem to be taking artisan to refer to the creation of the decorative aspects of the product. That's not unreasonable -- the word is sometimes used in that context -- but it's not what I was getting at. I was intending artisan to refer to the method by which a thing is created, not which aspect of it was being created.

After over 40 years in the industry, I feel the creative side (the artisan)
is just as important as the engineering side

Again, I am not using artisan to mean creative. Engineering is a creative discipline (unless by creative you mean simply the decorative aspects of a project). Engineering turns out a steady steam of new and innovative products every year. That is creativity. To contrast creativity (in this sense) to engineering is to misrepresent what engineering is. I have met more truly creative engineers in my career than I have truly creative writers.

The distinction I am reaching for is this, as best I can phrase it at this moment:

The artisan is one who does everything by hand and by eye, and by tools guided by hand and eye. They may be very practiced hands and very practiced eyes, and they may produce things of great utility and beauty, but there is a limit to the productivity and scale of the artisan approach.

An engineer is one who does things by process, and jigs, and tooling, and standardization, and logistics. Using these methods, they produce things of great utility and beauty but with greater productivity and scale than the artisan can achieve.

The engineer can hand production off to a separate function; the artisan must do all the production himself, for the whole of it remains in his eyes and his hands.

Mark

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