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: Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 13:46:44 -0400

On 21/10/2011 9:58 PM, Gene Kim-Eng wrote:

I suppose I must be misunderstanding your point, because a single
operator employing standardized methodologies and tools is no less a
"technician" than one who is working on only a bit of a project along
with others. It's not how many people are doing the work, but how they
are doing it.

Well, I will certainly grant you that. If the scale of the project is small enough, you can indeed do it by yourself and still be using an engineering approach.

The difference between engineering and artisan is that the
artisan employs processes and skills that are non-standard and which may
venture into less objective territory. For example, when I write the
teardown manual for an engine, my methods and tools are standardized
(there are, in fact formal standards that define them) and anyone
following the standard with similar skill levels will arrive at pretty
much the same result.

The collaboration involved in working in an industrial approach does not necessarily mean that you are all working round the same table. Indeed, an industrial process would deplore that kind of inefficiency. Rather, by the creation of standard interfaces between parts and processes, it allow the individual to work separately most of the time while assuring that their contribution will integrate smoothly with the whole. That is, in fact, the best form of collaboration. But it isn't working alone -- it is working separately as part of team.

I am a technician/engineer; Neil Gaiman is an artisan/artist. And
if Gaiman and I both took on a partner, or two or three, the difference
between how we work and what we produce would be just as glaring. Also,
members of any team I put together will be more or less interchangable
and the results will still be the same, but if Neil Gaiman abandons his
project and Stephen King takes it over, wave goodbye to standardized
results.

Well, for Gaiman, this is almost certainly true, but it is by no means true that there is no industrial production of fiction. From Harlequins to Disney book/tv tie ins, industrial, standardized fiction production is a major part of the book market, and the people who produce them can be just as interchangeable as you and your hypothetical team members.

Whether there can be an engineering approach to creating high-quality fiction is a more interesting question. You don't tend to see it in novels, but one could make an argument that a good Hollywood film is the product of an industrial fiction-creating process that produces something of quality and originality.

But there is a lot of difference between a technician and an engineer. Engineering is a creative trade. Give two competent technicians the same problem, and you should get substantially the same answer. Give two engineers a problem (an engineering problem) and you should expect to get substantially different answers. Indeed, some companies deliberately set up different teams of engineers to attack the same problem, hoping that they will get different results, and thus have more options going to market.

Now you make the point, however, I do see that just as there are engineers and technicians, so also there may be engineer-writers and technician-writers (in addition to artisan-writers). Of course, everything that makes a technician-writer a technician lies in the specific subject domain. Technician writers from different domains are no more interchangeable than are technicians from different domains.

But yes, within a domain, I certainly acknowledge that there can be technician-writers who are interchangeable because they have a well defined set of professional knowledge and follow a well designed set of standards (which were, of course, created by engineers/engineer-writers).

However, when I made the distinction between the artisan approach and the engineering approach, I was not making a distinction based on creativity versus rote, but undisciplined creativity vs. disciplined creativity.

Mark

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