Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Concrete Theory Works a Room

The Smart Surfaces course that we are taking part in is meant to teach us a variety of things. The course is, in a nutshell, a design course, teaching us tools and thought processes and team-building methods for use in the future, applicable to architects, artists, and engineers in the world of design. However, there are benefits for each major not seen by the others.

In my mind, the architects and artists, though separate in major, are similar in the way that they learn. The disciplines are both very hands-on, as is obvious in their skill sets being very similar - though the artists are more hands-on and the architects are more technical. They may or may not have worked together before, but they work together easily in general. Each definitely brings their own separate abilities to the table, but they do have some overlap.

Engineers, on the other hand, come at this class from a completely different direction. Most of us have limited hands-on experience with anything but material testing and our respective research topics. Any construction experience or design and development are generally done on our own time, which we (for the most part) do not have much of. We have all of the necessary technical skills and much of the thought process required for design, and can come up with complex solutions that have plenty of calculation. However, when it comes to giving our ideas depth, we are uneducated in most of the skills required to take what is on paper to any other medium.

One of the major stumbling blocks that I have noticed, and not just for myself, is that we engineers are able to communicate intra-major quite well - with other engineers, but when we move into inter-major communication - the majority of our future - we are quite poor at it. I'm saying that in general, we have great ideas and can't sell them to people who don't understand what we're talking about the way we do. You can design a mechanically perfect device, but if you can't pitch it properly, you won't get anywhere fast. In most of our engineering classes that require group work, this isn't an issue, as we are communicating with people that think the same way. Unfortunately, in real life we can't communicate as well with the people that we need to - financiers, designers, production personnel.

This course provides a unique educational opportunity to hone communication skills towards non-technical personnel. Not only do we get to communicate with designers, but we also get to communicate with the general public, who may not have any of the technical skills that we learn, when we do our final presentations.

I feel like I have expanded my expectations for what I will learn in this course. Smart Surfaces is honing design skills, teaching new methods of thought, teaching new hands-on techniques, teaching project responsibility by defining a budget, teaching proper teamwork techniques, teaching new software and hardware, and last, but possibly the most important [for us], teaching engineers how to work a room - how to sell ideas and make them stick.

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