The Software Engineer as Artist [Courtney Behm]

There is a perception in the general public about engineers…solid, grounded in facts, serious, cautious. They work logically, methodically, are disciplined by their profession into taking one step at a time. I used to have that perception myself, until I started working in high tech. At first, as a marketing professional, I was looking at the engineers I worked with from the outside in, and the assumptions held reasonably well. There’s no question that they were far more practical and pragmatic than I and my fellow marketeers. But when I moved from Marketing into Program Management, and began dealing with the development process at close range, my assumptions began to change.

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Creative Leadership and the Water Cube at the Beijing Olympics

I don't ever want to hear another engineer say I am not creative after attending a presentation on innovation and creativity by Tristan Carfrae, Senior Fellow at Arup, the designers and structural engineers in the consortium who constructed the Water Cube for the Olympic Aquatic Centre at the Beijing Olympics. What was particularly interesting about Carfrae's presentation was his proposition innovation in the building industry is very difficult and when you look at the simple physics of his proposition, he has a point. Every building is a prototype that mustn't fail. In structural engineering, you just cannot fail or the building will fall down. Engineering is calculable but it is not the calculations which fail. It is what the engineer chooses to calculate that will bring about the failure and in this sense, engineers' thinking can be compared to the way artists work.

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