Engineering, we would argue, falls closer to the right-brain domain. While we technically-trained engineers may have always associated ourselves more closely with the study of science, our discipline actually has more in common with art. Mobile phones, MP3 players, and digital cameras are hardly universal truths waiting to be discovered. Those devices and systems are incremental evolutionary steps atop innovative ideas hatched by the creative minds of engineers. While we engineers are always trying to solve problems, the nature of our solutions is often well-distilled creativity. A problem may represent a universal truth, but normally an optimal solution does not.
Like any other type of artist, electronic system engineers work in a pre-defined medium. In embedded technology, that medium is both new and rapidly evolving. In fine art, when a new medium arises, the first efforts are usually banal explorations of the craft. It takes years of experience with a new set of materials and capabilities to gain the mastery that facilitates the fabrication of a work with any transcendence. The first paintings, the first photographs, and the first movies may have been successful initial explorations of the media, but the work that followed years later eclipsed those initial attempts and eventually elevated the form from novelty to worthwhile artistic expression.
In 2005, our embedded technology palettes grew richer, our skills grew stronger, and our art form elevated itself to a new level of maturity. While embedded system designs may not have yet reached the level of sophistication that would place them in permanent collections in the major museums of the world, some designs are certainly reaching the stature of finer folk art. In that vein, we’d like to nominate Apple’s iPod nano as the year’s finest example of expression of excellence in the art of embedded design. Sure, the nano is an embedded system with the usual components of processor, peripherals, storage, embedded OS, application software, and mechanical parts, but the overall effect of the design challenges the notion of those components the way Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” challenges the notion of canvas, pigment, and binder. OK, maybe not quite, but they’re definitely headed in the right direction.
We often discuss the innovations that fuel our progress to new levels of achievement in technology, but discussion of the human side of the equation is far less frequently analyzed. We all know that our engineering environment is continuously enriched with new improved capabilities, but we tend to forget that we’ve also been busily breeding a new generation of experienced and talented engineering artists. A decade ago, the technology mastered us. We struggled to get a working embedded design to do anything at all with the tools and techniques available to us. Today, system designers compose component symphonies, orchestrating the perfect product from the palette of technology available to them. Advanced processors, high-density memories, stable drop-in operating systems, and robust, accessible hardware and software design tools provide the power that enables engineers to explore a greater range of options.
Engineers learn. Both as individuals and as a community, our knowledge and expertise expand with the cumulative experience of years and projects gone by. That knowledge is disseminated in formal venues as diverse as technical papers, journals, and datasheets, and informally passed along by word of mouth much like folk stories and traditions were passed through cultures of the past. As we learn, our art form elevates. Even without the driving distraction of Moore’s Law’s momentum, engineering would evolve. Our skills and facility at manipulating technology to create a vision are steadily improving. If we were still designing today with vacuum tubes and rheostats, in Fortran and in Forth, our work would most likely far surpass the best efforts of our predecessors.
While 2005 brought us to new levels of achievement in our nascent medium, 2006 will most likely take us much farther. Faster processors, denser silicon, more capable development tools, and cheaper everything will certainly make our jobs easier and our efforts more productive. These things do not make new products, however. It takes something more. We should never be so distracted by the progress of basic technology that we fail to recognize the progress in ourselves and in our discipline at the same time. Make 2006 the year that you achieve new levels of creativity and innovation in your embedded engineering endeavors. You are, after all, an artist.
