A Brief Rhapsody on Art and Engineering

It is essential, when designing a complex system, to spend some relaxed time fantasizing about what it will be like when it’s finished. After all, this is what drives the process of engineering: at some level between rigorous and fanciful, an image of the finished product must be held in the mind, savored, and examined from all sides. Only after this playful interlude (which, to a manager, may be disturbingly indistinguishable from unproductive wall-staring) can decomposition of the design into subsystems, tasks, and packaging make any sense.

Trying to shortcut this by starting on Day One with formal design methodologies can have the catastrophic effect of committing one to an ill-defined goal state, whereupon the end result is shaped more by design tools than the supposed objective. That’s why so many products seem malformed, patched, and otherwise inelegant... the industry loves formal tools, and generally looks askance upon such frivolous notions as approaching product design as a delicate blend of art and engineering. The exceptions, when they occur, are a joy to use. The rest simply miss the point, no matter how stylish their exterior... or how sophisticated the underlying technology.

With that in mind, let’s play with Microship system design at the highest level for a moment. What will this feel like? Perhaps a “day in the life” approach, though a bit cliché in a literary sense, will help integrate all these processors, networking layers, and distributed widgetry into some kind of a cohesive (and hopefully enchanting) whole.

There is much more on this theme in my article on Gonzo Engineering.