EEWeb Featured Engineer

I am happy to be EEWeb’s Featured Engineer this week! The list of engineers that EEWeb has profiled in the past is incredibly impressive and I am honored that I was chosen to be included.

I have a fairly non-traditional engineering upbringing that really grew out of a need to know more about the details around the art projects I was working on at the time as opposed to finding a “career” working as an engineer.  I didn’t know I wanted to be an engineer. The desire to dig deeply into the structure and design of higher-order projects was really the only way I convinced myself to go back to school and learn the field.  I doubt I would have had the discipline to completely submerge myself into the math, physics, chemistry and circuit classes when I was younger and just out of high school. I was too much of a partier, way too social and too disorganized. I feared those subjects at one point. Working in the real world with real problems opened the door to the importance of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) in my work.

What ultimately led to my desire to learn was a need to know.  The need to know was driven by the truly honest feeling of enjoyment I felt while creating exciting work as an artist.

It’s a great time to be involved with not only engineering and tech but art-making as well.  When you create mashups of Art and Engineering you solve User Experience problems.  Humans are the ultimate audience;  they respond immediately to changes – good and bad – and, in the process, inform those of us who build things how to do better.