In creating the piece, there were two layers to each the engineering and the art concepts that I wanted to approach. For instance, there are some very obvious and concrete engineering concepts in the final piece: the flow diagram that resembles a typical engineering flow diagram. But these concepts are also represented with the more abstract: the design process of filtering out the unnecessary information, to find the helpful and important information needed in order to solve the problem or create something useful is central to this piece, conveyed not by the objects themselves but by the interaction of the colors and the marks.  The concepts of drawing from what you know and outside sources, and the way an engineer combines these in their mind to work out a final output are imagined here.

An important part of this is to take note that this “process” is not solely characteristic of an engineer- an artist or designer will go through a similar thought process, they will just perhaps translate that to a different output. They will also see this as the combining, recycling, and purging of ideas and inspirations. Just as an engineer might see an object or hear a snippet of conversation and use this to create a new object or concept, so too will an artist. I think that these are things that you can sense from looking at the piece. You may not notice that ideas are flowing and being carried throughout, but there is a sense of action and movement.

Knowing that this was what I wanted to represent, the thought process on the schema of a chemical engineers flow diagram, I began with a simple black and white flow diagram. I then translated everyday sensory inspirations into colors and shapes and lines or blurred objects, and used these as “inputs.”  The representation was like a collage of various overlayed images and shapes, pasted along the image of the flow diagram. I tried to select colors that I felt strongly represented the experience, or contrasted with other colors in the representation. 


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