Large Engineering Projects and Major Artistic Endeavors

A Perspective on Systems Thinking, Architecting, and Art: Part 4

By Tom McDermott & Alejandro Salado

In Parts 1-3, we explored the relationships between the arts and technical disciplines. More specifically, how artistic endeavors can improve the organization and communication of complex projects to encourage more elegant design. Today, we are exploring the relationship and similarities between large engineering projects and major artistic endeavors, using the example of the production of a film score and theatre production. In Part 5, we will discuss a framework and a series of experimental classes/class modules designed to educate systems people using approaches from art education.

Systems engineering is a discipline and a set of methods and tools for executing large engineering projects in a structured and controlled manner. As such, there are similarities in the way large engineering projects and major artistic endeavors are organized and executed, particularly in the domain of systems engineering. For example, the production of a film original score has been described in systems engineering terms (Salado & Salado, 2015).

Viewing the production of a film score through a systems engineering lens, the authors describe the organization of the composing and production teams (e.g., composer, arranger, and orchestra), identify the different stakeholders (e.g., film director, scriptwriter, audience), and the process and activities to create the artistic piece (e.g., analysis of dramatic structure, development of cue sheets, composition of main leads). The authors managed to map all activities in the creation of the film original score to the main activities that systems engineers perform (note that order does not imply implementation sequence):

1. Elicitation of stakeholder needs, in which the composer aims at understanding how the music will aid the movie in achieving the objectives of the film director.
2. Concept of Operations and Conceptual design, in which the composed presents musical subjects and the intended usage during the movie.
3. Derivation of system requirements, in which the composer defines the different tempos and specific intention of each scene in the movie.
4. Creation of system architecture and flow down of subsystem requirements, in which the composer creates a coherent underlying structure for the entire artistic piece, as well as the main leads upon which the entire piece will be built.
5. Detailed design, in which arranges complete the music by adding elements to the main leads, using the structures defined in the previous bullet point by the composer.
6. Manufacturing, in which the individual musical pieces of the movie are recorded.
7. Integration, in which the full film original score is put together.
8. Verification, in which the composer assesses the matching between the full compositions and the original ideas, as well as the beauty and efficacy of the music.
9. Validation, in which the film director assesses the suitability and quality of the film original score for the movie.

Without such a structured and strategic approach to composition, the authors presented an anecdote in which traditional songwriting processes failed to yield a valid film original score (Salado & Salado, 2015). This is parallel to engineering, where the increase in size and complexity of the products to be developed were key factors that made systems engineering emerge as a new discipline (Honour, 2018).

Theatre production has also been suggested as a good surrogate of systems engineering projects (Palma, Mesmer, & Guerin, 2019). The researchers took several classes in Theatre Productions and identified practices that had similar contexts and purposes to some practices in systems engineering. The table provides a summary of some of the engineering applications in relation to theatre topics.

Research has shown that large artistic productions and large engineering projects could share similar characteristics that lead to working processes and approaches that follow similar patterns. These overlaps reinforce our idea that art and the technical disciplines may not be as far apart as educational silos have established. We do not imply that both are identical, but certainly there may be skills and competencies that both artists in large productions and engineers and designers of large projects can leverage.

In future posts, we will specifically explore a framework and a series of experimental classes/class modules designed to educate systems people using approaches from art education.

View Part 1 of this series here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.