Three Branches of Creative Activity: Engineering - Art - Science

Today, I have had an ingenious idea that has helped me a lot find out what I am really striving for. Here is the result of this idea:


This image shows the three branches of creative activity humans perform: Engineering, Art and Science. There are, of course, many other things human beings do (e.g. healthcare, politics, military,...), but those things are not creative.

Being creative does not mean that you have to draw a painting that looks good or compose music. That is only one branch of creativity - Art, where aesthetics matter. But Science and Engineering are fields of creative activity, too. So you can actually be creative - create something - without having an aesthetic intuition, e.g. by writing a scientific paper or working out a mathematical proof, or by creating a mechanism or building a machine that works.

Engineering is the Generation of Working Things. That means, what matters is that the result works. The difference to Science, which is the Generation of Knowledge, is that in Engineering, it matters that the result works, but not, why it works. Even if you create a machine that seems to do what it is supposed to do although you do not really understand why, you are a good engineer. By contrast, a scientist has to be able to back up each of his/her statements with sound evidence. So the criterion of judgement in Science is correctness. And in Art, the Generation of Aesthetics Things, what matters is beauty.

The Demo Scene is a subtype of Engineering at the intersection with Art. By contrast, I am mostly into the intersection of Science and Engineering, both in professional life (where I deal with computational physics) and in my sparetime (where I am into computational systems biology / artificial life). That is why I do have some interests in common with Demo Sceners, but at the same time making demos is not the right thing for me to do, since I lack the aesthetic aspect. I do enjoy watching demos, but I would regard it as a waste of time if I spent hours and weeks working on demos of my own.

The diskmag I made is actually a bit of all the three things in one: Engineering, Art and Science. But as I am more into Science than into Art, this may be the reason why I never felt to have really fulfilled my potential in the years when I focused on writing about the Demo Scene.

With this image, I now - finally - know where I belong and what I am headed for: Generation of Knowledge by means of Generation of Working Things.

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