News/Research

Engineering and Art: An interview with Ken Goldberg

29 Aug, 2021

Engineering and Art: An interview with Ken Goldberg

Engineering Professor and artist Ken Goldberg discusses the similarities between engineering and art, how he got into art as an engineering undergraduate, and the harmonious intersection of the two studies in his interview with the National Academy of Engineering.

From the interview:

The amount of hard work and studying that’s needed to learn how to be an artist is analogous to the hard work that we’re well aware of in engineering—learning calculus and physics over years of intensive time and effort.

Successful artists must study deeply to understand how art works. They have to learn about the logic, language, and very nuanced complexity of thousands of works of art. In art and science, you can’t innovate if you don’t understand what has gone before. Art has a logic and a complexity that’s very analogous to engineering.

Check out the entire interview here!