Engineering as a Physical Art
Our bodies are machines that must be cared for and maintained.
By Mel Chua
Hello, reader. How are you? To be explicit, by “how are you,” I also mean “how are your hands?” Are they holding a print magazine, twisted outwards to meet a keyboard, gripping a mouse? How are your shoulders—rolled forward? Your neck—cantilevered outwards to support your head? (Relax your jaw.) How are you breathing? Is anything scrunched up in concentration or out of habit? Is there pain—or will there be, if you stay in this posture for a few more hours?
Engineering is inescapably material: Our work changes and shapes the material world surrounding us. But engineering, like all human activity, is also inexorably physical: Our bodies are made of the same stuff as the world we shape. If humans did not have bodies, we would not need engineers. Even our most abstract work lives in the material world—hands grasping chalk, eyes scanning equations. Some engineering work is overtly physical, like bolting an engine into a Baja racer or hauling an autonomous drone out of the sea. Some is more subtly physical, like the precision of pipetting or the muscular endurance marathon of an engrossed coder’s extended static posture.
We teach engineering as a material art, with labs and hands-on projects—but do we also teach it as a physical art by watching our movements as we do so? If a student’s router bit is gliding smoothly through plywood, but we see the arms straining, do we pause and readjust an elbow? Or do we care only about the path of the machine, and not the hand that guides it? We ignore the physical side of engineering at our peril, even though the effects may take a while to show up.
As a musician, I could immediately hear how my biomechanics at the piano keyboard affected my instrument’s tone. As an electrical engineer, my biomechanics at the computer keyboard seemingly had no effect on my code’s compilation…until my 22-year-old body shut down from an RSI (repetitive strain injury) attack so severe that I couldn’t work for several months. It was only then, as I began the long and painful journey through rehab, that I began to hear similar stories from older engineers. Their bodies, too, had given way before their thirties; this pain was “normal,” in some twisted way, for “dedicated” people in our discipline. In contrast, when I started studying and performing as a dancer, I noticed that the dance faculty began by explicitly teaching us how to care for our bodies—how to warm up, stretch, and mobilize—precisely so we could keep up with the vigorous pace of classes and rehearsals and protect our ability to dance into ripe old age.
Some engineers learn physical awareness through another discipline that teaches it—climbing, yoga, weightlifting—but not all engineers will study movement disciplines, and not all who do will transfer that awareness into their engineering work. I have seen ballerina-engineers walk out of the dance studio and immediately shed their poise at the barre to slump into a corner and write code…then wonder why their necks are sore. As engineering educators, we can embed physical awareness into the movements of engineering we teach—whether we need to grip the soldering iron quite so tightly, whether that screen could be raised up by several books to sit more at eye level.
Legend has it that Bodhidharma taught kung fu to the Shaolin monks so their bodies could withstand the physically and mentally demanding meditations he wanted to teach them. Engineering is a demanding mental and physical practice; engineers must learn how to rest, eat, sleep, and move, or our ability to practice will run out. As engineers, we are—gloriously!—part of the material world that our training prepares us to shape and influence. Let’s appreciate and care for our engineering bodies—our bodies that are marvelously engineered, and which do and teach marvelous engineering.
Mel Chua is a Ph.D. student in engineering education at Purdue University.