Tim Hunkin

My favourite part of a public library has always been the large amorphous section between the pure sciences (the 500s) and the fine arts (the 700s), usually simply labelled `the useful arts'. It contains everything from rocketry to crochet, engineering, hobbies, cookery, etc. Mr Dewey, who devised the absurdly ambitious classification of all human knowledge for the libraries, has become a hero of mine. There are many connections between the arts and the sciences, but Mr Dewey's seems particularly strong.

As a child, I constantly made things at home, mechanical things like a burglar catching machine (a female figure that beckoned the burglar and then hit him with a hammer). I never thought making them was doing art (though I lavished attention on their appearance), or doing science (though I was constantly experimenting with electricity, materials and mechanisms to get them to work).

At school, subjects became rapidly polarised. Arts subjects seemed to consist mainly of writing essays, science subjects of doing sums. Not particularly interested in any school subject, I chose sciences because I found sums much quicker than essays. Things have improved since the sixties when I was at school, but teaching still has to centre round activities that can be done in classrooms, sitting at desks, and which can also be examined.

I was good at sums, and eventually got to Cambridge, with a scholarship to read engineering science. This was an intensely theoretical course, and though some of the mathematical analysis was quite elegant, I found it frustrating being without any tools or workshop. Instead, I started to draw cartoons, eventually contributing a regular strip (called The Rudiments of Wisdom) for a student newspaper. Throughout my time there, despite regular engineering drawing classes, my `arty' external activities seemed to have no connection with my engineering. Since leaving 24 years ago, I have very gradually realised how wrong I was. Cartoons and engineering design have much in common, united as elements of Mr Dewey's useful arts.

Engineering drawings serve the same purpose, to convey information. The idea of doing engineering drawings is surprisingly recent, James Watt was one of the first people to do them. His early beautiful hand coloured steam engine drawings, of about 1800, were executed after the engines had been finished, mainly to demonstrate the workings. The idea of using drawings to proscribe how every part should be made caught on rather later, as engineering feats became more ambitious and increasingly depended on co-ordinating the efforts of large teams of workers.

What I have only gradually realised is that formal engineering drawings are almost exclusively intended for conveying information, to ensure all the parts fit together, and not for designing the parts in the first place. To this day, parts are frequently only `drawn up' once a prototype has been perfected, doing the initial design is a separate process.

Prototypes can be made without any drawing. I don't remember drawing my machines much as a child, and when I started making things again after leaving Cambridge, I still did very little drawing, working out the detail by trial and error. There were so many factors, particularly with moving parts, that drawings didn't help with - will a lever be rigid enough, will a spring counteract a weight, will a grub screw be enough to hold a pulley on a shaft, will a motor be powerful enough, will it stop quickly enough. The quickest way to find out things like this was to try them.

Engineers originally used to work with `dirty hands' like this, but things had started to change by the mid 19th century, when James Naysmith wrote: `the eyes and fingers - the bare fingers - are the two principle trustworthy inlets to trustworthy knowledge in all the materials and operations which the engineer has to deal with....Hence I have no faith in young engineers who are addicted to wearing gloves. Gloves, especially kid gloves, are the perfect non-conductors of technical knowledge'. There is something intuitively obvious that it must be a good idea to make use of as many of the senses as possible (smells and sounds can also be very useful in identifying a problem), but in practice trying everything out becomes very slow. With experience, it becomes possible to solve many design problems indirectly, on paper.

  One of the first was a coin operated device called `The Birth of Venus' that I made for a friend, an arrangement of pumps, buckets and weights etc which pulled a poster of Rachael Welch out of a bath of murky water.

I have become increasingly critical of design teaching in schools and colleges, getting students to design on paper or computer with totally inadequate practical experience of the materials, mechanisms and processes involved.

I now sketch most of the parts I make, I have enough experience to be fairly confident a part will work. Sketching, back of the envelope plans, are very different from precise engineering drawings - you can change my mind all the time, scrubbing over the lines again and again. Drawing becomes a tool for thinking, for exploring different solutions, rejecting bad ones and developing good ones. Design engineers in large companies like Black and Decker, despite their sophisticated CAD suites and drawing equipment, still do most of their design work sketching with pencil and paper. Only when they have perfected a component do they draw it on the computer.

This process is not very different from doing drawings as a cartoonist - scrubbing over lines, trying to make the image clear and concise, thinking of endless variations or embellishments. It obviously is an intellectual skill, not verbal, not mathematical, something shared by most of those involved in engineering and applied arts, but often unrecognised. When I first presented this essay at a conference on Art and Science last year, an academic art historian asked me if it was really possible to think by drawing, so deeply did she equate thinking with verbal reasoning.

Even now, drawing can never solve every design problem, there always reaches a point, where I have to stop drawing and start working directly on a prototype.

Founded on the inadequacy of traditional IQ tests, some psychologists now list multiple `intelligences'. Howard Gardner's book `Multiple Intelligences' lists seven - Musical: Bodily (sports etc): logical, mathematical: linguistic: spatial: social: intrapersonal (understanding oneself).

Mr Dewey was not only right in recognising `the useful arts' as the link between fine art and pure science, he was also right in seeing it as something distinct. About 15 years ago I had a brief period of respectability in the fine art world as a sculptor, with an exhibition at the ICA, followed by nearly twenty in regional city art centres. At first I was flattered and enjoyed seeing my coin slot machines (which I'd previously been taking to local fairs and fetes) immaculately displayed. I was impressed by the art magazines and their intense theoretical discussions about contemporary art.

However, disillusionment soon set in and I felt the fine art world was increasingly alien. I found the hushed, respectful atmosphere of art galleries arid compared to the boisterous, cheeky atmosphere of the fairs. I became suspicious of the art world's difficulty with humour and popular, commercial art forms. I found the writing increasingly elitist, and underneath began to suspect it was meaningless empty hype. I felt the whole point of exhibiting was to communicate something, and yet there seemed to be an ethos that obscurity was a virtue.

I started to think the art world views today’s artists in the romantic tradition of William Blake, close to the tradition of mad art. I had tried briefly working as the romantic artist in a garret, drawing entirely on my imagination, but it didn't suit me - I liked being out in the world, being inquisitive, doing something useful, more related to the idea of the renaissance artist. This did mean making compromises in what I produced, but I found I didn't really mind, in fact I rather enjoyed all the discussions and arguments. I havEn't had any contact with the fine art world for ten years now, and have never regretted my departure. Mr Dewey was right that the useful arts are separate from fine art.

I've always found it very satisfying creating things that make people laugh. It is true that unlike great art of the past, humour doesn't last, (19th century cartoons for example now seem completely unfunny). However, I suspect the art world's main problem with humour is that it undermines the idea of fine art as a `serious and important' subject.

The baffling front that fine art presents to the world partly explains its minority interest. I suspect it stems from a terror of the art being dismissed as `slight and superficial'. This is odd, because other art forms are assumed to work on many different levels - films for example can have a rigid plot, they can fit Hollywood's need for sex, violence and sentimentality, but can still raise interesting issues and ideas. My own films, about domestic machines, have a story, demystify the machines workings, but also have undercurrents poking fun at consumerism etc.

It is the fine art world of the curators and the dealers and the critics that is alien. Fine artists themselves have many of the same practical skills and interests as those involved in the useful arts. Few fine artists I've met have much respect for the art world, but feel themselves trapped within it.

Since then, I have spent a considerable amount of times demystifying everyday machines, explaining how they work, both making films and designing museum galleries. I have become increasingly aware that understanding the principles behind even sophisticated machines like photocopiers or videorecorders, is distinctly separate from understanding contemporary pure science. It is separate because the theories and models of the universe that today's scientists find useful in their work (quantum physics, DNA genetics, chaos theory, etc) are generally not the same as the models most useful for everybody else, simply curious to understand more about the world around them. Newtonian physics is far more relevant to the machines I've filmed than relativity. Victorian electrical theory is more useful than quantum theory -even surprising devices like transistors have their victorian origins (coherers, the first radio recievers, were non-linear point contact devices, closely related in principle to the first transistors).Even when sophisticated modern scientific models are relevant, any real understanding depends on an awareness of the basic science from which they were developed.

In many cases, the machines were invented first, with `scientific principles' applied after the event. Science and mathematics can help in perfecting a machine, but the heart of the design process is still an art - knowing what will work; knowing what size and shape to make all the parts. Even the humble washing machine is a considerable achievement, each of the hundreds of parts has undergone intensive development, often years of work. It is because of this thoroughness that we have come to expect our machines to be so reliable we don't need to know anything about what's inside them. Once again, Mr Dewey was right, this sort of achievement of the useful arts is quite separate from pure science.

 Three series made for channel 4, called the Secret Life of Machines, shown also in the USA, and parts of Europe and Asia.

Despite the importance of the useful arts in creating the modern world, the subject and the skills are often ignored. Engineers, designers and skilled workers are not usually good at talking about their work, not surprisingly, because it is essentially non-verbal (there are no great works of literature in the shelves of the useful arts). Interest in the abstract and the theoretical has always been seen as intellectually superior to interest in the tangible and the practical. Academic study requires the use of words or mathematics, ignoring areas which they can not be applied to. Schools also favour academic subjects, with the added incentive that they don't require expensive materials and equipment, and don't pose awkward health and safety problems. Journalists, critics and politicians principally work with words, and are not in a good position to grasp the nature of the useful arts either.

Realising that `the useful arts' was a focus of my own interests I recently started reading about Mr Dewey. He devised his library classification system in America at the turn of the century. This was a time of rapid expansion and growing confidence, when old world values were being questioned. John Dewey was an educationalist who argued passionately against the classical aristocratic idea that teaching should consist of learning how to talk about things, in favour of the idea of learning how to do things. As a philosopher he believed that things could only be known through their origins and functions, and that knowledge, to be real, had to be functional, rather than conceptual. His library classification system was obviously underpinned by these beliefs. Behind his idea of the `useful arts' it's hard to imagine he hadn't intended the implication that the fine arts and the pure sciences were actually `the useless arts', something that has often delighted me while browsing in libraries. Its planting such an anarchic idea like this in such an unlikely place that makes Mr Dewey such a hero.

I now see my Cambridge Engineering Science course as a result of the engineers feeling inferior to all the other subjects in the university - the course was set up to prove that engineering could be made into a theoretical mathematical discipline.