engineering and art

<p>I really like drawing and some of my friends tell me that I should have gone to art school or done architecture. is there any kind of engineering or engineering-related career that has something to do with art/design? I know there is computer graphic/animation for CS majors.</p>

<p>Yeah you can be a CS major and look into graphic design. You can only do civil engineering and focus on structures. Then in grad school study architecture.</p>

<p>I believe the basis for Cooper Union is to bring art and engineering together.</p>

<p>Not really. The Cooper Union has a great engineering program and a great art program, but they are quite separate.</p>

<p>Product design sounds like a pretty good mix of those two.</p>

<p>I’m a CS kid with a strong interest in art + design + writing…one field that looks pretty promising to me is HCI (human-computer interaction). It’s essentially computer science + interface design + cognitive psychology, which is an interesting blend.</p>

<p>Industrial design may also be interesting…product design, from what I’ve seen of it, doesn’t have enough of the engineering side to be really compelling for me. But you may be different.</p>

<p>Are you in the process of compiling a college list right now? I know CMU has a HCI double-major you can apply for once you’re in (they only accept a handful of students from different colleges, however, so I imagine it’s quite competitive) and they also have the BCSA interdisciplinary program, where you can get a degree in the School of Computer Science as well as their College of Fine Arts. Just a thought. =)</p>

<p>Although many aspects of drawing such as perspective, geometry, etc are found in some engineering classes, the vast majority of any engineering discipline curriculum consists of material that has nothing to do with drawing or art whatsoever. I don’t know much about architecture, but it’s probably the same situation there.</p>

<p>If art/drawing are your only motives, avoid engineering.</p>

<p>An alternative, although this may not be your goal, is that some 2 year vocational degrees exist in CAD drawing, drafting, graphic design (and all variants) maybe that’s something you’d like to investigate.</p>

<p>Architecture schools tend to favor art, though some more than others.</p>

<p>mechanical and civil engineering involve a lot of drawing, ive heard</p>

<p>Mechanical and civil probably involve a lot of AutoCAD which isn’t really drawing.</p>

<p>Architecture is more or less about art.</p>

<p>Computer Graphics as part of CS involves some art know-how but keep in mind that most CS programs will have just 1 course on computer graphics and it will be almost entirely about graphics algorithms and libraries like openGL not much to do with art directly – except in your projects perhaps but that too depends on the professor.</p>

<p>Stanford has a Product design major that you start by completing the courses for mechanical engineering. [Stanford</a> Design Program](<a href=“http://design.stanford.edu/PD/]Stanford”>Stanford Design Program)</p>

<p>thank you for responses</p>

<p>If traditional engineering has nothing to do with art, I can’t think of anything else but CS then. what about vector graphics? isn’t that included in computer science?</p>

<p>collegebound_guy – vector graphics are studied in a course called “Computer Graphics” but in any given CS program there will be 1 maybe 2 courses on computer graphics. There may also be courses on computer vision which may indirectly involve art.</p>

<p>Remember computer science is the study of computing not things that computing is used for. In CS you study algorithms, relevant mathematics, computation theory, some software design, and computer systems that are used to enable computation (such as modern computers, database systems, networking, operating systems, etc…). </p>

<p>In computer science you don’t learn how to use, Excel, Word, Photoshop or any other particular software application – maybe their design in some software courses but not how to use them. </p>

<p>Similarly, you won’t study photoshop or blender or 3DS Max as part of CS. You may study the algorithms that enable them to do what they do. For instance you may learn how to smooth an image by convolving the 2D image “signal” with a smoothing function, but how to do this in photoshop is irrelevant to CS and is a part of graphic design.</p>

<p>If you’re interested in the types of things you would learn in a CG class take a look at this wiki page:
[Ray</a> tracing (graphics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)]Ray”>Ray tracing (graphics) - Wikipedia)</p>

<p>Let me know if I can answer any other CS/CG questions…</p>

<p>UF has a Digital Arts and Sciences program which is what I’m doing. It basically combines computer science with art and is in the college of engineering.</p>

<p>There are also programs in video game design out there that probably combine CS/software engineering and art. But I don’t know anything about them and I am very skeptical about them since they seem kind of pointless.</p>