Engineering Art: Democratizing creative expression using normative rules

This paper offers a presentation on the use of normative rules to create works of art and music as well the use of this approach in encouraging creative expression in engineering and design students. Identifying patterns found in art and music allow untrained people to employ these rules, thereby broadening access to creative expressions. The democratizing implications of technology is already apparent in applications such as additive manufacturing and digital manipulation of imagery. These applications of technology allow people without artisanal skills of a sculpture or painter to move their mental conjuring into physical embodiments. Identifying normative rules that undergird many artistic and musical expressions allow their prescriptive usage by less trained individuals to create art and music, which represent rich expression of creativity. Relying upon heuristics to move ideas forward into tangible expressions embolden students to use their abilities to create designs and solve engineering challenges. This paper identifies normative rules used in some forms of art and music, then uses these rules to produce alluring works. Use of AI generated art from DALL-E is compared with the author's artwork as a foundation for a presentation of individual style and the intersection of AI and human creativity. This paper also shares experiences with artistic exercises in an introductory mechanical engineering class.