I like that idea.

As you probably know, in the art world there's a nontrivial business of fabricators. Consider a giant lamp-bear[0]. That's pretty hard to build: it has to not fall over and kill the students, it has to survive the winter, it has to be transportable from wherever you build it.

There's a whole cottage industry that just does things like that. (Not all of them large of course.)

Wouldn't it be cool if engineering projects called in a team of artists? Probably the closest anyone's come to that is having murals on public buildings.

[0]: https://www.brown.edu/about/public-art/Fischer

Groups developing systems that interface with humans bring in artists (by various titles) all the time. In the programming world these are our UI/UX designers. In aircraft, it's the person or persons deciding on how the passenger cabin should look and feel. Same for other vehicles. For buildings, it may be the architect, but more likely a team working with them.

Yes but doesn't this just bring us back to the "are engineers artists" question?

UI/UX designers are not "artists" by conventional definition, and architects are in such a special zone of "engineering-plus" that some of us end up called Software Architects.

In other words: his exceptional aesthetic sense doesn't make Jony Ive an Artist except in a let's-decide-what-an-artist-is discussion. Which this is, of course. :-)

I was responding to your question here:

  Wouldn't it be cool if engineering projects called in a team of artists?

By saying it does happen. Could it happen more, sure, but it does happen quite often, and for more than just murals.

Regarding the general debate here of engineer vs artist, I gave up on it. We have to first agree on what is meant by "art". By some definitions, engineering is very clearly art. By others, it's very clearly not.

Yea, but we have an awful lot of drab cinderblock buildings or their equivalent, that are basically eyesores the moment they're built.