Engineering is a discipline whereby the demand for a pragmatic structure or device is responded to by the creation of an object which conforms to minimum specifications only. Money is not provided for any parameter to be in excess of the least values realistically possible. Money is not provided for enhancing the object artistically in any manner whatsoever. Thus it is that windmills are cobbled together out of whatever bits of spare lumber and metal brackets are lying around and thats the end of it. Bridges are just lumps of steel bolted and welded into a framework, or set into a concrete matrix, in such a manner that heavy vehicles don't collapse them. The engineering considerations only attempt to accommodate for the vagaries of the cosmos by using verified models, with informed safety factors, which reduce the probability of failure to commercially acceptable levels.

Artistic considerations for environmental and cultural enhancements are entirely outside the engineering brief. In many circumstances such stark functionalism is quite justified. In the battle field soldiers don't care much about the artistic merits or otherwise of a portable military bridge. Fifty metres below the surface scuba divers are not that interested in the cosmetic appearance of their air valves and gauges. The obvious reality, that many engineered objects have been styled and been given a desirability make-over, is a consequence of market forces and advertising perspectives. The engineering is subordinated and bypassed and the marketing promoters disguise the function with fashionable form. The engineering achievements incorporated in the latest automobile are not emphasized to a technologically ignorant customer but rather its prestige value is enhanced to psychiatric proportions.

Such a phenomenon might lead many to suppose that engineers were culturally deprived and artistically inarticulate and to not have the capabilities to enhance their detailed appreciation of the properties of materials with creative art forms. This is quite simply not true. Many engineers would relish the opportunity to embellish their windmills and pylons and bridges with sculpture and mural but are prevented from making their aesthetic contribution by the cramp of modern commercial indifference. Certainly the most significant consequence of this suppression is that many engineers have been forced to do watercolours or something similar for recreation in an attempt to compensate for this imbalance in their lives. It should only be a matter of self-assertion to rectify the situation. Having all the intricate details of the design to attend to they have been outmanoeuvred by the managerial and advertising fraternity who have nothing else to think about. A digital device stylized by an engineer should be more marketable than a fashionable facade digitized by a promoter but, because this is not always the case, it is simply a matter for the engineers to become more street-wise and capitalize upon human stupidity when it is available.

The one engineering skill which continues to provide global hoarders with an intractable dilemma is that of designed in obsolescence. When one component of an engineered object wears out on schedule many of the more practical and pragmatic backyard engineers are most reluctant to immediately dispose of the entire entity. If a spare part is not readily available at a reasonable price it might be able to be fixed with some adhesive or string or, if all else fails, it may be most useful as a cannibalized source of creative enterprise for other projects. It is the fate of most such junk however, never to be resurrected as anything. Little ever resists the active vicissitudes of nature to moulder and oxidize and disintegrate. The enduring irony for the hoarder-engineer who periodically deems it necessary to conduct purges of the seemingly useless, is that applications for a crumbling piece of junk will always become evident immediately after it has been disposed of.