Whilst I’m no longer much of a gamer (I finished Half-Life 2 and got several hours into Oblivion before dialling down the game time), I do like to keep tabs on what’s going on in that world. Right now, the biggest thing since sliced zombies is Destiny,with its massively online save-the-solar-system campaign of dealing death to death-dealing aliens. Its creation was a huge undertaking, both in terms of manpower and financially.
One paragraph of one article about Destiny really stuck with me, though, and it didn’t have much to do with the game itself. The Guardian newspaper (I wonder if they got additional access because of the paper’s name?) had a behind-the-scenes article about Destiny that described how large an undertaking it was. The project was so big and so complex, with so many people working from so many different perspectives in such a big converted cinema, that they created the position of “workflow engineer”:
“The company employs a workflow engineer, Brandi House, whose job it is to mediate between the art team and the programmers. “The team kept growing so it became harder to just walk up to the engineers' desk and tell them it’s not working,” she explains. “The engineers started to say, ‘Well, we have 200 artists – I can’t get any work done!'” House has a PhD in electrical engineering and is an expert in user interfaces – now she’s applying that skill with systems to a workforce, - she is effectively debugging the development team.”
This is the wonderful thing about engineering. It is so loosely defined that it can seemingly be applied as a concept to pretty much anything. For engineering to really kick in, that something needs to be complex (yes, a pencil is complex, if you look at it from the right perspective), it needs to be definable and there need to be adjustable parameters so that an optimum can be targeted.
Once you know more or less how something is, you can define - more or less - how it could, or should be, and how - more or less, once again - to get there.
So, whether it’s sorting out your early morning breakfast workflow, or designing your low orbit home rocket - or even if you’re nominally an engineer at work and want things to be better: engineer your destiny!
