[Jon Stratis]

Have you ever looked at a robot or a mechanism and thought "wow, that's beautiful"? You might have 30 other teams at the event that accomplish the task the same way, but none of them will look as good. That's art, expressed through engineering. As we see every year, any team that tries can field a robot that plays the game. But some teams have a certain elegance in their design that makes you stop and look, while others are kludges that, while functional, aren't pretty.

At work, I implement solutions to problems every day. Sometimes, when I review those solutions before delivering them, I think "wow, that's ugly". Other times its "wow, that's really nice". The nice, elegant solutions I want to go crow about. The ugly ones I just hope no one else notices. Yet both of them solve the problem and become part of the product.

Art is integral to engineering, even if we don't like to think so.