What is invisible, taken for granted, and often misunderstood in almost every SHAPE activity?

Computer scientist, Professor Harold Thimbleby, shares a story of helping to set up an art exhibition, combining engineering, technology, and art. Through his insights, we see the need for SHAPE and STEM to work together, balancing our humanity with our desire for new and improved technologies. 

As a computer scientist, I live in STEM, but my wife is an artist; in fact she sits on the Arts Council of Wales. It’s almost inevitable, then, that I regularly get asked to help make art work. Recently, I built a walk-in exhibition cube to display some videos and other artwork.

I had to do some straight-forward engineering and woodwork to make the cube work as a safe space to exhibit the art. When it was all painted black, my engineering details disappeared and the art stood out. The cube supported three TVs playing videos, some amazing white ceramic sculptures, and some paintings — and that was just the inside. The outside supported some woven projects and a huge interactive piece of art.

I think the artists who curated the exhibition enjoyed my comments about the cube while I built it, and they asked me to write it up like the other artists had written up their art pieces.

My write-up for the exhibition told how engineering disappears to support art, but also that great engineering and art are often merged or married into one where it isn’t obvious where the engineering stops and the art begins, or where the art stops and the engineering begins. Something like Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North is an amazing piece of art that can be seen for miles around, but it’s also an amazing piece of engineering. Engineering provides the function and supports the art to communicate its meaning.

But there’s also another sort of engineering on display in the cube. Engineering that unintentionally undermines the art.

After reading all the technical documentation, I chose to use Sharp TVs for displaying the artists’ videos. Sharp TVs can display videos from USB sticks, and they have really nice high resolution colour screens. Ideal for an exhibition I thought.

While these Sharp TVs have lovely graphics, their video features are surprisingly unreliable. I am afraid it would bore you to tell you details — I had to write a four page manual on how to fix problems with the TVs, so they can be reset by staff when the videos go wrong. (If I told you any more I think your eyes would glaze over.)

And this is the problem. 

Almost all modern IT, like the Sharp TVs, is absolutely amazing and exciting. But the other bits of modern IT are horrible. Sharp’s QA is clearly problematic, but the nice 95%-or-so looks so good that everyone gets sucked. 

When you get a modern smart TV home, it’s going to take an hour to set it up, and then you may well find it won’t do some of the things you bought it for. Mostly we keep quiet about these embarrassing expensive mistakes we make. We don’t want to think about them (they are too complicated to think about!), and so we join the queue for the next irresistible innovation when TVs will be even smarter, probably with more AI in them.

At least we’re in good company. 

Politicians want the NHS to spend more money on better IT, and we all agree it’s blindingly obvious that the NHS needs better IT. But if it is going to be like my Sharp TV experience, most patients might be helped, but some, maybe 5%, will end up with worse problems — and all staff will eventually experience the problems. For the NHS and patients, that level of quality just isn’t acceptable. (We actually don’t know what the percentage is as no one wants to fund research into technology failure so 5% is an estimate.)

The Times Health Commission that set out to “save the NHS” says we need a better NHS app. That’s obviously true, just as you need a better picture on your TV. What the Commission failed to say is that the app needs to work, and be in a reliable IT environment that works. Just like for a TV, what you need is not just a great picture but a great picture supported by functioning, reliable engineering as well. The high quality pictures may seduce you in the shop, but you only discover the annoying details after you have bought it, got it home and spent a few hours setting it up. If you were the NHS, getting excited about how IT will fix all your problems, you have to be sure that a new app is not just inspiring, but it also works well. It needs to be reliable. 

Art and engineering should be in harmony. The art’s meaning should be able to be appreciated without off-putting failures in engineering that interrupt and disrupt the intended meaning. In the NHS’s case, the ‘art’ is the art of medicine, delivering cures and healthy lives. It should not be undermined by engineering failures, like interoperability, bugs, cyber attacks, or obsolescence. 

Just like we all know drugs have side-effects and that side-effects have to be taken into account for any treatment, it’s time we acknowledged that IT too has side-effects. IT does go wrong, and if we don’t acknowledge that, and manage it better, things will keep on going wrong — and we will gullibly respond by just wanting more and more new stuff, rather than demanding better stuff. 

We need to think about STEM+SHAPE, engineering and art, more often.

Further reading

H. Thimbleby with P. Thimbleby, Patient Safety — Stories for a digital world: https://www.harold.thimbleby.net/booklet   

The Times Health Commission: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/society/health/health-commission 

About the author

Prof Harold Thimbleby

I am a professor of computer science, but I’ve moved into legal activism, via these stories in the NHS and the Post Office. I am now working with barristers, and I am proud my work in the NHS has led to me being elected honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh. I’ve published 345 refereed papers and been invited to give over 300 conference keynotes and over 600 presentations and workshops around the world.