As someone who has mostly worked in industry or independently, to me the issue of evaluation has long seemed to be a dilemma for artistically-oriented engineering academic projects, as you point out, both in regards to getting funding, and for understanding the value of the research.

In industry, evaluation is usually measured in sales, of course, or otherwise is informal, with the occasional focus test to gather some data. (I think some, such as Brenda Laurel, think industry should be much more rigorous about doing user-oriented research/evaluations, in order to improve the design of the product.)

It occurs to me to ask, when artists in academia (technology-oriented or not) are applying for art grants, to what extent do they have to offer evaluations of their work? They don’t need to “measure” the value of their work in the user-testing-style terms Barry is describing. Is the value of artwork, vis-a-vis grants, in terms of reception in the art world (i.e., number of shows, awards, etc.)? I assume success in that domain, even for technology-heavy art/creative projects, holds little or no influence for getting money from traditional engineering sources of funding.

Also, I think it’s often the case that artistically-oriented engineering research tends to not have a strong artwork associated with it, at least at first, and so it’s probably tough to get funding from art sources. Not that you’d get enough money from them anyway to support costly engineering research.

This seems to be a problem of a hybrid discipline.