Embrace Design, Rediscover Visual & Go Social
Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity
March 13–14, 2018, Washington, DC
http://www.nasonline.org/programs/sackler-colloquia/completed_colloquia/Cybernetic_Serendipity.html
Ben Shneiderman, University of Maryland @benbendc
Founding Director (1983–2000), Human-Computer Interaction Lab
Distinguished University Professor, Department of Computer Science
Member, National Academy of Engineering
This Introductory talk follows NAS President Marcia McNutt’s greeting. She will invite Jill Sackler to speak.
Thank you Marcia. I’m thrilled to be here today to open this Sackler Colloquium on Creativity and Collaboration, and welcome you to the beautiful building of the National Academy of Sciences. Before I go any further I want to express my appreciation to Marcia McNutt and the National Academy of Sciences staff, especially our administrator Susan Marty, who diligently arranged the speakers’ and students’ travel, set up the website, produced the publicity, prepared the printed materials, and gave personal attention to many of us. I have a gift for her, but please give her your thanks when you see her, and a round of applause.
Introduction
I wonder how many of you know that Abraham Lincoln founded the National Academy of Sciences by way of an Act of Congress on March 3, 1863. The National Academy of Sciences’ Congressional Charter stipulated that it would be a non-governmental organization of scholars who would advise the federal government on important issues. The National Academy of Sciences was instructed to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art”.
That charter, which combined “science and art” came at a time in which those disciplines were seen as closely related, maybe still infused with the spirit of Renaissance thinkers, such as Leonardo da Vinci, whose brilliant integration of art, design, science, and engineering produced astonishing breakthroughs and bold creations that have endured for 500 years. Leonardo’s training as an artist enabled him to make more accurate medical drawings, see the movement of bird wings, understand the dynamics of flowing water, and much more.
Leonardo’s integrative style inspired 19th century scientists, engineers, designers, and artists such as Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, James Audubon, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and others who gracefully wove together these diverse disciplines. However, during the 20th century the pressures for specialization and the emphasis on rational thinking methods, pulled the sciences away from the arts. This split led to CP Snow’s controversial essay that portrayed the gulf between what he called the Two Cultures. He encouraged closer connections between the two cultures, but many critics wondered how to more reliably ensure that human values and societal needs guided science and engineering.
The thirst for and opportunities to be gained from a broader vision began to emerge, maybe with the work of Buckminster Fuller whose concept of “comprehensive anticipatory design science” was inspirational to many. His geodesic domes, support for educational technology, and global environmental visions demonstrated the kind of integrated thinking, which is easy to trace back to Leonardo. Buckminster Fuller, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions, was a firm believer in the power of individuals to produce large changes.
Bucky may have been the catalyst for historic changes that began to raise the profile of design thinking, a research method that is sensitive to human values, devoted to advancing human needs, and protective of the planetary environment. His prominent advocacy of well-designed technology to advance human welfare and address societal needs surely contributed to the formation of the National Academy of Engineering in 1964, 101 years after the establishment of the National Academy of Sciences.
To study the changes of interest in science, engineering, art, and design I did a little bit of research using the Google N-gram Viewer, which enables users to search for the frequency of words over time across 20 million English language books (Figure 1). I was startled to find that design has grown so dramatically in its importance during the past century. The emergence of design is not due to Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive, but they were part of a larger movement.
Design is more than a way to make nicer brochures and better consumer products. Design is more than a component of engineering, as in chip design or structural design. Design is a fresh way of thinking about how we shape human experiences and our environment through better services that improve business, widely-used mobile devices that weave families together, and potent web-based resources that give access to information. Designers teach a fresh way of thinking that calls for heightened sensitivity to human needs, greater empathy for the people who use technology, and increased willingness to engage with stakeholders as partners and participants. Designers also raise awareness and appreciation for diversity: old and young, men and women, novices and experts, people from different cultures, and people with varied abilities and disabilities.
I see design as such a vital discipline that I propose the creation of a National Academy of Design by the year 2065, just 101 years after the establishment of the National Academy of Engineering. Design thinking, infused with art, science, and engineering, is increasingly shaping the world by way of products and services, as well as novel research methods and innovative social structures. By the end of this Colloquium, I hope you will share my enthusiasm for the establishment of a National Academy of Design.
How this Sackler Colloquium Emerged
This Colloquium began when Jill Sackler requested that the National Academy of Sciences hold a Sackler Colloquium to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the famed exhibit “Cybernetic Serendipity” which was held in London in 1968. That influential exhibit, seen by 60,000 people, was organized by Jasia Reichardt who will speak after me. That exhibit, in a time of political turmoil and rapid technological advances, celebrated the innovative ways that artists and technologists worked together to create entrancing art, sculpture, music, animations, videos, and much more. The goals of these artists and technologists were to delight, surprise, and sometimes annoy audiences with their creations.
This Colloquium will use the historical framework of Cybernetic Serendipity to look at how the context has changed. This will form the foundation for asking questions of how collaboration and creativity is impacting practice and research today. How should we re-envision research policy and educational structures to maximize the impact of partnerships with design, art, and humanities? How can we productively engage business, government, and non-governmental organizations as research and educational partners?
The Organizing Committee, which includes Maneesh Agrawala (Stanford University), Alyssa Goodman (Harvard Smithsonian), Youngmoo Kim (Drexel University), and Roger Malina (University of Texas-Dallas), set out a bold vision for this Colloquium:
Our ambition is to redirect the history of ideas, restoring the Leonardo-like close linkage between art/design and science/engineering. We believe that internet-enabled collaborations can make more people more creative more of the time.
This goal of restoring integrative ways of thinking drove the deliberations of Organizing Committee which worked hard to select, invite, and engage with our dream team of terrific speakers, who you will hear from in the next two days. Since we sought broad attendance, we wanted to enable participation from those who could not afford the full registration fee. We thank the Simons Foundation for stepping forward to support the reduce registration fee for those who requested it.
The Organizing Committee also dealt with the difficult issue of recent news reports about the Sackler family’s involvement in the opioid addiction crisis. Arthur M. Sackler whose foundation supports these Colloquia, died in 1987, almost a decade before the development of OxyContin by his younger brothers by way of Purdue Pharma. Jill Sackler, Arthur’s widow, reports that her funds do not come from opioid producers. She has admirably used her funds to support arts and science institutions, such as these Sackler Colloquia, and therefore deserves our support and admiration. We believe that researchers and companies that market research products must take responsibility for the societal impacts of their work. Researchers must do what they can to prevent and condemn tragedies such as opioid addiction.
Overview of the Events
This Colloquium began with yesterday’s Student Fellows Symposium, which brought together 54 graduate students from across North America. They were chosen from almost 200 applicants who represented an astonishingly broad range of disciplines. This Student Fellows Symposium, organized by Professors Liese Zahabi and Molly Morin, gave the students a chance to present their work to each other in a spirited day filled with energetic discussions, and today those students are joining us — I’ll ask these students to stand up to be acknowledged, and so the other attendees might approach them to learn about their projects. This first-ever Student Fellows Symposium, sponsored by the Sackler Foundation and Google, brings youthful energy and fresh thinking to our events, helping to support our goal of substantive and sustainable change.
There are also three art exhibits organized by JD Talasek featuring the work of remarkable artists: Paul Brown, Luke Dubois, and Neri Oxman. These exhibits will be open during our Colloquium and in the coming weeks.
I hope many of you will join us on Thursday evening when Jasia Reichardt will participate in a discussion with Phillips Collection Curator Klaus Ottman. These monthly DASER events, DC Art Science Evening Rendezvous bring together hundreds of people in the DC region who share an interest in collaborations across art, design, science, and engineering. Finally, for those who can make it, there will be a Sunday afternoon talk by Luke Dubois speaking about his exhibit.
One more thing: at the end of each session, Youngmoo Kim has arranged for a relevant musical selection, with explanatory notes that are in your program.
Agenda
The power of art and design will be featured in our first session in which speakers will take inspiration from the 1968 exhibit on Cybernetic Serendipity. They will show potent examples of design excellence and report on the benefits of, to quote Sara Diamond, “artists and designers working in concert with STEM disciplines in order to act as transformative social, economic, environmental, and cultural agents.”
Then this afternoon’s session on information visualization will demonstrate how design thinking combined with a deep understanding of human perceptual abilities enables the creation of novel interactive information visualization tools. These powerful tools support analysts in exploration and discovery in ways that add much to the capabilities of traditional statistical analysis. In addition, data-driven story-telling is revolutionizing journalism while empowering a new generation of software savvy artists and designers to help us understand the world around us.
We are very pleased that the evening keynote speaker will be Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton, a respected scholar, visionary thinker, and inspirational leader. His talk “Branches of the Same Tree,” based on a quote from Albert Einstein, emphasizes the unity of diverse disciplines. If you can, take a few minutes to walk outside to the front of the building and sit by the statue of Albert Einstein — it will be a memorable experience.
Tomorrow morning’s session will bring us an early briefing on the upcoming National Academies report on Integrating Higher Education in the Arts, Humanities, Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. This major report, compiled by a diverse and distinguished committee over a 2-year process, highlights opportunities in higher education to give students more diverse backgrounds and skills, while also raising awareness of the ethical issues surrounding their work.
Tomorrow afternoon’s session will show how the transformative power of design coupled with internet-based access enables an historic shift to greater participation and collaboration. Teamwork is the new normal, and the evidence is strong that teamwork produces better research. In the past 60 years, science and engineering research paper authorship has gone from primarily single authors to 90% co-author teams, sometimes including more than a thousand authors. The internet-based teamwork tools, such as video conferencing, shared documents, and open data sets, appear to have accelerated the pace of collaboration and the quality of the work. Evidence from citation analysis shows that teamwork produces stronger papers that attract more citations and have greater impact.
New forms of crowd-sourced research, such as citizen science, enable projects that collect and analyze large data sets. New forms of social media research enable the gathering of vast amounts of data about human behavior, as well as the chance to study evolving trends, track emerging influential leaders, and understand the dynamics of controversy. However, the dark side of social media needs to be acknowledged, understood, and controlled so as to develop methods that reduce the impact of cyber bullying, cyber-criminals, fake news, hate groups, oppressive governments, and terrorist organizations. Every researcher needs to take responsibility for the ways in which their work is used, while doing what they can to counter unanticipated negative impacts.
Four Paths to Collaboration
As you listen to the talks please pay attention to the examples of how the integration of art, design, science, and engineering actually take place. I think there are four paths:
1) The perceptual training of artists, musicians, dancers, and designers develops skills that serve scientists and engineers well. Pasteur’s training in lithography probably helped him understand the chirality of molecules, that is, their left and right handed versions. Training as artists helped Leonardo, James Audubon, Mary Leakey and others to see more clearly, draw more accurately, and notice what others missed.
2) The innovative visions of artists and designers put demands on scientists and engineers: A famous example is Karlheinz Brandenburg, whose passion for music and sound drove his foundational research, which led to the creation of the widely-used mp3 audio format, igniting the digital music revolution, and thereby opening up new directions for computing algorithms research. Likewise, computer games, Hollywood animations, and the current interest in virtual reality forced rapid development of new software, advanced chip designs, and improved interactive capabilities.
3) A third path is that the playful, exploratory, iterative, and divergent methods of art & design free up scientists and engineers to expand the range of their thinking. Maybe the double diamond method of repeated divergent and convergent design thinking should play a greater role in the education of scientists and engineers.
4) A fourth path is that products of art & design, such as paintings, sculpture, music, or film can directly inspire scientists and engineers. Did a Kandinsky painting, a Calder mobile, or a Stravisnky symphony open up fresh possibilities for 20th century researchers? Do the works of Basquiat, Annie Leibovitz, Trevor Paglen, or Liz Lerman inspire 21st century researchers?
I’m sure you’ll have other questions for our speakers and I hope you’ll go to the breaks to engage them in spirited discussions. In a few weeks the speakers’ videos will be posted on the web and by the end of the year we will have a special feature in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with papers from many of the speakers. In addition, Studio International will publish all of those papers and related essays in ways that will reach broader audiences.
This Colloquium should be more than a memorable moment of inspiration. It can trigger profound discussions and build powerful new relationships that bind our disciplines. Then we, our colleagues, and our students can ask new and important questions that lead to positive changes. I hope these fresh ways of thinking will lead us to bold discoveries and breakthrough innovations that empower people, improve society, and preserve the environment.
