Session IIIb Report //// Integrating Art & Design Education with Science, Engineering & Medicine
The session on Integrating Art & Design Education with Science Engineering & Medicine at the 2018 National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquium opened with a talk given over video-conference by storm-stayed John Maeda on Design and Inclusion. Despite the occasional technical glitch, Maeda’s message on the importance of design in technology came through clearly. Maeda’s talk was characteristically unconventional, with audience members encouraged to send Maeda questions by text throughout the talk. According to Maeda this allowed an opportunity for introverts who wouldn’t normally come up to the mic to get their questions in. Maeda’s presentation revolved around his recently released, openly available, 2018 Design in Tech Report — a report which itself brings together design with technology in an interactive form that gives life to the data.
Maeda spoke to the potential for design to evoke change and contribute to improving both businesses and society. He discussed the three types of design: Traditional Design, Design Thinking, and Computational Design as well as their differences. Focusing on design thinking he stated that it provides a shared language that facilitates collaboration between individuals with diverse backgrounds and skills. His McKosmo Design Quiz allows companies to identify whether they are “set up for design to succeed.” At one point Maeda stated that many designers do not feel they need a college degree to perform their job, suggesting universities need to rethink their programs to provide more value to students that can be applied in their work and life. When asked how designers taking a degree program should get the most value out of their degree, Maeda responded that they should take more liberal arts classes to learn about inclusion and exclusion, while also understanding data and statistics and not fearing math. He also spoke to the ethical obligation of the technology industry to take advantage of the flexibility of networked technology to decentralize labor in an effort to reduce inequality between America’s richest and poorest people and regions.
In the second talk, How Arts, Crafts and Design Training Benefit STEMM Professionals: The Evidence and It’s Limitations, Robert Root-Bernstein talked about the potential of accelerating innovation and producing more creative and skilled professionals by bringing art education into the STEMM disciplines. Root-Bernstein, perhaps best known for Sparks of Genius, advocates for not just requiring students take classes outside of their area of focus as separate strands but for an interweaving of disciplines, where concepts are combined and applied to one-another. He spoke about building bridges, both literal and figurative, as a way to bring together seemingly disparate technical and creative disciplines to their mutual benefit.
Root-Bernstein discussed the many cognitive similarities between the arts and sciences and described a few of the thirteen skills laid out in Sparks of Genius. Examples of common skills included empathizing, abstracting, and playing, and all stem from the commonality of artistic and scientific creativity. He showed numerous examples of correlations between avocations and scientific success as exemplified by increased numbers of patents and Nobel Prizes. He talked about how arts, crafts, and design are ways to train STEM students and that can also help to get people that might typically not succeed in technical disciplines through a STEM degree. Root-Bernstein also spoke to several of the success stories of art and engineering such as Snelson’s Tensegrity and the $30,000 grant that led to the confirmation of using plants for contaminant sequestration by artist Mel Chin and botanist Rufus Chaney through Revival Field. He concluded stating the need to eliminate the misconception of individuals as left or right brained and instead understanding and encouraging thinking as “ambicerebral,” reinstating the main tactic for success as connections between diverse disciplines.
In Art as a Way of Knowing: Lessons from the Exploratorium Experience Integrating Art into STEM Education, Robert Semper discussed the formation of the Exploratorium and the essential role the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition played in its success as an innovative institution. According to Semper, the Exploratorium provides a facility where art and science co-habitate, with art providing a way to understand the individual’s internal world of perception and science as one which enables physical understanding of the “external.” Semper stated that during its two years at the Exploratorium, Cybernetic Serendipity established the notion that both artists and scientists were exploring and shaping the nature of the world, seeing 100,000 visitors in its first year.
Semper talked about numerous examples of the Exploratorium’s contribution to bringing together art and science including Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest machines. He stated that artists are moving out of the studio and into the lab, that they are central to maker and hacker culture, and essential in engaging the public. Discussing the 2011 Exploratorium Conference, Art as a Way of Knowing, Semper listed four main conclusions:
Practice: There is a need to engage the public in understanding art as a cultural tool that can address the compelling questions of our time.
Documentation: There is a need for greater documentation of learning and meaning-making in interdisciplinary contexts.
Research: There is a need to better capture and understand the ways in which learning through the arts enriches understandings and meaning-making.
Policy: There is a need to foster more interdisciplinary collaborations and syntheses of knowledge furthering the role of art as inquiry in interdisciplinary learning environments.
Throughout the talk Semper focused on how art can help STEM education do its Job. Semper stated that art must be an equal in collaboration, not just an add-on or paintings in a foyer. He suggested that artists should be recognized for the thinkers that they are: that the artist’s research process is important and that artists should be invited to participate as full-time members of education teams.
Overall the session resonated with the theme of the conference: bringing together art/design and engineering/science in creative collaboration. It was an excellent and convincing display from some of the nation’s experts on what art has to offer to the STEM disciplines. What was missing from the talks however, was discussion on integrating science and engineering into the arts. The potential of technical training and a broader understanding of the sciences to allow designers and artists to produce works that provoke social and technical change beyond the current norm. While many artists have already taken it upon themselves to take advantage of technology, institutions must work to integrate technical skills and scientific understanding into artists’ training, to provide a foundation from which to build new ideas that go beyond what is known and to improve interdisciplinary communication. Simultaneously, the integration of the arts and sciences must also consider the rich potential of artists to contribute directly to innovation and research both in academia and in industry.
