Making STEAM STEAMy
As a concept, STEAM is simple: the intersection of science and art, of humanities and design, of any two seemingly different fields, is greater than the sum of its parts. Buildings that mimic desert lizards to capture rainwater, musical soundscapes designed through a lens of linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, projects that embrace the interdisciplinary nature of the world, embrace its STEAMiness, often reach heights that less STEAMy projects don’t.
But to build and smoothly run an organization that fosters STEAMy thought, STEAMy projects and conversations, is hard. Very hard.
At its core, Brown STEAM’s mission is to help people gain new perspectives on the connections between different kinds of thinking. That means running makeathons, building forests of lanterns, and tromping through the brush looking for mushrooms. That means trying every format of event in every field of study. The problem is, that to be truly STEAMy, Brown STEAM has to be accessible. We must cast as wide a net as possible, while keeping the net strong enough to compel and inspire.
But how can we balance ideology and efficiency? How could we possibly manage a group with such wide goals? How could we make it easy for people to find the projects and events that interest them?
Brown STEAM’s original solution, the one in place when I joined, was to make “subgroups” focused on a few major subfields of STEAM: cyberSTEAM for the intersection of computer science and the arts, bioSTEAM for the intersection of biology and the arts, and makeSTEAM for anything involving physical fabrication. Each subgroup had a few leaders that came up with events and (some) projects, which the people in those subgroups would work on. We had traded ideology for efficiency and ease-of-access (at least, we thought); we were dividing people by discipline, but in the process making the groups smaller, easier to manage, and easily distinguishable by new members.
And for a time it worked. People were interested and we pushed out events one after the other. We still wrestled with the ideology/efficiency balance, but by-and-large we were giving students the experiences they’d hoped for.
However, those three groups soon proved to be too narrow a net; people’s interests were more diverse, and we grew to match them. We had soundSTEAM for all things audio, citySTEAM for the intersection of art and urban studies, kinderSTEAM for the application of STEAM thinking to early education, and on and on. We got more people too, not just because there were more subgroups, but because interest grew as well, and soon our divisions were doing far more harm than good. Brown STEAM was too divided, nobody knew how to join, subgroups never talked to each other and never collaborated, and even we co-presidents had a hard time remembering what everyone was doing. In short, Brown STEAM had stopped being STEAMy. Managing the organization had become nightmarish. We wanted to start adding bigger projects to go along with the events and workshops we already ran, and that meant that we had to come up with and manage these projects as well. If we came up with the ideas on our own, it always left a few people out in the cold. And if we ideated with members, reaching a consensus would take months.
Something had to change. So we sat and thought. We needed project ideas that interested people. We needed to be more transparent, interdisciplinary, and accessible.
So we dissolved the subgroups, gave everyone the power to propose projects, and handed out links to our Slack like candy. Instead of having secret subgroup meetings scattered through the week, we have a few big meetings where everyone gets together and sees what everyone else is working on. We decided to dedicate ourselves to smoothing out communication, improving team forming, dedicating our time to mentoring and advising, and making sure we provided a rock solid foundation for others to build on. We had always talked about trying to make our projects more interdisciplinary, or how we never knew how to answer the question “How do I join STEAM?” Our previous structure had worked for years, but it was starting to show its age as we forgot what STEAM could and should be: a community.
So come work with us. Come with your ideas and dreams and passions. Propose projects and events and anything you want to show the world. We’ll help make it happen.
It’s time for us to be STEAMy again.
