Students, sundials, and school: Interdisciplinary barriers within the university
The Timepiece Sculpture is the first student-designed permanent sculpture on Brown’s campus, scheduled for installation in Spring 2019 on the Engineering Research Center green. Timepiece is a noon-mark sundial in the shape of a large Mobius strip.
Two years ago, an alumnus of Brown Engineering approached the University about donating a sculpture. However, rather than selecting an existing piece from an established artist (think Untitled (Lamp/Bear) by Urs Fischer), he wanted this sculpture to be different: he wanted it to be designed by students. He only asked that the sculpture tell time in some way and last as long as the building it would sit in front of.
As soon as STEAM caught wind of the project, we knew we wanted to be the group to make it happen. The sculpture’s need for durability and accurate timekeeping combined with the aesthetic requirements of a piece of public art makes it quite interdisciplinary by nature, and STEAM specializes in convening interdisciplinary groups of people from around campus. The donor and administration agreed, and thus the STEAM Timepiece Project was born.
For some reason, the STEAM leaders asked two freshmen, me and Elizabeth Austin (now a STEAM co-president), to guide a volunteer team of engineering, art, computer science, and architecture students through a design process to produce a final Timepiece concept. Though we were nervous at first, we leapt at the opportunity to help make a permanent mark on Brown’s campus. And besides, all we had to do was design the thing!
Or so we thought.
After navigating through an iterative process of idea generation, prototyping, and public feedback showcases, we settled on a final design: the Mobius-strip sundial. At this point, we thought our job was over — but it turns out going from a concept to actual, dimensioned SolidWorks drawings requires a lot of work. Most notably, it took a huge amount of idea-bouncing between us, the School of Engineering, and the Brown Public Arts Committee (PAC), which oversees the acquisition and installation of all new campus art (yes, including the aforementioned Lamp/Bear).
This is where we started to see tensions emerge: as we refined our design, the engineering administration became more concerned with budgeting and material and structural feasibility, while the Public Arts Committee pushed us to explore different aesthetic and narrative-based interpretations of our original. While these were both important aspects of the project that we could not ignore, deciding which design decisions should be prioritized caused clashes between the engineers and artists. Each thought their own approach had more merit, and that the other contingent had fewer qualifications to make the best decisions. The engineers thought the artists didn’t understand enough about physical constraints, fabrication techniques, and design feasibility, while the artists thought the engineers didn’t have enough of an aesthetic eye to be designing a permanent piece of public art.
In reality, both sides were probably partially right. But why was it so difficult for these groups to collaborate? Elizabeth and I had never run a project of this scale before, and we didn’t know how to handle the situation, especially because the similarly-diverse student design team experienced no such tensions. Perhaps the students were a self-selecting group, or the administrators and PAC were dealing with tighter constraints, but I believe the issue runs deeper than that. These tensions and resistance to cross-disciplinary collaboration are a pattern stemming from the structure of the university itself, both at Brown and elsewhere.
Here’s the problem we’ve noticed: at Brown in particular, the upper-level administrators (including the president, corporation board, etc.) have an incredible interest in interdisciplinary practices; it’s reflected in the “spirit of free inquiry” in the University’s mission statement and in the Open Curriculum itself. That interdisciplinary spirit is also embodied by the students who choose to study here, who are more than ready to soak up these principles. However, there’s a disconnect between the interdisciplinary efforts of the top (administration) and bottom (students), and it comes at the level of academic departments.
It’s this group within the modern university — between the administration and the students — who need the extra push into interdisciplinary thinking and cross-departmental collaboration. The faculty who make up each and every department are focused experts, we have the utmost respect and appreciation for that. However, they often conduct much of their research in specialized fields, sometimes during decades less friendly to cross-disciplinary collaborations. With Timepiece, these cross-departmental tensions stalled the entire project for months.
But there is a solution.
What finally allowed Timepiece to keep moving was transitioning the Engineering-Arts dialogue away from ten people in a room to smaller, more personal conversations. It was in these one-on-one, two-on-two meetings where members of Engineering and Public Arts could listen to each others’ perspectives and realize what they had to gain by accepting elements of a different approach.
It’s these conversations that we have to facilitate as a university, and in all universities, in order to have the type of collaborations and the depth of interdisciplinary research and studies that we want — and need.
STEAM is here to do our part in getting people to talk about these issues. So let’s sit down together, listen, and learn from those who might have something to teach us.
