STEM and IDEA

Alright, guys, it's been a year and a half since I posted something on this blog. A year and a half. Shame on me. But the ideas that led to making this blog are even more important to me than two Septembers ago. So I hereby make a renewed commitment to promoting both art and science, and perhaps melding the two. Who knows?

There could be no better way to promote this view than the article I'm about to share. It comes from the esteemed Seed Magazine and it was published in December of last year. John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design and he laments our seemingly total encouragement of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at the expense of IDEA (intuition, design, emotion and art). None of this is new - music and art programs are being cut with alarming regularity in schools, while science and technology are being touted as what will save America from this recession.

I don't disagree with that statement, and John Maeda doesn't either. But he wants to combine the two, to put "just a little bit of our humanity back into America’s innovation engines" and humanize the innovation that, to his mind, has become a kind of never-ending loop.

As President of the Rhode Island School of Design, Mr. Maeda uses artists and designers as his examples. As he says, "RISD represents the ultimate culture of makers. There is no greater integrity, no greater goal achieved, than an idea articulately expressed through something made with your hands. We call this constant dialogue between eye, mind, and hand “critical thinking—critical making.” It’s an education in getting your hands dirty, in understanding why you made what you made, and owning the impact of the work in the world. It’s what artists and designers do."

As an actor myself, I can only translate that into the work of creating a new character. That isn't done by getting your hands dirty, per se, but the real value of understanding how different characters, different traits, different ways of understanding the world, different personalities is on the same measure as being able to understand a butterfly by recreating it through art. There is a science in re-creation (whether butterflies or personalities) that a scientist does not have access to by mere observation. There is a wealth of information to be gained when we can step inside someone else's shoes, even if it's a butterfly's.

Unfortunately, we are starting to hold scientific quantifiable data to a higher value than the qualifiable data we acquire when we seek to understand by going within an idea or culture or emotion. As Mr. Maeda puts it, "I’ve begun to wonder recently whether STEM needs something to give it some STE(A)M—an “A” for art between the engineering and the math to ground the bits and bytes in the physical world before us, to lift them up and make them human." Who knows what ideas we'll find when we put these two ideologies together?

By the way, my favorite sentence of this entire article? "Artists do research with an open-mindedness and rigorous inquiry unseen in most other disciplines, except true science. " Yes.