Arts to the rescue

Here's a very interesting article on collaboration between arts and engineering.


Engineering has made great advantages in the past several decades, but to really move forward, more collaboration with other disciplines is needed. For creativity, arts is a great option.

In  the above article, a student has a very insightful comment: "Engineers tend to make very small, incremental improvements on things that have already been done, and they don't really allow their creativity to take full force," [...] "Artists can teach you to be more open to new things and to think about things in different ways."

This is exactly what I have observed in our work too. I, the engineer, see my students designing things that are not very different from what they have seen before; and while we are able to increase the level of innovation of their designs, we do not see radical new or different designs.

The idea of how differently engineers and artists (and psychologists) think, and how to harness the benefits of that, can be extended to our research too. We all three have very different approaches to things. With minor simplifications it boils down to this:

Engineer: Identify the problem
Psychologist: Explain the reason behind the problem
Artist: Solve the problem

Hopefully this mix will result in more than just incremental improvements in creativity in design education.