STEM to STEAM: The Scientific Case for Art
For many, 2011 was the year of Steve Jobs. His bright, creative light went dark. His legacy of innovation and creativity lives on in the products of Apple and the people who work there. But his reach extends much further. Political scientists, business gurus and pop culture junkies are still calculating exactly how big of an impact Jobs had on shaping modern society. And despite his death, I don’t think he’s quite done yet.
Certainly, no one would argue that Steve Jobs made personal computing much more personal. The cold, hard, immutable technology became warm, brightly colored and comforting under the watchful eye of Jobs and his creative team.
Perhaps the greatest gift Steve Jobs left us all was the ability to recognize how important art and creativity is to fostering innovation and solving technological challenges.
No one agrees with that more than Harvey White, the cofounder of QUALCOMM and former CEO of Leap Wireless International, a cellphone company on the cutting edge of technology development. Familiar with the education jargon Science, Technology, Engineering, Math or STEM he felt compelled to add an A for Arts.
At a San Diego economic development meeting last year, White said, “We simply cannot compete in the new economy unless we do something now about creativity and innovation.”
He and many others view an infusion of art as a means to preserve America’s advantage in the future.
"It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning unexpected findings of science." - Carl Sagan. Painting by Pat Linse
After all, Steve Jobs and Apple demonstrated that infusing sleek art and design elements into technology is the formula for great success and untold riches.
Former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley predicts that the jobs in greatest demand in the future don’t yet exist. In fact, he says they will require workers to use technologies that have not yet been invented to solve problems that we don’t yet even know are problems.
After all, Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
In addition to technical know-how, many of these challenges will require fresh, creative and artistic solutions.
Both former President George W. Bush and President Obama have called for strong investment in our nation’s education system, especially when it comes to STEM fields. But art is conspicuously absent from the discussion.
President Bush authorized the STEM initiative for Science Technology Engineering and Math. And with it came a $151 million infusion of federal dollars to help students earn a bachelor’s degree, math and science teachers to get teaching credentials. It also provides additional money to help push Kindergarten through 12th Grade math and science curricula to better prepare students for college.
President Obama reauthorized the America COMPETES Act in 2010 and added his own initiatives including Educate to Innovate and Race to the Top, calling for a renewed focus on STEM education. As a result, STEM centers are popping up all over the country. STEM seems to be on everyone’s lips and a future without proper STEM preparation is viewed as a dark time, perhaps even the death knell of the U.S. leadership.
However, many global economists recognize that a more well-rounded education that includes STEM plus art and music is the direction the U.S. should head. Most analysts agree that growing a “creative and innovative” economy represents America’s best chance to stay competitive in the global knowledge economy.
Journalist Jonah Lehrer says that science needs to find a place for the arts. A STEAM advocate himself, he believes that the best science begins with a scientist imagining something — an idea, a universal truth — long before it can be experimentally proven. He says science often relies on metaphor.
STEM to STEAM
In the 1920s physicist Niels Bohr was studying the radiation given off by electrons. At this point in history, the classical model held that atoms were like miniature solar systems with the nucleus acting as the sun while electron planets whirred around it in orbit.
While analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, Bohr realized that the mini solar system idea didn’t hold up. In fact, what he learned about electron behavior seemed to defy every conventional explanation. At the time he said, “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.” In this case as in many others ordinary words couldn’t accurately capture the data.
Lehrer says, “Science needed a new metaphor.” Bohr was an avid fan of Picasso and loved the the deconstructed cubist art of the time. He was quickly learning that the atomic world was much more abstract than science would admit at the time. Lehrer says, “For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object.”
Within the same time period, Louis de Broglie discovered that electrons could be either particles or waves. Thinking like a subjective artist, Bohr thought that which form they took depended how you looked at them.
Lehrer says, “This meant that electrons weren’t like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.”
The students and instructors at the Rhode Island School of Design understand this principle all too well. In January the National Science Foundation and the renowned art school brought together over 60 leaders in science, creative information technology, engineering, art & design, math and education research to examine and develop strategies for enhancing STEM education through the integration of art and design.
With creative energy and structure, this collaboration is turning STEM to STEAM.
John Maeda, the president of RISD says, “When policymakers today talk about education and reform, it’s all about the STEM subjects. It’s about convergent thinking – problem solving by breaking it down. Instead, a divergent thinker takes an idea and looks to expand it, and to find new diverse ways to connect it.”
In June, Representative James Langevin (D-RI) heard those words as he submitted a House Resolution to add Art to existing STEM initiatives in federal agencies. In part the bill says, “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that adding art and design into Federal programs that target the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields encourages innovation and economic growth in the United States.”
Stephen Lane is the CEO of Ximedica, a company that develops medical products and services. But the company began at RISD with a base in fine arts and industrial design. Lane says many major companies started as art companies but became design-driven enterprises.
Lane believes that STEM enables but that design is what really drives innovation. He says, “My kids didn’t grow up in grade school saying I want to become a technical sound engineer. They grew up saying, I want to be a rock star.” He believes art and design are the capture points and where students must be engaged.
Invoking the memory of Steve Jobs, Lane says, “Those are the people who are truly changing the dynamic, meaningfully, impatiently and consistently over time.”
Steve Jobs Shows Apple's Sweet Spot at iPad Launch, 2010.
Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson in his biography Steve Jobs, “Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place.”
Lehrer says at first glimpse science, in particular, physics may seem far removed from the subjective nature of the arts. But he says, “This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses.”
It’s true that physics theories are extracted from rather arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. But Lehrer suggests that just as artists rely on the imagination physics actually exceeds the imagination. He paraphrases Shakespear’s Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.”
Richard Feynman, the father of nanotechnology famously said, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”
To find the ingenious within us all as Jobs did, we must focus our strength and energy on the critical intersection point of the arts and sciences. Science is art. Art is science. And both are interdependently woven into the fabric of human existence. They are inextricably linked and for that reason, Steve Jobs’ legacy will likely be that of one of the most visible visionaries to embrace the STEM to STEAM movement and without ever realizing it.
Leave a Reply
