Abstract
As design practitioners researchers and educators, we constantly find ourselves shuffled between humanities and sciences. In fact, the design departments in the universities around the globe are located within the faculties of engineering, architecture, visual art, liberal are or environmental sciences, thus becoming a meeting point for academics and professionals coming from both the humanities and sciences. The synergy resulting from the varieties of backgrounds and expertise creates a fertile ground for explorations on both a conceptual and a technical level. By briefly compiling and analysing a review of literature and creative works spanning from the renaissance to contemporary art, this paper reflects on the potential benefits of combining engineering and art research. The authors of this paper look at the increasingly delicate role that technicians, engineers and computer programmers play in developing technologies that impact our social, emotional and intimal lives, and advocate for art as a context and tool to help those professional developing their sensitivity and critical sense, besides their skills. In doing so, the paper makes a contribution to the STEM vs. STEAM conundrum, encouraging an education that merges arts and humanities disciplines with scientific and technical subjects. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2021-02-01-04 Full Text: PDF
Highlights
If one looks at the way conventional educational and academic contexts have been conceived and organized, artistic and engineering disciplines seem to be two much separated realms
The Gap between Art and Engineering in Education. It would not be for nearly 500 years, from the rise of the universities and cities of the later Middle Ages, that the first formal education system to promote a mix of engineering and art, the Bauhaus, would appear and open its doors for the first time
Those who push for a stronger involvement of the arts within the scientific-technical education see an opportunity to enhance some soft skills of the students, ranging from sense for aesthetics, real-world applications, playfulness, and communication [16, 17] Recently, the State University of New York in Potsdam has investigated the potential of a STEAM education with the intention of creating “a model for the education of scientists who will be able to create innovations in modern science and technology necessary to address the complex problems facing human society”[18]
Summary
If one looks at the way conventional educational and academic contexts have been conceived and organized, artistic and engineering disciplines seem to be two much separated realms. We can state that for Leonardo art was the drive and the mean to conduct his research As Wilson [3] suggests, the current separation between science and the creative arts is a consequence of the Enlightenment and the Romanticism movements of the XIX Century. We stubbornly separate the science from humanities, engineering from arts, technical skills from conceptual thinking. The aim of this paper is to highlight how in reality, art and engineering still coexist today within creative projects, and that reinforcing and formalizing cohabitation of the two leads to an exchange of skills and approaches enriching both actors with technical and scientific backgrounds and those from creative practices
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