Creativity After Google: Art and Science Interfaces
Biomedical engineering professor David Edwards feels that creativity is catalyzed by the act of crossing the conceptual boundary between art and science.
Published September 1, 2008
By Adelle C. Pelekanos
Academy Contributor
Pop quiz: What is the 43rd element on the periodic table? Who served as Secretary of State under President William Taft? What was the name of the fourth Star Trek motion picture?
Unless you’re preparing for a turn on Jeopardy, you’re probably not storing that knowledge in your head. No matter. In less than a second, an Internet search engine can produce it for you: Technetium; Philander Knox; and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
In an age when information is increasingly at our fingertips, the ability to retain facts ranks second to the power of problem solving. And leaders of innovation are asking how an educational system that emphasizes rote memorization can generate creative thinkers.
Harvard biomedical engineering professor, entrepreneur, and author David Edwards tackles that question in a new book, ARTSCIENCE: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation. To teach people to be innovative, he suggests, requires an understanding of the circumstances that promote innovation. He proposes that creativity is catalyzed by the act of crossing the conceptual boundary between art and science. And to show what happens when creators traverse the invisible borders between disciplines and institutions, Edwards offers anecdotal evidence from his career and those of contemporary artists and scientists.
Artscience: One Word, One Process
“Artscience” is the term Edwards coined to describe the phenomenon by which creators float among the disciplines of art and science. An artscientist may be a cell biologist such as Don Ingber, who as a young Yale science student was inspired to take a design class. In it, he studied the structural principle of tensegrity in design, originally described by architect Buckminster Fuller. Ingber recognized this type of integrity in the cells he was studying in his lab, and went on to pioneer a new view of cellular structure.
Or, an artscientist may be a doctor such as Sean Palfry, whose passion for medicine runs parallel to a passion for photography. Unlike Ingber, who carried a specific idea over the artscience boundary, Palfry experienced another kind of catalyst for innovation. While working in the toughest neighborhood hospital in Boston, Palfry spent his free time developing a photography technique involving multiple exposures. The attention to detail and analytical skills that he honed as a doctor complemented his photographic work, and the enjoyment he experienced taking pictures served to balance the stress of his difficult work at the hospital. His application of artscience in his leisure activities both sparked his creativity and revitalized him for his medical work.
From Musician to Mathematician
Diana Darby is a third kind of artscientist—an artist by training who pursues scientific understanding to advance her creative work. One afternoon, Darby, a professional concert pianist, became fascinated by articles she found in a music journal at the Lincoln Center Library. The articles, written primarily by engineers, piqued her curiosity about how science might help her better understand her music. Unable to let the idea go, Darby researched engineering programs and eventually enrolled in City College, followed by graduate school at MIT.
Toward the end of her studies, Darby finally had the mathematical tools to explore her music. Her eureka moment came when she developed a use of chaos theory to generate musical variations. It had taken the intuition to follow her idea, the courage to risk her career as a professional musician, and dedication of more than six years to produce her artscience innovation.
Obstacles to Artscience Innovation
Edwards sees Darby, Ingber, Palfry, and other artscientists as “idea translators,” who have taken an idea through three stages: conception, translation, and realization.
None of them set out with the intention to pursue artscience. Darby’s idea of chaos theory transformed into music began merely as an intuition that mathematics and science could enhance her experience of music. She struggled with the decision to return to school, leaving behind her successful career as a pianist. But it is the move from one intellectual environment to another that Edwards says allows artscientists to create an aesthetic result from a scientific method, or the opposite.
Unfortunately, in a world that increasingly values innovation over information, our cultural and academic institutions are as yet ill equipped to foster creative innovation of the kind Edwards describes. “We value creators in business, culture, education, and society, but somehow we struggle to create institutional environments to welcome them,” he says.
Indeed, the divide between art and science that Edwards recognizes as a catalyst for creativity can contribute to the “administrative inertia” that weighs on academic institutions. “That we institutionally encourage these modern prejudices through our dizzying array of disciplines and internal departments stems from the specialization of human knowledge, expression, and experience,” Edwards writes. He calls this the educational institutional problem.
The Artscience Lab
To overcome such institutional barriers and catalyze innovation, Edwards proposes an intellectual artscience environment he calls the “laboratory.” Edwards promotes development of workspaces “for the societies, industries, cultural institutions, and research and education institutions in which artists and scientists might create a place that allows…creativity…to spread as pervasively as good ideas today should.”
Edwards walks his talk. In October 2007, he opened Le Laboratoire, the world’s first artscience center, in Paris. The 14,000-square-meter open area includes a large exhibition gallery, a design atelier, offices, and the commercial spaces for Le LaboClub, a members-only recreation area, and Le LaboShop, which sells merchandise.
Edwards says he founded the not-for-profit Le Laboratoire as an “art and design experimental center” where students could learn “to more effectively realize ideas about which they can feel passionate and which are simultaneously relevant to society, industry, and culture.” He underwrote a significant chunk of its operating expenses through the sale of his own biotech startup. A range of cultural, nonprofit, commercial, and educational institutions including Epson, the Wellcome Trust, and Harvard University also provide funding to support the break-even operation.
Edwards describes the center’s first few months as a “completely wild experience,” with artists and scientists collaborating on various experiments that might
produce “theater in the street, visual art in the office, or opera in the bathroom.” He says, “What takes place in the laboratory continues to change as the world’s issues and needs change.”
Inspired By NASA
One of the first projects of Le Laboratoire has been Edwards’ own collaboration with French designer Mathieu Lehanneur on an air filtration system called Bel-Air, inspired by observations of NASA scientists who detected unusually high levels of toxins in the blood of astronauts returning from space missions. The NASA team experimented with certain plants that acted like natural filters, absorbing and metabolizing the noxious chemicals emitted into the air by the artificial materials of the space suits and shuttle environment.
Edwards and Lehanneur recognized similarities between the space shuttle environment and a modern home—both of which play host to high levels of fine particles emitted by plastics, insulation, and other modern building materials. The two envisioned a kind of living filter that would absorb and metabolize airborne particles, the way plants did in the space shuttle. Bel-Air aims to maximize the natural absorptive properties of plants by optimizing the filtration capacity of leaves, roots, soil, and plant water.
Bel-Air qualifies as artscience because Edwards and Lehanneur used the tools of plant metabolism and of airborne chemicals to create an important functional appliance that is also aesthetically pleasing.
Innovation By Example
In addition to artscience experiments such as Bel-Air, Le Laboratoire carries out public programming and education in accordance with a goal to serve as a center for learning that complements traditional school environments in which, Edwards says, specialization is inevitable.
When specialization stifles creativity, the artscience lab is an invaluable environment for students, he says. Edwards sees the artscience lab as a supplement to the specialized learning that pervades education today. Through Le Laboratoire partnerships, such as one with Harvard, university students can work alongside established artists and scientists at the lab. Edwards hopes that this model for collaboration will be repeated between other educational and cultural institutions, catalyzing innovation and complementing similar missions.
Younger students can benefit from learning about the innovative work happening at the artscience lab in less formal ways. On any given day, students of any age can be found seated cross-legged on the ground at Le Laboratoire, chatting about exhibits and scribbling in notebooks, Edwards says. By presenting examples of creators freely exploring ideas through various methods, he says the artscience lab effectively teaches innovation by example.
“Giving kids the opportunity to play on that artscience interface is a gift,” Edwards says. “We learn best by being passionate for an idea, and by having enough fearlessness and experience to pursue those ideas wherever they’ll take us.”
Also read: The Art and Science of Human Facial Perception
About the Authors
David Edwards is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering, Harvard University.
Adelle C. Pelekanos is a freelance science writer living in Queens, New York.
