STEM to STEAM
stemtosteam.org
stemtosteam.org
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them"
- Steve Jobs' Commencement Address at Stanford University, June 2005
BTW. My knowledge of typography, as well as data-related graphics design and organizing skills have improved quite a lot just a year or two ago. It was not because of going to an arts school, it's because I stumbled upon Tufte's books while procrastinating on HN. The point being, learning random stuff is random.
(If we want to improve it, then maybe let's introduce a "quick overview of a lot of completely random stuff" course in STEM classes.)
There are too many people getting Art degrees and then want to have a STEM job and just don't have the math and science skills required for the STEM jobs. Art is easier because it doesn't have the math and science classes that STEM has.
When I think of design I often think of Engineering and not Art, and that might be because I was a STEM student. When I design a program there is no art involved unless it is a video game or something. I usually give the user control over what colors they want the background and menus to be.
This is a close-to-home question over here. The fact that William Blake can spend time on the front page of HN alongside ZFS is in my view the best thing about it.
I keep my mouth shut, because I don't want to hurt their feelings, because they do a lot of good work with helping kids into the STEM fields, and because they're genuinely nice people. (I can be kind of abrasive, and they're doing good work. So I hold off.)
But I fail to see how the color of the packaging affects how tough parts for the space shuttle are. Is it about promoting creativity and free-forming content into Engineering and Science, etc.? The webpage says a whole lot of nothing. I'd be willing to rethink my position if I understood the concept a little better (because I am clearly missing something).
Also: friend attends RISD right now. Will ask what he thinks of this.
Then, when someone had a figure to include (again, before the advent of matlab), they had to plot out their data by hand, then send it off to the art department. Journals back in the day had strict requisites on the quality, type (font) of figures, and on their readability, and the artists were careful to follow these rules, turning handwritten figures into quality, readable, and informative figures.
Nowadays, you have no fucking idea how often I have to read a paper with figures that are just plain confusing, un-insightful, and with types and labels that are unreadable, and defeat the whole purpose of a scientific paper: to disseminate and communicate your findings. I get it that STEM'ers happy now that they no longer have to talk to the art department, but so often, they do not realize how important design is and how you need at least a modicum of design sense, especially when the entire point of you writing a paper (after using it when writing for grants) is to communicate with your fellow scientist your findings.
Design is so much more than "color of packaging," design is readability, type, structure of visual elements, and yes color. Moreover, design, as the name implies, is art for a purpose; often for, yes, attention grabbing and customer wooing, but for us scientists, design plays an important role in the communication process. And going back to color, for fuck's sake, some choices colormaps can really hurt the quality of your publication! 10 panes of Jet heatmaps, each with different limits on each pane? Give me a break.
Design is important, just as much as literacy is important, just as much as knowing limits before you memorize the derivative of a sine function is important. Just because you have LaTeX and bootstrap doesn't mean design isn't important anymore, even though it's easier. No one can do everything, but being humble enough to learn from people outside your field (even outside science) can make you a better STEM'er, especially when it comes to sharing your cool ideas.
This is the role of The Artist.
At least the hypothetical universe in my mind, a bunch of technocrats are a lot more likely to commit unethical behaviour than people who have a bit more sensibility for the human condition and history.
I would not say that, at this point, many engineers know or are interested much in history or art, regardless of its social value. This is a mild failure on the part of the free market.
It doesn't. The objectives only seek to leverage the concrete validity of STEM as a stable platform for "arts & design," which are intuitive and incredibly debatable by nature.
As a teenager I was totally turned off by engineering. It seemed like a bunch of dudes who wanted to discover the best way to make something, but with a total disinterest in why that thing should be made.
The art (and design) people seemed to get it. They were intensely curious about the bigger idea, and wanted their output to connect to some visceral and/or moral and/or political outcome.
So I wound up in an art program. I learned how to make aesthetically satisfying objects and was exposed to a ton of cool things that have happened in art history.
Later on when I got into software, I came to it with a mentality of wanting to make "things" that were in some way complete and satisfying. That turned out to be enough of a motivation to learn programming, and it turns out the demand for software is insatiable regardless of your background or skill level.
So if I were to talk to someone who was going into school, I would tell that person to do what excites them, and suggest that STEM doesn't really deserve to have a monopoly on creation.
There is an objective, correct answer to questions in science to the point where disagreement is simply wrong. I don't think there is an objectively best art or anything like that. So the studies are nothing alike, even if art and design can provide real value to technical projects.
To be fair the site is very vague - I can't really see how this would be different from something like industrial design/architecture ?
Adding the Arts to STEM is about much more than just "Art + Design" (though that is a piece). It's an important topic of discussion and should be priority in education.
Every child in America should leave school with a basic understanding of arts and culture - some knowledge of music, visual arts, literature, history.
Societal progress has consistently been tied to the greater appreciation of humanity found in these pursuits. Just as any musician or artist should have the opportunity to understand and appreciate the basic concepts of physics or computer science, so too should the scientist know sculpture. Creative thought sustains critical thinking, and many of the borders between them overlap.
If we truly wish to build our future nation to be our best, we must not discount the arts as a core pillar of any healthy society, and one worth supporting in any way possible.
e.g. https://www.nms.org/AboutNMSI/TheSTEMCrisis/STEMEducationSta...
I've never heard 8 years of college referred to like that. It's... strange.
A well rounded person is always better than a person that's really good at one or fewer things.
(edit: why am I being downvoted?)
The Rhode Island School of Design seems to be the main force behind this. They're not really a design school, in the industrial design sense; they're a "fine arts" school. Teaching kids the rudiments of industrial design might be useful. It's not about self-expression; it's about what the user needs.
[1] https://bonamici.house.gov/press-release/reps-bonamici-and-s...