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Comment by striking | Hacker News Reader

I've heard a lot about this from people who do work at STEAM events. Arts are allegedly just as important as the rest of these, because creativity and artistic design are part of the manufacturing process.

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.

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Design is a bit more than the 'color of the packaging' but I do agree it feels odd to try and get it in w/ the STEM. It calls attention to a certain anxiety within the design community about their own value while at the same time trying to overburden the relatively useful STEM shorthand.

I think 'A' independently has much lower value than when its combined with STEM skills (in terms of problem solving). If you are strong in STEM as an individual then adding 'A' would make you much more effective at solving problems.

I once got one of the senior researchers in my group talking about the harsh task of writing scientific articles before the advent of the personal computer(and LaTeX, of course). Back in those days, he had to do the usual handwriting of a draft of his papers, hand that off to a secretary, who'd, by rule, only type up two drafts of any of the faculty's manuscripts. They had to be very careful, then, what they sent off...that it was polished and ready for submission to a journal.

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.

Art, in this context, means the content of the render() function. There is a great deal of ambiguity, a great deal of magic, surrounding the implementation of render() for a complex system. It's easy to come up with mechanical isomorphisms for low-entropy representations of state; it's very hard to come up with evocative representations.

This is the role of The Artist.

Arts can create a sensibility for context, and can answer the "should" of "should we be doing this".

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 think resources would be better allocated at simply educating STEM people in ethics and the like. We don't need to funnel people into arts just as checks-and-balances to the "less sensible" technology folks.

You can teach an engineer history a hell of a lot more easily than teaching an art historian how to do stochastic calculus.

Can and do are not the same. Just because different forms of knowledge are "easier" or "more difficult" to obtain does not mean that the easier knowledge is somehow devalued, except in the context of labor supply.

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.

These examples may be true, but they're not necessarily representative. For example, writing is at the heart of history and literature, but it is not easily taught to engineers (or anyone, for that matter). Becoming a skilled writer takes years, and it probably also relies on innate talents as well.

Without reading, none of these would be possible - so maybe it needs to be STEAMR

Without Oversight, all of these can turn into a force of evil. The necessary Oversight needs to be framed in the context of Law. Therefore, I introduce to you STEAMROL(L).

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