Art for the Sake of Improving Attitudes Toward Engineering

Since 2003, a course that incorporates art and engineering has been offered to mixed teams of engineering and fine arts photography and video students at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The course is focused on the art and physics of flow visualization. The course is largely technical, including imaging techniques, optics, some fluid physics and specific flow visualization techniques. Student work for the course consists entirely of open-ended assignments to create and document aesthetic images of fluid flows. A survey instrument is being developed that explores student perceptions of and attitude towards fluid physics or other engineering topics such as design. It has been administered to students in the flow visualization course, in a traditional junior level fluid mechanics course, in a course on design and in an upper division technical elective on sustainable energy as a control. Survey results indicate that the students in the flow visualization course, after a semester of making images for art’s sake, emerge believing that fluid mechanics is more important to themselves as engineers and to society, i.e. they have a positive shift in affect. The students in the traditional fluids course which is packed with real-life engineering examples exhibit a negative shift in attitude, which is typical of other technical courses. The use of photography in improving student perceptions is being extended to a course on perception of design. Although many course elements were identical to the Flow Visualization course, including an emphasis on aesthetics, results from the attitudes survey towards design indicate no shift in attitude, nor was there an attitude shift seen in the upper division sustainable energy elective. These preliminary results suggest that whether a course is elective as opposed to required may have an impact on the maintenance of attitudes through the semester. The observed lack of positive shifts in the Perception of Design course indicates that the significant positive shifts seen in the Flow Visualization course are only partly explained by this elective factor.