Engineering in the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Projects in the Arts and Engineering

This paper presents the work of electrical engineering and art faculty, which have provided experiences in design projects in art, music, dance, and theatre to mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering students, with the goal of exposing engineering students to the arts, and involving art students with an engineering senior design project. We present the projects implemented by the researchers including two senior design projects involving aerial photography as well as the development of a motion capture laboratory. The latter has focused on motion capture applications in the arts including motion analysis in music conducting, nonverbal expression and character development through movement, skeletal modeling of dance, and four-dimensional animating drawing and painting. The paper presents the assessment of this effort, including the survey of the senior design engineering students to gauge their increased interest in the humanities and their ability to communicate across disciplines. In addition, the impact of the humanities students and faculty are assessed in relation to the effectiveness of the motion capture in their respective disciplines. keywords: interdisciplinarity, cross-disciplinary, engineering, humanities, art, aerial photography, senior design, motion capture, conducting, theater