Seeking New Perspectives: Engineers Experiencing Design through Creative Arts

The engineering curriculum of necessity focuses heavily on technical subjects—mathematics, chemistry, physics, and the large body of discipline-specific material. The arts are frequently present only in vestigial form and are regarded as tangential at best to the real engineering curriculum. However, an experience of the creative arts beyond the superficial might reveal that the artist and the engineer are not as different as is usually supposed. The University of Texas at Tyler has conducted an experimental project in which engineering students were encouraged to experience the design process afresh from the perspective of the creative arts. Juniors in electrical engineering worked under the mentorship of arts faculty in a chosen medium (studio art, writing, or music) to produce legitimate works of art that were displayed, performed, or read publicly, and documented how their experiences of design in the arts have informed and shaped their perspectives as engineers. The structure, expectations, and results of this course are described in this paper. A pedagogical crisis presents an opportunity The BSEE and BSME curricula of the University of Texas at Tyler include a required course entitled “Design Methodology in Engineering.” The course’s catalog description states that it is “an overview of design activity in engineering” and includes “the product design process; project planning; quality function deployment; design specifications; concept generation and selection; system and subsystem design.” This course would appear to have prima facie relevance and value to engineering students; however, its reception among EE students has been lukewarm at best. Thirty-one graduating EE seniors between 2011 and 2013 (the latest years for which data have been compiled) assessed the usefulness of Design Methodology as 2.65 on a scale of 1 – 5 with 1 representing “Little Usefulness,” 3 representing “Useful,” and 5 representing “Essential.” (Eight students chose the extremes of this scale, with six choosing “Little Usefulness” compared to two choosing “Essential”). Design Methodology had traditionally been taught by Mechanical Engineering faculty to mixed classes of EE and ME students. However, circumstances in the fall of 2015 disrupted this longstanding comity. The large number of ME juniors enrolling in the course outstripped the available faculty resources (both the EE and ME Departments had faculty vacancies) and provoked a decision in fall, 2015, to limit enrollment in Design Methodology in the spring of 2016 to ME students only. However, rather than simply finding someone to teach Design Methodology for its students, the EE Department challenged its faculty to find creative solutions to the crisis. Two proposals were eventually put forward. One proposal was to create an additional technical elective involving Matlab, Simulink, and LabVIEW. The other was an exploration of the design process through participation by engineers in the creative arts. The genesis of this particular proposal is described in the following paragraphs. Insights from Gustave Flaubert One of the authors of this paper has long harbored Francophile tendencies and approximately a year ago undertook as a personal goal to read Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary in the original French. This particular edition of the text 1 included an appendix that described the genesis of the novel, including Flaubert’s development of detailed scenarios for the events of his novel in which Flaubert described the setting, characters involved, and outcomes of these events. The level of detail and planning seems remarkable to an engineer; Flaubert even drew a simple map of the fictional village of Yonville-l’Abbaye in which much of the story takes place. Many pages include cross-outs and marginal notes related to the plot. Faculty in the arts, however, are used to seeing such careful mapping of setting, plot, and characters in imaginative texts, especially in longer works such as novels. Similar plans were made by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen for their novels, and by William Wordsworth and John Keats for their poems. Figure 1 shows images excerpted from Flaubert’s original manuscript (which is now available on-line). 2 Fig. 1. Excerpts of Gustave Flaubert’s manuscript of Madame Bovary. Left: opening page. Marginal notes about characters and settings appear on the left-hand side of the page. Center: chapter 1, folio 24 of Flaubert’s manuscript, showing extensive editing. 4 Right: Flaubert’s hand-drawn map of Yonville-l’Abbaye. Flaubert’s meticulous detail, planning, and documentation evident in the artifacts he created are reminiscent of the detail, planning, and documentation in engineering design. Flaubert, like other imaginative writers, evidently employed a structured process by which he brought his work to fruition. This encounter with the artifacts of Flaubert’s creative process posed the following question: what sorts of structured design processes do other artists use—and could engineers learn from them? Engineering—a straitjacket curriculum? The process of answering this question began with a survey of literature; and, somewhat surprisingly, there does exist a body of literature bearing on the relationship of engineering and the creative arts. But some of that literature concluded that the engineering curriculum has little room for engagement with the arts. Lichtentstein et al 6 have performed an extensive analysis of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and have drawn conclusions regarding the engineering curriculum. They conclude that the tightly-packed engineering curriculum leaves little room for studies for personal development; as a consequence, engineering students report the least engagement among all majors in foreign languages, study abroad, and independent study. The perceived benefits of the liberal arts component of the engineering degree are consequently low. They speculate that a narrow curriculum may discourage students from continuing in engineering or enrolling in engineering in the first place: “Might students who leave engineering (or who never enroll who might otherwise have considered the degree) enter STM [Science, Technology, and Mathematics] and Business believing that they can still acquire practical skills that make engineering so appealing, while giving themselves curricular breathing room for enriching educational activities that are difficult or impossible to pursue when enrolled in engineering?” The rigid curriculum would appear to be an impediment to the education of the socially-aware, humanistically-competent graduates envisioned in The Engineer of 2020 (among whose traits is “the creativity of Pablo Picasso”). 7 These observations prompt the question, could engineers draw benefits from a curriculum in which they have greater exposure to the arts? Loosening the straitjacket—the benefits of arts training for engineers and scientists The engineering curriculum is indeed bursting at the seams with technical subjects; however, a number of authors make the case that engineers and scientists would reap much benefit from including the creative arts in their education. Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein 8 make extensive observations about the benefits of arts education to scientists and engineers. They state that arts and crafts develop skills of observation, visual thinking, manipulation, and the ability to discern patterns. Drawing and painting, they observe, also contribute to fine-motor skills. Albert Einstein, Luis Alvarez, Richard Feynman, and Hans von Euler-Chelpin (winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) are cited as scientists whose arts avocations enabled their success in science. The RootBernsteins further observe that scientists who have achieved at the highest levels in their fields are significantly more likely than their peers to practice an avocation in the arts. In their view, arts education is not a dispensable luxury. Kellam et al, 9 drawing upon their experience with an interdisciplinary (engineering/art) design studio program, state that “deliberately engaging students in creative thinking processes is thus critical to their development as innovative thinkers who are able to work across multiple knowledge domains.” Shuster 10 argues that exposure of engineering students to the liberal and the fine arts is important not just because it will make them better members of society, but because it will make them better engineers. Shuster proposes further that creation in art and creation in engineering have much in common, and that the study of the liberal arts and the fine arts requires creative participation on the part of the student in ways that the engineering curriculum does not. The author contends that “the activity of research in engineering has far more in common with artistic creation or even with the appreciation of a work of art than anything which we usually teach in our engineering classes.” Root-Bernstein 11 emphasizes the roles of observation, empathy, and envisioning in scientific discovery and states that all are strengthened by artistic training. He cites the work of anthropologist and painter Desmond Morris (author of The Naked Ape) to support his contention that “scientific insight and inspiration stem from empathy, feelings, dreams, visions or, more simply, what Max Planck (himself a concert-caliber pianist) has called the ‘artistically creative imagination.’ " Laplante and Flaxman 12 invoke the concept of aesthetics to explain the preference for “elegant” proofs in mathematics and science. They state that information presentation must include considerations of aesthetics and that developments in video and computer technologies are creating niches where computer, video, and audio technologies are converging with art forms like music, painting, sculpture, and theater. This literature points to the following: (1) greater exposure of engineers to creative arts wo