Arte e Scienza insieme nei secoli che vengono

ArtScience® is a Big Idea By Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein on April 8, 2009 - 5:15pm in Imagine That! ArtScience® is a Big Idea whose time has come. First coined over thirty years ago by the artist/scientist Todd Siler and recently reinvented by the scientist/artist David Edwards, the term refers to the integration of scientific and aesthetic concerns and processes in wholistic enterprise. Like any galvanizing notion, artscience has been preparing to break through for many years. We like to think that our book Sparks of Genius (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) has had some small part in that preparation. Here's how. Nearly 30 years ago, Bob set out to research how great scientists discover. Before the scientific method kicks in, before equations and theories have been formulated, what were their rules of thumb? More to the point, were these tacit procedures something the rest of us could model and learn? In 1989, Bob pulled together all the information he had uncovered into his book, Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge. With a nod to C. H. Waddington and his pioneering book Tools of Thought, which focused on statistical, graphical, and related forms of thinking, Bob laid out a number of other "tools" required for creative scientific thinking. Scientists, he had found, referred over and again to mental skills such as visualizing or analogizing, pattern forming or playacting or, for that matter, playing. Whenever one of these tools came up for discussion at dinner, Michele would chime in with examples of visual artists, dancers, poets, and musicians claiming to use the same skill. Was it the case, Michele wondered, that these thinking tools were common - that is, accessible and useful to all? If so, perhaps they were also universal and, like a Swiss army knife, good for lots of tasks in a wide array of professions. One thing leading to another, we (Bob and Michele) decided to investigate together what successful people across the arts and humanities as well as the sciences and technologies had to say about their creative abilities. And we quickly found that whether the individuals we studied were artists like Picasso or physicists like Richard Feynman, whether they composed sonatas or invented machines or discovered molecular structures, they all made implicit use of the same set of imaginative skills. Some more than others were more apt to address these skills explicitly, nevertheless across fields definitions were remarkably similar. This commonality was the genesis of the thirteen thinking tools that we explored as a set in Sparks of Genius. We've already touched on a couple of these tools for thinking in previous posts - notably body thinking (as well as its close cousin, thinkering) and play.* We're sure to revisit many more in future posts. In the meantime, we'll offer brief definitions here: observing - honing all the senses to perceive acutely; imaging - creating mental images using any or all senses;abstracting - eliminating all but one essential characteristic of a complex thing; recognizing patterns - perceiving similarities in structures or properties of different things; forming patterns - creating or discovering new ways to organize things; analogizing - discovering functional similarities between structurally different things;body thinking - "reasoning" with muscles, muscle memory, gut feelings, and emotional states; extending bodily sensitivities through tools and instruments; feeling with body how non-self things or systems function;empathizing - playacting or "becoming the thing" one studies, be it animate or inanimate; dimensional thinking - translating between two and three (or more) dimensions, for instance, between a blue-print and an invention; to scale-up or scale down; to alter perceptions of space and time; modeling - mentally or physically creating a simplified or miniaturized analog of a complex thing in order to test or modify its properties; playing - undertaking a goal-less activity for fun; incidentally developing skill, knowledge and intuition; transforming - translating between communicative modes, e.g. "hearing" how an equation sounds or "dancing" the logic of an experiment), thus using any or all tools for thinking in a serial or integrated manner; for example, using analogies to image a new invention, creating a model, playing with it, tinkering with scale, and then translating the optimized invention into drawings; synthesizing - knowing in multiple ways simultaneously -- bodily, intuitively and subjectively as well as mentally, explicitly and objectively, such that the emotions, body sensations, and images that accompany solving a problem become inextricably enmeshed in understanding the physical embodiment of an equation. With this list in mind, descriptions of creative process take on more precise meaning. Take, for instance, what artist Brent Collins, who transforms mathematical equations into stunning wood sculptures, had to say about his working methods: "I made [two-dimensional] templates exactly to scale.... The entire mathematical logic of the sculpture is inherently readable from the template. There are, however, many aesthetic choices.... The template serves as a guide for a spatial logic I somehow intuitively know to follow. Using common woodworking tools and proceeding kinesthetically, I am able to gradually feel and envision its visual implications.... The linear patterns issue as abstractions" (cited in Sparks, p. 27). In this brief passage, Collins refers to his use of several imaginative thinking tools. These in turn articulate relationships between logic and image, aesthetics and intuition. We see not only what he is getting at in his creative work, but how he gets there. Several things distinguish our list of thinking tools from skill sets suggested by other researchers in the field of creativity studies: First, the tools presented here involve pre-verbal, pre-symbolic forms of thinking. Many creative individuals point to some subset of these skills as providing them with a subjective, intuitive, or emotional grasp of ideas that they only subsequently figure out how to express in words, numbers, images, movement, or sound. Thus, the tools involve the generative thinking that comes before expressing. Second, most creative people talk about a "translation" process that is separate from the intuitive solution of problems. This translation involves transforming their subjective feelings into symbolic forms that can be communicated to other people. (For more on translation, see Aping Einstein, our August 6, 2008 post.) Third, these tools are not esoteric skills, available only to the highly talented or trained. They are skills we all possess to some degree or another, skills we can all exercise and hone. Whether in vocation or avocation, one of the readiest ways to practice our thinking skills is in the arts and crafts. Like reading, writing and arithmetic, the arts make up a 4th R of relevance and utility to all other life endeavors. What we found and what we argue is that creativity is fundamentally a unitary process. No wonder, then, that for many creative people artistic thinking and scientific thinking are not separate. For more on this, see our previous posts Dance Your Experiment (October 13, 2008), The Art and Science of Play (January 21, 2009) or Arts and Crafts: Keys to Scientific Creativity (March 6, 2009). When imagistic, subjective feelings combine with data-driven, objective knowledge, when the intuitive methods of art and science become one and the same, that's artscience, a big idea whose time has come!