Foreword
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This book is a beginning, the embodiment of a new model for teaching, learning, and research. Here, a university’s school of engineering and its art museum come together in the shared belief that transformative innovation can happen at the intersections of usually distinct academic disciplines and modes of creativity and inquiry. Our partnership began with a radically simple idea: an Artist-atLarge Program in which an artist recommended by the Block Museum of Art would join the community of faculty and students of the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University for several years, with no specific outcome in mind. We had faith that something meaningful would emerge organically if we merely provided structures in which informal interactions might take place. We wanted to model for young engineers the value of embracing uncertainty as part of the journey that leads to innovation and opens pathways within the imagination — as artists do. For artists engaged in the program, we offered access to and immersion in McCormick’s extraordinary resources in fields as diverse as robotics, synthetic biology, design thinking, and artificial intelligence. This initiative was nested in McCormick’s commitment to “wholebrain engineering,” augmenting the traditional analytical and convergent thinking that is central to engineering with the divergent and creative approaches one normally associates with the arts. The program was also an expression of the Block’s shift in emphasis from what art is to what art can do. For the museum, this means centering process over outcome — a method that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and expansive, and asks questions that reframe how we see and how we think. We began with the premise that at the heart of their respective practices, sometimes visibly, sometimes less so, artists and scientists ask the same fundamental questions: How can the insights offered by my work provide understanding of human experience in the larger context of the complex universe? What are the limits of knowledge? What is the meaning of life? What, in fact, is life? The essays in this volume, intended as a cross-pollinator between disciplinary perspectives, express the underlying ethos of our partnership and its collaborative spirit. Choosing the right inaugural artist-at-large was paramount. After several candidates visited campus for programs and meetings, Dario Robleto was the unanimous choice for our new initiative. Throughout his career, Robleto’s research-based practice has operated in the interstices of art and science, eliding conventional boundaries between the two. Coming to campus for intervals of a week or more during three academic terms over three years, the artist participated in public and informal conversations, gave lectures, and made class visits. He probed the assumptions underlying engineering research, including the values that shape it, transforming teaching and learning along the way. Students and faculty have benefitted from his method of questioning what is familiar, of welcoming unfamiliarity, of finding joy in play and risk taking. They have also learned to consider the ethical implications of their innovations and their effects on the real lives of people. For this role and its impact on McCormick, Julius B. Lucks, professor of chemical and biological engineering, coined an apt title for the artist: “our Socrates.”