Interdisciplinarity: Artistic Merit
Stamps School Dean Guna Nadarajan was recently cited in a Nature.com article on the increasing options for interdisciplinary art/science connections, collaboration and research.
Hybrid art — science efforts have gained support in recent years. Some institutions see them as a means of enhancing creativity and innovation, and a growing number are creating cross-disciplinary centres.
Guna Nadarajan, dean of the University of Michigan School of Art & Design in Ann Arbor, is helping to build the NSF-funded Network for Sciences, Engineering, Arts and Design (SEAD) to help artists and scientists to connect and collaborate, and to explore how to conduct research at the intersection of art, science and engineering. So far, SEAD has 300 participants across 30 research institutions and art colleges.
“Executives are eagerly hiring people who bring a key element of creativity to produce game-changing ideas,” says Nadarajan. …Nadarajan notes that Google and IBM are hiring graduates with design backgrounds for their research and development teams; and companies such as 3M and Proctor & Gamble have a steady demand for those skills in their efforts to develop innovative materials.