Collaboration Begets Creativity in Both the Arts and Sciences
Top Scholars Cite “Soft” Skills of Creative Collaboration and Communication as Driving Factors of Innovation in Arts and Technology Alike
Most think artistic creativity and technical innovation have nothing to do with each other; the greatest artists and innovators in the world disagree. In general, scientists and engineers don’t consider themselves to be creatively inclined. From grade school onwards we are taught that art is the domain of creativity, taking nothing and making an idea. At the same time, we are told that science and mathematics is the realm of objectivity, rational deductions from absolute truths, and observations. With these views of art and STEM, one can go far in their fields. But it takes something more to be the best. To figure out what’s in the special sauce, one ought to go straight to the chefs.
Ian Hattwick is a lecturer in the Music and Theater Arts department at MIT, where he has developed and taught a number of music technology courses. As far as professors go, Hattwick’s path has been unconventional. Following his B.A. in Jazz Composition at USC, he spent the better part of a decade as a gigging musician. Once he felt he wasn’t interested in continuing to pursue music as a career, Hattwick went to graduate school and attained a PhD from McGill in music technology.
Everyone I interviewed was asked to define creativity, but Hattwick’s description was the most succinct. He responded in a single sentence, “Creativity is the belief that something is worth doing.” Hattwick stressed that perseverance is a key characteristic of both great artists and researchers. In a world where we only see artist’s most important and impressive in museums, it is easy to forget that many masterworks have dozens of “worthless” paintings underneath them. Those underpaintings are what it took to develop the skills required for the final work. Hattwick emphasized this point by asking, “Why does [a creative] become really excellent?” The response: “They believe that that process is worth doing.” Unfortunately, the process isn’t always so smooth. When asked where the process can break down, Hattwick said “When things stop seeming like they're worth doing, when they're not valued by other people, when they're denigrated, when they're not compensated, when other things become more existentially important.” Hattwick says that sticking to the creative vision even when these obstacles are presented is “the hard part.” The engineering design process is similarly riddled with obstacles. Many artists might imagine that engineering’s approach to obstacles – a structured, systematic series of steps – is utterly reasonable. Jeff Lang would beg to differ.
For Electrical Engineering Professor Jeff Lang SM ’77 PhD ’80, the engineering design process is full of creativity. As a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) since 1998, Lang has written over 250 papers on the design, analysis, estimation, and control of high performance electromechanical energy conversion and motion control systems. When asked where to start tackling the difficult problems Lang faces head on, his response was surprising. “If you're trying to come up with the new thing and you don't have a particular method in mind,” he stated, “I think you just start throwing out ideas and seeing what sticks.”
For many, finding things to “throw” at the proverbial wall is the biggest challenge. On how he approached this process, Lang cited collaboration as a major source of creative inspiration. “If two people join together and see more areas of opportunity, whatever one works on will be much better off,” he explained, adding, “What makes the collaboration best is that you get two people who have good depth in different areas and are able to communicate and so build a multidisciplinary depth.”
This touches on a perennial question of artisans and engineers alike: breadth-first or depth-first? It’s often not obvious whether it's best to go for breadth, giving shallow thought to many possibilities, or depth, digging deep on just a few. Lang’s take was rather decisive. “You have to have enough breadth to be able to talk to your neighbor, but maybe that's all that's required. As long as you've got some common means of communicating, some common language, some common understanding, then you can explain your thoughts, and the other person can explain theirs. Between the two of you, you can come to ideas that wouldn't have occurred to either one alone.”
Communication is key in art and technology. Artists are often seen as working in isolation, while engineers work in large teams. However, teamwork in critical analysis is a key topic of both artistic and engineering education. Hattwick discussed his approach to design pedagogy by saying, “Arts training serves gives you the ability to think critically about what you're interested in and what you're doing,” At its core, Hattwick asserts, “You have to ask yourself that most important question of all, which is, why am I doing this? What are the values that I'm holding? I think the value of an artistic education, broadly speaking, is making it aware that those questions are questions that you're allowed to ask.”
For engineering and science, communication is done with “mathematical modeling,” Lang said. “Mathematically, each person can contribute a model or a piece of a model to the overall system, and then, once you have a bigger picture.”
It is of note that, for all their similarity, art and engineering often have different goals. Misunderstandings between artists and engineers might stem from an assumption that the other has the same objectives. In Hattwick’s experience, “I've seen people from the engineering world approach the arts as being interesting problems to be solved quickly and efficiently.” Hattwick sees this idea as counterproductive. Instead, he insists, “I want them to try to focus on why they're interested in something, what it is that they're trying to do.” Ian is a strong proponent of the MIT motto, mens et manus. Despite having great interest in the abstract theory of art, Hattwick doesn’t consider the theory to be “the point,” which, instead, he says is “to actually make the thing, do the thing, have the experience. Because that's why they're doing it.”
In order to learn more about the goals of art I spoke with Seth Riskin SM ’89. Seth is the founding manager of the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery, a program that relates artistic and scientific methods of research and education at MIT. Riskin is a classically trained oil painter and came to MIT first as the varsity women’s gymnastics coach prior to his reintroduction as a graduate student at MIT’s former Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). The center was later subsumed by the Media Lab.
Riskin is about as close as one can get to an authority on the artistic process and the question: is art invented or discovered? “I would side on discovery,” Riskin stated. “There's a notion out there that artists are idiosyncratic, emotional. That's untrue… We can imagine an artist taking ownership of an invention and embracing it and running it through the line for the touchdown of success and sales. [But], my approach to art and my feeling and passion about art is that it's akin to science in terms of discovery. [Although], I too can be poetically and emotionally inspired.”
If art were to be invented, Seth stressed that “it's important to have genuine inventions that come from the authentic human personality. We are individuals. As much [as there is] commonality, there are differences, and it's a beautiful thing to have that tapped into and manifest through art.”
The access to such a diverse set of extraordinary scholars and practitioners of the arts and sciences at MIT provides a unique opportunity to synthesize many perspectives on ideas. The adage “great minds think alike” is often cited as an oxymoron, under the argument that what makes minds great is that they don’t think alike. I think this critique misses the mark entirely. There are many commonalities between the thought processes of particularly insightful thinkers. Interacting with, studying, and cross referencing these thought patterns is an excellent way to build one’s own creative and technical abilities. The creative process does not take the same form in every instance, but to distinguish between the engineering process and the creative process may often prove more restrictive than helpful.
When asked whether or not he saw creativity as throughline in his 50-year career at MIT, Professor Lang was emphatic. “Absolutely,” he stated. “We're never trying to reinvent things that already exist. [We work] in order to develop something new. Isn't that sort of the definition of creativity?”