January 21, 2021

Agency

(Communion)

“I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.” David Whyte

Often described as the fusion of art and science, design is now publicly poised at the center of the STEM to STEAM debate. Co-sponsored by Democratic Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon and Republican Congressman Aaron Schock of Illinois, the bipartisan U.S. Congressional STEAM Caucus endeavors to explicitly embed art and design within and alongside science, technology, engineering, and math in K-20 curricula in hopes of returning the original promise of the liberal arts to US public education. The initiative offers an extraordinary opportunity to demonstrate how the divergent thinking associated with the creative arts can contribute to mutual expansion of the potential of science, technology, arts and humanities. The STEAM Caucus advocates for stimulation of the whole brain as essential for the participatory learning, engagement and innovation that the future demands.

This appeal for conscious engagement of art and science in service of addressing our educational and fiscal crises has been led by the Rhode Island School of Design, in the person of President John Maeda, progressive designer and advocate of innovation for social good. Maeda sees art and design as invigorating STEM education, enabling ”right brain innovation” (Maeda) and ultimately, global competitiveness. “The value of art and design to innovation is clear: Artists and designers humanize technology, making it understandable and capable of bringing about societal change. The tools and methods of a studio-based education offer new models for creative problem solving, flexible thinking and risk-taking that are needed in today’s complex and dynamic world.” (Maeda)

Although a nationally mandated shift in educational policy would appear to give arts and culture a long-awaited seat at the table of educational power, reaction to the caucus has been mixed. The public rhetoric of STEAM education as capable of buttressing the U.S. economy in an increasingly competitive globalized market context may resonate with mainstream Moderns, but among Postmoderns the linking of STEAM with global competitiveness has been met with suspicion. Old culture wars schisms have been reopened, along with fears that the creative arts will be pawns in a new wave of US nationalism that could reduce pedagogy to tools with which to exacerbate oppressive global inequities. Motivated by deep concern for the welfare of all humanity and with the intention to safeguard the principles of restorative justice, the resistance seeks to maintain distance from global capitalism. Enemy finding, in the form of the neo-liberal Other, tragically keeps reductionism alive, ultimately doing violence to the self-sense of the creative agent him or herself.

If art and science split the baby, can STEAM perform surgery? Or will these old school epistemological categories be maintained through continued self-depiction of the creative as a marginalized outsider having no formal role to play in the societal narrative? The structure - agency dialectic exhibits seemingly binary polarities: conformity or rebellion, agency or communion. From tis perspective there appears to be a poverty of options for creative performativity. Creative imaginary can atrophy, producing hesitancy to joyously engage, to participate, to belong to the world and to make a real difference. A sense of separation from our designed world reifies the mind/body split and offers us no leverage point from which to effect change. Fortunately there are signs that values-driven design agency and pedagogy is emerging in the context of self-organizing human systems. Our participatory agency is activating the latent potential of design within the Mystery. We change the game not by will or by force but rather by means of our conscious participation in the unfolding, designing, swarming now.

Arguing that the kind of critical thinking/making practiced in the arts is a primary modality of intergenerational altruism enacted through emergent collective creativity, James Haywood Rolling Jr., Chair of Education of Syracuse University writes “. . . art making and related design practices are metacognitive skills. They create metaphors of what our minds are doing at any given time–not just individual minds, but the collective mind of any given sociocultural swarm to which we are attached. If deemed advantageous, even the revelation of one neighboring yet divergent point of view or value is enough to alter the direction of an entire swarm.” (Rolling)

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