Emphasizing arts can make U.S. innovation leader

John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design since June 2008, thinks innovation is the answer to the U.S.’ economic woes and that art plays an integral role in that equation.
What’s the difference between an ordinary MP3 player and an iPod? Art and design, he says.
That’s why Maeda, U.S. Rep. Jim Langevin, along with other local organizations, are fighting to add an “A” to the science, engineering, technology and mathematics federal agenda – STEM to STEAM.
Maeda will turn up the spotlight on the initiative in March at the SXSWedu conference in Austin, Texas. His panel “Turning STEM to STEAM in Modern Curriculum” was recently selected for the second annual conference by popular vote and is slated to include R.I. Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist as a speaker.

PBN: What is the ultimate goal of STEM to STEAM – to get more funding for the arts?
MAEDA: It’s about transforming America’s position in the world – as a leader of innovation and creativity [and] invention. Right now our innovation policy is grounded in science, engineering, technology and mathematics – which we believe could be vastly augmented by the arts.
It’s not what we at RISD want to do with it. It’s what people around America will do with it.
We have people calling from all around the country saying: “Well, we know art is important and STEM is so core to our education system – how do we argue for art as an important part of our education system”?
So starting from the young and also from the older spectrum … increase [the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities] funding – we’re taking from the same pot of RICH’s funding and providing more access to artists and designers, to get that funding for them too.

PBN: How at a K-12 school level would you incorporate arts in science and math? MAEDA: Well … you do it very slowly; because it’s kind of evaporated from the curriculums – here in Rhode Island and all over the country. …
[Success] like at Apple shows you that it wasn’t just technology, [it] was a very humanistic, emotional approach. It wasn’t something you can calculate with [numbers] – it was how things look, how things feel – which is what art and design do for people.

PBN: Ideally, would you create a new class incorporating STEAM or just add more arts into curriculums?
MAEDA: That’s the fundamental question. On the one hand, there were efforts in past decades to make science and art integrate; there were efforts to add art back into the curriculum. I think you need both.
You also need the opposite. You need art to adopt science too – which happens all the time. The best artists move between the worlds of how it’s made and what [they] want to make, so that’s a natural thing that I’d like to make more visible.

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PBN: Are there any places doing it well that we could model after?
MAEDA: One example just came from San Francisco. Have you ever been to the Exploratorium? It’s quite magical. It was founded by Frank Oppenheimer; he worked on the Manhattan Project – he and his older brother, Robert. He founded this place in San Francisco which is a science museum [and] art museum combined. They have tons of K-12 education programs to bring people from all ages to learn about science through art.

PBN: Returning to Apple, what kind of impact will the death of Steve Jobs have on the STEM to STEAM initiative?
MAEDA: I think his passing is creating a question around the enigma … of what is it that made him so special. What was so unique about him? We know he was a great marketer; we know he wasn’t a technologist. We know that he cared about something called “design.” We know that he collected art. Was that the important part of him? Turns out – it is. Everything that you see in the Apple universe is something that you want. It’s a technology approach [versus Apple’s approach] … fueled by art and design.
Industry has a hard time with that because you can’t measure it so easily. But you can measure it in dollars and desire; they’re always very close to figuring it out that art and design are important.

PBN: How do you see RISD fitting into the STEAM ecosystem?
MAEDA: RISD is a beautiful organism that has been around for over 134 years. RISD has a certain character, a certain signature that I look to preserve because it’s one of the few places on earth when you say the name, people get what it means – it stands for quality in art and design.
What I’ve been doing is trying to figure out how [to] keep that tradition full-on and how do you find a few new ways to talk about it.
STEAM is an example of one way to talk about RISD which leverages on things like – Nature Lab, the [Manning] Rare Woods [Collection] – we have all these things that are about nature, ecology … and I see those things as “thinking” DNA to be used in the world.

PBN: How can individuals get involved in STEAM and what’s a concrete step toward inserting that “A”?
MAEDA: [One] thing is the wonderful, new innovation fellowships [from The] Rhode Island Foundation. It’s like a MacArthur grant here in Rhode Island! It’s $100,000 for three years. I think that will attract a lot of people to either come here or to stay here.
In terms of a concrete step, it’s about getting the leadership interested in STEAM. It could be as easy as recognizing that art and design exists and it plays a major role in how we live. •

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