I was reading Chapter 25, in which Pirsig talks about the synthesis of classical and romantic thought. He argues that adding the romantic as a veneer over the classical almost always results in "stylish" but unsatisfying -- even ugly -- results, both the product itself and the experience of users and designers. Instead, the classical and romantic must be united at a more fundamental level, in his notion of Quality. Pirsig then says:
At present we're snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with lots of stylishness in the arts -- thin art -- because there's very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technolog is long overdue.
How much artistic knowledge do scientists require in order to avoid producing ghastly results? Can we just put a "stylish" veneer on our work, or must we tudy art -- do art -- so that the process is a part of us?
I sometimes feel as though I am affecting an artistic stance when
the substance of my work is little different.That isn't to say that I have not benefited from adopting practices from the arts. I learned a lot from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. Since reading it, I have always tried to write a little every day (code and text) as a way to keep my ideas, and my ability to write them down, flowing. I recently started a weblog called
[ Knowing and Doing http:/www.cs.uni.edu~wallingfblog ]at least in part as an external encouragement to write something of value every day, and not just the surface of an interesting but inchoate thought. Gabriel has been something of an inspiration in this regard, with his "one poem a day" habit.
I have also certainly benefited from learning to play the piano (well,
beginning to learn) as an adult. The acts of learning an obviously artistic skill, talking about it with my teacher, and reading about it have all changed my brain in subtle but useful ways. The change affects how I teach computer science and how I read its literature; I suspect that it has begun to change how I do computer science, too.How easily can scientists adopt practices from the arts without 'grokking' them in the artistic sense? I suppose that this is one of the points of Extravagaria. -EugeneWallingford
My point is that I don't think we have to become artists to succeed as scientists. But I agree that some of what we see in software is ghastly. So do we continue to foster education, awareness, and discourse between disciplines, or could we identify some practice (like designers learning technical tools) that would greatly benefit?
The following readings may be of interest to Extravagarians:
Among ideas these readings proffer, a few especially relevant themes emerge. All five sources imply that understanding of creativity in a given field involves consideration of its history, its most creative practitioners, and its masterpiece products. All five sources agree that the cognitive processes of exceptionally creative people and the rest of us are basically the same. Simon puts it this way: “All of the evidence we have today about the creative process […] argues that the processes that yield creative products are basically identical with the processes that human beings use in their daily thinking about all sorts of matters […].” Taking a somewhat different approach, Jacob writes, “We live in a world created by our brains, with continual comings and goings between the real and imaginary. Perhaps the artist draws more on the latter and the scientist more on the former. It is simply a matter of proportion, not of nature.” All five sources emphasize, too, either directly or indirectly, the role of defocused attention in creativity. Hogan asserts, for instance, “one repeated empirical finding about creativity is its association with ‘defocused attention.’ According to this research, less creative people focus their attention quite narrowly when engaging in creative tasks. More creative people allow their attention greater scope.” In a different but related vein, Jacob implies a great deal about associative thinking and revision: “in art as in science, the essential thing is to try out […] each idea that comes into our heads […] even if it goes against our tastes and biases. […] The beginning of any research is always a leap into the unknown. It’s always after the event that we form judgements on the level of interest of the initial hypothesis.”
Based on these themes emerging from the selected readings, we have formulated a few questions that we share with Extravagaria:
- Doug and Anna
Computer science is only part of the question, in my mind. I'm not a scientist, either by job description or according to my CV; I'm an engineer / programmer. This does make a difference, because my primary focus is not studying things as they are, but creating new ones. I'm not sure if that makes me more like an artist, but I find that the analytic parts of my work, which I take to be more like the work of a scientist, tend to be much more intellectually driven and much less aesthetically driven, than the synthetic parts.
-- BruceCohen
--Dean
I'm currently enjoying [Gould's http:/www.stephenjaygould.org] book on based on his presidential. Recommended reading!
--Dean
A somewhat older book (currently out of print, but still available at Amazon) that ably straddles art and science is Conrad Waddington's "Tools for Thought". Waddington was a developmental biologist and an advocate of Systems Theory. You will find in him a kindred spirit to Alexander's patterns ideas -- but one originating in the history of developmental biology and morphology (and glancing backward's to Goethe's ideas of archetypes). This book concerns "form" in various manifestations. Well written, it is uniquely illustrated with lovely black-ink brush paintings. It complements Alexander's Architectural view on the nature of form with a Developmental veiw on the nature of form.
A more recent book that tracks similar territory is Stan Salthes "Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biology"