This framework first came up in
a conversation with John Maeda. The original observation was that artist and
scientists tend to work well together, and scientists and engineers work well
together, but that scientists and engineers don’t work as well together, and
likewise, neither do artists and designers. Engineers and designers tend to
focus on utility and understand the world through observation and gathering the
constraints of a problem to come up with a solution. Artists and scientists, on
the other hand are inspired by nature or math, and they create through pure
inner creativity and pursue expression that is more connected to things like
truth or beauty than something so imperfect as mere utility. Which is to say,
there are many more ways to divide the brain than into left and right
hemispheres.
However, I think a lot of the
most interesting and impactful creative works tend to require all the use of
all four quadrants. Many of the faculty at the Media Lab work in the dead
center of this grid—or as I like to call it, this compass—or perhaps they lean
in one direction, but they’re able to channel skills from all four quadrants. Neri Oxman,
one of our faculty members who recently created The Silk Pavilion, told
me that she is both an artists and a designer but switches between the modes as
she works on an idea. And to look at The Silk Pavilion, it’s clear she could
easily qualify as either a scientist or engineer, too.
I think that there are a variety
of practices and ways of thinking we can use to get to the center of this
compass. The key is to pull these quadrants as close together as possible. An
interdisciplinary group would have a scientist, an artist, a designer, and an
engineer working with each other. But this only reinforces the distinctions
between these disciplines. And it’s much less effective than having people who
use all four quadrants, as the project or problem requires.
The tyranny of traditional
disciplines and functionally segregated organizations fail to produce the type
of people who can work with this creativity compass, but I believe that in a
world where the rate of change increases exponentially, where disruption has
become a norm instead of an anomaly, the challenge will be to think this way if
we want to effectively solve the problems we face today, much less tomorrow.
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