One of the greatest challenges facing the United States in research and education is how to fundamentally encourage innovation across all sectors and spawn new solutions to address global challenges. Increasing research evidence and industrial innovations (i.e. mobile computing, social media) confirm that broad interdisciplinary collaborations that include both science and art fields have great potential for spawning creativity and innovation in computer science, engineering and the sciences. An emerging hybrid community of scientists, engineers, artists and designers is producing innovative and entrepreneurial research that advances new knowledge and proposes holistic solutions to societal challenges including health, education and environmental change. Yet, this burgeoning interdisciplinary community continues to face problems in its efforts to self-organize among constraints imposed by academic systems and historical biases; it continues to seek a dynamic and synergizing research and outreach exchange.
Building upon lessons-learned, a new Virtual eXchange to support networks of creativity and innovation amongst Science, Engineering, Art and Design (XSEAD) will be developed. The XSEAD project will address the following urgent needs of the interdisciplinary science-art community: establish a cohesive view of the field and provide a mechanism to attract entrepreneurs and industry; create a venue for multimodal documentation of research outcomes; provide extensive databases of prior and current research; allow rapid dissemination of research outcomes; facilitate forming of collaborations and specialized sub-communities; document and help evolve science-art curricula efforts and evaluation approaches; provide context and support mechanisms for science-arts careers; establish evidence of the societal impact of interdisciplinary science-art integration. The software engineering development components of XSEAD will contribute further knowledge in three technical areas: Content organization (improve the effectiveness of algorithms for dynamic, usage based, organization of large multimedia databases); Recommendation algorithms (promote the use of multi-relational structures for providing effective recommendations); Community dynamics (develop novel algorithms to extract structures that encode meaningful interactions in online social networks).
Broader Impact XSEAD will expose general non-expert audiences to the evolution and potential of collaborative research across science and arts. It will attract the interest of young people searching for careers that combine the rigor of science and engineering with the creativity and reflection of arts and design. It will serve teachers and informal learning communities seeking exemplars for curricular development, active practitioners looking for further institutional opportunities to present and support their ongoing work, academics developing related interdisciplinary efforts and commercial companies seeking cross-trained expertise. XSEAD will enable rapid research exchange and in-depth peer-reviewed scholarship between the worlds of science and art and provide a unique and deeply engaging inroad to a vast and creative repository. XSEAD will help promote new paradigms for developing human centric solutions to complex societal problems (i.e. cost effective health and wellness, globalization and conflict, adaptive K-12 learning, electronic communication and security). These paradigms will combine knowledge across broad and diverse areas of human knowledge.
Three key outcomes and achievements were accomplished in the past twelve months as part of this project. Namely, the launch of the portal in May 2013; the development of 50 curated works contributed from over 12 curators representing leading art/science organizations; and the formalization of a reciprocal knowledge generation relationship with the Alliance for Arts in Research Universities (a2ru). Portal Launch: In May 2013, the portal was launched to a test community of over 400 invitees. At launch the full versions of the resource and showcase layer were made available to participants along with some limited community functionality which explored provocation and discussion with the community. These initial invitees quickly converted into over 100 users of the portal. In the two months since its launch the portal has had 9,500 pageviews from 1,200 unique user sessions with an average visit duration of 5 minutes 30 seconds. Having observed steady but modest increase in traffic since its launch, these figures are particularly encouraging towards the continued growth and participation within the network. Partnerships towards Curated Content: A major undertaking for the XSEAD portal has been to coordinate the leading organizations and stakeholders active within the art/science community to participate in the curation of exemplar works. These organizations had not previously contributed to any similar collective initiative. To gather their support and participation in this way is a significant achievement for the project. ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIG Multimedia, ISEA and the National Academy of Sciences all have provided content to this effort, with Leonardo’s contributions in preparation and participation also secured from IEEE Multimedia and ACM SIG CHI. Already, 50 exemplar outcomes have been documented and prepared as part of the curation effort. Lead by Donna J. Cox, participants in the curatorial effort include Meredith Tromble (Leonardo), David A. Shamma (Co-editor Arts & Digital Culture, ACM SIGMM), Juan Diaz Infante (Founder, Mexican Space Collective), Andrea Polli (Artistic Director, ISEA 2012), Jacki Morie (ACM SIGGRAPH’s Executive Council), AJ Christensen (Chair, ACM SIGGRAPH’s Student Chapters), Lucinda Presley (NSEAD, Learning and Education Working Group coordinator), Roger Malina (Coordinator of SEAD White Paper initiative), Carol Strohecker (NSEAD PI), Pamela Jennings (Founder Noblewire, representing National Academy of Sciences), Ed Finn (Director, Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University), Frank Nack (Associate Editor in Chief, IEEE Multimedia) Partnership with ArtsEngine & A2RU: The Alliance for Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) is A2RU is an alliance of the leading U.S. research universities including Stanford University, Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Ohio State University, University of Florida, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, University of Michigan and Virginia Tech. Coordinated by ArtsEngine at the University of Michegan, the group additionally have a Mellon funded initiative to conduct a comprehensive review of art/science institutions cataloging their initiatives, programs and approaches through site visit and interview towards the development of best practices for the integration of arts and science in the context of a research university. Over the past 12 months, XSEAD has regularly met with the team at Arts Engine to discuss the potential for synergistic activities. This has led to the development of a dedicated ‘syntax’ section where art/science terminology identified in the interviews already conducted can be shared and community contribution to extend the definitions, and thereby the reach of a2ru’s research, can be facilitated. The community challenge section sees additional cooperation with a2ru wherein many of the provocations and prompts employed in their interviews have been incorporated into the lines of inquiry issued to the community through this section. Both of these activities form mutually enriching and reciprocal relationships between the two groups, where new knowledge about the nature and prospects of art/science efforts can be generated through the platform to the benefit of both parties. In addition to this, XSEAD and A2RU’s Research Committee are formally cooperating to collect examples of research projects where arts and/or design expertise are an integral part of a transdisciplinary approach to a complex societal and/or scientific problem. A call for content was circulated in July 2013 with final content required by August 24, 2013. This content will be cross-listed in the A2RU Knowledge base and form a series of curated sets for XSEAD’s curated section focusing on complex problem that transcends disciplines and particularly projects that have secured funding (or other distinctions) and/or have produced documented societal impact.
