Research Initiation: Exploring Epistemologies where Engineering Meets Art

近年来，工程与艺术的结合被认为是培养未来工程师的有效教育模式。工程和艺术相结合所需的多样化思想和技能鼓励学生的创造性思维，并开辟了新的，非传统的途径进入工程。计算机图形学、3D打印、人工智能和人机交互等新的工程领域需要工程师与设计师、视觉艺术家和人文学者合作，使他们的科学和技术产生社会影响。工程师不仅需要技术技能，还需要社会意识和沟通技巧，以有效地跨越艺术和工程的领域界限。通过结合工程和艺术课程，这些需求得到了有意义的解决。这些课程通常具有广泛的合作或设计项目，供工程和艺术专业的学生相互交流和合作。然而，许多研究指出，由于观点、背景和技能的多样性，参与者之间的互动是困难的。该项目旨在了解学生在协作工程和艺术环境中使用的知识理论。这将有助于更好地理解艺术和工程边界的相互作用的本质。从这项工作中出现的见解有望改善工程师在这些项目中互动的教育体验，并为工程人员培养新的，多样化和包容性的工作方式。该项目是对亚利桑那州立大学两类学生的比较研究：（i）一组工程和艺术学生，他们在跨学科的艺术、媒体和工程学院进行为期一年的设计/顶点项目;（ii）一组对比的工程学生，他们在传统的电气、计算机和能源工程学院进行为期一年的高级设计项目。通过分析这些学生的经历，研究人员回答了一系列关于两个人群中参与者所持认识论信念的范围和深度的研究问题，以及参与者之间的任何相似之处和差异。此外，通过对参与者使用的语言和术语以及工作组的观察记录进行话语分析，研究人员揭示了哲学观点以及这些观点如何影响沟通，为工程和艺术之间的有效合作提供了见解。 这一建议的智力价值包括在艺术和工程学习环境和教育中的个人认识论的概念框架的认识论观点和互动的基础知识的生成。该项目的更广泛的影响包括跨学科工程和媒体艺术课程的教学材料，通过科学与想象中心的公众宣传和参与，并参与数字文化暑期研究所，向不同的初中和高中学生介绍工程和艺术项目。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过评估被认为值得支持使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Recently, the combination of engineering and the arts has been championed as an effective educational model for training future engineers. The diverse ideas and skills required from combining engineering and art encourages creative student thinking and opens new, non-traditional pathways into engineering. New domains of engineering such as computer graphics, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction require engineers to work with designers, visual artists, and humanities scholars for their science and technologies to have societal impact. Engineers need not just technical skills, but social awareness and communication skills to effectively work across these domain boundaries of art and engineering. Through combining engineering and art curriculum, these needs are addressed in a meaningful way. These programs typically feature an extensive collaboration or design project for students in engineering and the arts to interact and work with one another. However, much research has pointed out the difficulty of these interactions between participants due to the diversity of viewpoint, background, and skills. This project aims to understand theories of knowledge that students utilize in a collaborative engineering and arts environment. This will help develop a better understanding of the nature of interactions at the boundary of art and engineering. Insights that emerge from this work promise to improve the educational experiences of engineers interacting in these programs and foster new, diverse and inclusive ways of working for the engineering workforce. This project is a comparative study of two subsets of students at Arizona State University: (i) a group of engineering and arts students pursuing a year-long design/capstone project from the transdisciplinary School of Arts, Media and Engineering; and (ii) a contrasting group of engineering students pursuing a year-long senior design project in a traditional Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering School. Through analysis of these student's experiences, researchers answer a series of research questions on the range and depth of epistemological beliefs held by participants in both populations, and any similarities and differences among the participants. In addition, through discourse analysis of language and terms used by participants and of observation notes of working groups, researchers reveal philosophical viewpoints and how these viewpoints affect communication, offering insight into effective collaboration between engineering and the arts. The intellectual merits of this proposal include generation of fundamental knowledge into the epistemological viewpoints and interactions in art and engineering learning environments and conceptual frameworks of personal epistemology in education. The broader impacts of this project include pedagogical material for transdisciplinary engineering and media arts courses, public outreach and participation through the Center for Science and the Imagination, and participation in the Digital Culture Summer Institute to introduce a diverse set of middle and high school students to engineering and the arts projects.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.