White-Page Moment

IDEA DEVELOPMENT:A HARVARD professor who founded and sold a technology company, specialises in biomedical engineering and works in the applied sciences has a mission: to fuse the creativity of art and science into a single entity.

His mission is not meant to make painters or dancers out of scientists, or engineers out of actors. Rather, it represents a mental process, a technique that merges the intuitive and the intellectual as a way of pushing boundaries and fostering innovation.

"ArtScience" is the term used to describe the process by its inventor, David Edwards, the McKay professor of the practice of biomedical engineering at Harvard's school of engineering and applied sciences.

It is at once intuitive and deductive, sensual and analytical, comfortable with uncertainty and able to frame a problem, Edwards writes in his forthcoming book, ArtScience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation. It embraces nature in its complexity and is able to simplify nature in its essence, he says.

"If you think about how we form ideas, we develop them through an experimental process," Edwards said during a visit to Dublin last month to deliver a talk at Trinity College's Science Gallery. It is an "idea translation process" that combines two elements most assume are antagonistic: the analytical and the intuitive.

You work long and hard on a problem, looking for ideas and methods, and if you are lucky you might have what Edwards describes as a "white-page moment". At this instant there are endless possibilities and no preconceived ideas to hold you back.

"That moment involves two processes, an intuitive process and an analytical process. Those two processes fuse to allow innovation," Edwards told The Irish Times.

"The best scientists, the best bankers, the best business people can do both. Innovators do both. Innovators have always functioned in that way," he says - the "ArtScience" way.

Unfortunately, neither the educational nor the business systems foster this combined mode of thinking. The two halves are encouraged but are kept separate from one another. "Innovators, while usually welcomed, are not encouraged," Edwards says.

He is trying to break down these divides. "Public and private, cultural and industrial and educational are increasingly separated," he points out. Yet the ready availability of the internet means there are no barriers to information access. "The value has gone from an information-based value system to an innovation value system," he says.

Edwards has transformed his central idea, the ArtScience process, into action by creating two unique innovation spaces. One is a facility called Le Laboratoire in Paris, and the other is at Harvard, where he devised and opened the Idea Translation Lab (ITL), described as a place "where art and science meet".

There is nothing like Le Lab anywhere. Established by Edwards less than two years ago, in September it won him the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the most prestigious award granted by the French ministry of culture.

He describes it as "an experimental art and design centre" that is also a gallery, staging three to four exhibitions a year. It offers 1,300 sq m of display space and is near the Louvre. "It is kind of like a pre-museum, like an experiment, but from the public point of view it looks like an exhibition," Edwards says. "The work that you see there very much works with the public."

It seems everyone - artists, scientists and heavyweight investors like Paribas Bank - is on board for this ArtScience adventure. "The reason people are interested in it is because it is where innovation happens."

Leading artists are invited to come with exhibition ideas that push the boundaries of their current technique, using technology or scientific thinking to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be, he explains. To this end, researchers relevant to the project are invited to participate and to work with the artist to help them reach their new goal.

There is a commercial edge to it as well, Edwards notes. If this was not so, the banks and industrial investors would not play ball.

"The investment has to be about the [ArtScience] process," he says, which delivers innovation and new products with commercial capability.

Le Lab has two new products on its books at the moment ready for market. One is an air filtering system that uses living plants to scrub the air. The product, Andrea, goes on sale in June. The second is inhalable chocolate.

Edwards's company was built on his expertise in developing inhaled pharmaceutical technologies, and he has found a new way to apply them, switching from medicine to food. The chocolate product will be launched in April. "It goes well with coffee," he says.

"The model here is significantly educational. . . and at the other end there is the innovation that comes out of it, and the income from that helps to keep the motor going. The whole idea is innovation as culture in the process of idea development," Edward states.

The Harvard-based ITL is not only a place but a course that invites students from all faculties to pursue projects using the ArtScience approach.

Edwards runs it as a wide-open opportunity to explore new approaches, demanding only that students "have a passion" for their ideas.

The students can bid for cash to chase their ideas, and many make use of their grants to attend Le Lab in Paris.

There are no limits in terms of the intellectual process, but Edwards expect the ideas to have some merit before accepting them as projects. The course exists within Harvard's school of engineering and applied science, so there is a practical side.

A recent ITL graduate is the Lighting Africa project on display last month at the Science Gallery, which brought Edwards on his Dublin visit. It involves producing small amounts of very cheap electricity directly from the soil by exploiting natural bacterial activity.

It is this kind of innovative thinking, says Edwards, that changes the way we do things.

No boundaries only possibilities

IF YOU want to understand ArtScience, think kid in a sandbox, suggests Harvard's David Edwards. This involves taking your mind back to when there were no boundaries, only possibilities.

Le Lab helps artists and scientists think in this way, he believes. “It is a place where you are not punished for breaking the rules, where you are not held accountable, where you can say you don’t know,” he says. “That is what Le Laboratoire is, it is a sand box.”

He wants to have participants thinking on the edge of their comfort zone, at the boundaries where fresh thinking will arise. Artists learn to express themselves in novel ways and scientists help them to achieve their goals.

He got the idea for ArtScience after meeting people at Harvard who thought in the same way he did – that boundaries needed to be broken.

It was not just about removing impediments to creative thinking – it was about removing the presumption that art and science, intuitive thinking and analytical thinking, could not merge.
Individuals can be encouraged in this direction with a bit of convincing, but large companies and established organisations struggle with it, he believes. "The bigger the company is, the harder it is to pull off the ArtScience process," says Edwards.

Yet, companies that can accept the paradigm will benefit, he believes. “The process is completely relevant to industry.”

Children, surprisingly, have no difficulty with the idea, given that they have not learned to blank one side or the other. “Five-year-olds get it; we are helping [participants] to be young again, to think young and without borders,” he says. “It combines science with off-the-wall ideas. They are being a kid again.”