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[MUSIC]
Hello everyone and welcome
to yet another episode of
Undercooled, a
materials education podcast.
I am your host for today,
Tim Chambers at the
University of Michigan.
But more important than me is an extra
special guest today.
We'll have someone who is not in our sort
of usual group of people
who are into these things.
I have brought with me Dave Choberka from
the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Dave, good to have you here.
Thank you. Good to be here.
I appreciate the invitation.
Yeah, I'm hoping that today we can get a
little bit into more of
the materiality of art
and sort of the intersection between art
and material science.
Also, what MSC as a field can learn from
how the art world and
how the museum world have
developed these ways of communicating
with and engaging with the public
that we can hopefully benefit from in our
professional practice as engineers.
Great. Sounds good.
So to get things started, if you could
just tell us a little bit about yourself.
How did you get into the museum field?
What are you doing at UMA currently?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I'll start with what I do
currently and then sort of tell the
backstory of how I got
there because there's a little bit of a,
there's some sort of
stories coming to the fruition in
the position that I'm in right now. So I
am the curator for
University Learning and Programs at
UMA, the University of Michigan Museum of
Art, which is a job that
I've been doing really with
same job, but with various titles since
2012. And the main part of
that job is leading our program
of what we call curricular engagement,
which is working with
classes from all disciplines
across the university and working with
the instructors of those
classes to find ways to
use art at the museum to, like the main
thing I really try to
emphasize is advanced learning
goals within the discipline that the
students are coming from. I
also do, I mean, in this job,
I also do like a lot of our
collaborations with faculty around
exhibitions, collaboration with
researchers on projects that involve art,
which maybe I'll talk a
bit more about later on.
So all kinds of sort of intersections
between the art museum and
the university in general.
The way I got into museum work was
actually, there was kind of,
there's kind of a happy story
of serendipity that happened when I was a
grad student. I actually
came to the University of
Michigan to do my PhD in German studies.
And that sounds probably
like some odd leap from
German studies to museum work, but it's
actually not. The very first time I
worked, and so I was,
I was working, a cultural historian,
basically in a German studies program.
And I was hired by a
curator at the University of Michigan
Museum of Art to be a
researcher for a show on German
expressionism, because they wanted
somebody that could read German. That was
the first, I'd never
even thought about working in museums
before. But I really
liked that experience because,
I was like working in my area of
expertise, but writing and presenting an
exhibition for a general
audience. So I really appreciated sort of
using things I'd learned,
but not just communicating
them to other experts. I liked that. That
was a great experience. But
then also, I really enjoyed
the experience of working with the
material of a collection, like having
these objects and create,
and arranging them in a space in order to
create experiences that go
beyond the individual objects.
So that was a really cool experience. And
then right after I had that experience,
the university started their museum
studies graduate
certificate program. So there was just
kind of a happy, like I was like, that
was a cool experience. And then I like
learned that there was
this new museum studies program. So I
applied to that and got into
the first cohort. And then,
and that was what really got me into
thinking about museums as
a possible future career.
And that experience in grad school with
the museum studies
certificate program was really pivotal
in the sort of museum work I do, because
that that program is very
intentionally interdisciplinary,
they they bring in 12 grad students a
year. And they try to have
them be from all different
disciplines. So I was in the first
cohort. And my colleagues were like,
there was a there was an
aerospace engineer in there, there was a
zoologist, there was a computer science
person who was really
interested in sort of creating user apps
for museums. There were
only a couple of humanities
people. So it really being in that
program really helped me to think about
the interdisciplinarity
of museum work and the way that we can
make all museum work
relate to multiple disciplines.
And, and then so I got that certificate.
And then very soon after
I finished grad school,
UMA actually got a grant from the Mellon
Foundation to create
the position that I have
now, specifically with the goal of
increasing interaction between the Art
Museum and all sorts
of learning on campus. And so I got that
job and have been building
this program since then. And
we did some benchmarking studies a few
years ago for our current
strategic plan. And we found that
were the most successful university
learning program at an art at a
university art museum in
terms of the breadth of disciplines that
we work with, such as the collaboration
we did with material
science. Hmm. Well, maybe we'll hear more
about that shortly. The
thing that I love about hearing
your story though, is it's such a great
reminder that one single
unexpected experience that you
have, you know, in a course or in an
internship or something can completely
change your outlook on
your whole career. And you discover this
new thing that you never
quite knew existed before. And
suddenly you're experiencing it and like,
wow, I would like to do more
of this, the sorts of things
we want our students to, you know, have
when they're working with us. Yeah, you
know, it's actually,
it's an interesting point, because one of
the things I've done off
and on over the last few
years is since I have a PhD, but I don't
work in like a, you know, like a
traditional academic
position, I've been invited to do talks
with grad students about what you know,
what are often called
alternate career paths for PhD students.
And there's so many, so
many of the other people that
they invite to talk to talk there, like
they have this very deliberate story,
this very like, oh, I
wanted to do this. So I got this
credential in order to do this thing. And
my story is more like
exactly what you said, like being open to
experiences and being
open to like finding new
directions that just happen to kind of
come your way and really
embracing those. Yeah, it always
blows my mind when some of my students
actually know what they
want to do with their lives and
are intentionally working toward it,
because I certainly didn't when I was
that age. But that's
a story for another time. You mentioned
the interaction with the
materials department and
sort of how you got connected in there.
So yeah, could you give us
that part of the backstory of
Yeah, yeah, that's a so, um, you know,
back back or sort of early on
in the job, one of the things
I did a lot of was just outreach to
different academic programs
to be like, we're here, we're
gonna if you if you want to bring a class
to the museum, contact me,
we'll work together to put
together a very cool experience. And so
and I'm always like, I've
always been trying to work with
disciplines outside what people expect to
find in an art museum and
kind of going as far afield. So
I was I was like, I did some outreach
with engineering, I
can't remember exactly what
contact I had with material science
people. But then sometime back like a
year or two before the
pandemic. You're very active and cool
graduate student like outreach
engagement, like club.
Yep, actually contacted me because they
had kind of heard about the
outreach I was doing and the
work I was doing. And they contacted me
just to see if there's
anything that they could do with
the museum, that would be like, about
engaging the public with their
interesting knowledge about the
materiality of artworks. So we had some
very cool discussions, and it was going
to maybe go somewhere
and then things got derailed by the
pandemic. And then so because of that
connection, I actually
so when we were sort of getting back to
things at the museum, one
of the really exciting things
I've been able to work on since we've
been back at the museum is
this ongoing exhibition that we
call curriculum collection, which is a
show that I curate with faculty,
specifically for those
faculties classes to use as like sort of
learning material throughout the
semester. And I'm always
looking for, as I said, sort of wide
ranging disciplines to have
represented in that exhibition,
because it's a really cool experience for
the general visitor when
they come to an art museum,
and then they see, you know, this stuff's
on display for material science students,
it sort of changes how they think about
things. So I went back
to my contacts with the
grad students and said, you know, I'd
really like to put together something in
curriculum collection
with material science, and they directed
me to you. And then we
started talking and we ended up
collaborating on a curriculum collection
installation, which
actually had two really
cool components. One was we got some
really interesting art made with
different materials,
wood and metals and, you know, just like
my main criteria was like, I
think these students will see
things in this that are interesting that
I don't have access to, because I'm not
in material science,
but serving up some interesting materials
for them. But then we also
worked with that grad student
club to create what we call the materials
tour of the museum. So
they picked out, I think, six
objects that are on display in various
parts of the museum, and
wrote some really cool, like,
specialized but accessible texts about
the materials that went
into the creation of those
things. And I don't know if you knew
this, when that was on when
that was kind of active on the
website, that was the most popular thing
on our website for a few
months. Oh, that's fantastic.
That's very valid. Yeah. Yeah. So, so
that was, you know, that was sort of the
long story of how we
started working together. And it
culminated in this collaborative
exhibition. And then and then Tim,
who I'm talking with here right now, Tim
and I actually did a public
program that we do, we do a
public program in association with
curriculum collection
called subject matters, where we
basically try to like provide the kind of
university learning
experience that we do for the students
to the general public. And Tim and I had
that was one of the best
subject matters as well. Because
that was we had some really interesting
wide ranging discussions about culture
and materiality. And
I finally remember switching roles at one
point where you kind of
talked about the culture. And I
did my best to talk about the
materiality. That was a lot of fun. Yeah,
that was a really great
time. We should do that again. I'll say
that. Yeah, public. So
it's on the record. But you've
already brought me into I think the next
topic, which is that as
you're doing all this public
engagement, and, you know, you've been
interacting more with some of these
technical disciplines,
how has your experience and learning a
little bit about, you know, about
engineering and about
material science, has this influenced how
you think about the art
that you're working with and
how you communicate that art to the
public? Yeah, I mean, profoundly, and
really in kind of like,
two connected but disparate ways. So one
one being like the
technical side of things, and one
being how the working with material
science has also changed my
experience of like the aesthetic,
right? I'll talk a little bit about both
of those. So on the on the
technical side, like, I mean,
people, me and just people in general are
always interested to learn
about how objects are made,
and how the materials are manipulated in
order to produce the
effects that we're seeing.
And working with material science
actually gives me a little bit more
informed, like discussion,
sort of informed, informed material for
discussion about the creation
of metals, like talk a little
bit about the crystal structures in there
based on, you know, the
things that we learned about
with you. I know a lot more about
ceramics and glaze from
working with your program. So I'm
actually I have some facility to kind of
respond to that curiosity
that pretty much everybody has
when we're working with those sorts of
materials to talk a bit about how the
materials that they're
made with and the way those materials are
used produces the macro
effects that we find in the
pieces. I remember you saying at that
subject matters that micro structures
produce macro effects.
And I think about that often as well. Oh,
and that relates to the
other thing that's that's
really kind of in this is kind of a more
profound way in which it's influenced me.
And this is getting kind of into the
speculative territory here.
But like, so I think so our
experience of visual art is actually more
synesthetic than we
think it is, then we sort of
acknowledge it's like when we look at
something, it activates our
other senses as well. Right.
Okay. Yeah. And then it also, whenever we
look at something, it produces an
embodied experience as
well. Right, which could be, I mean, it
might be like an embodied
experience of like the form of
the art. And you kind of imagine like how
your body would move to produce that
form. Or it could be
something about like the texture of it.
And you kind of imagine how
it would feel and like maybe
how it would crumble if you touched it
and that sort of thing. So
thinking like, being more
attentive to the material qualities of
the that the objects are
produced with actually gives me
access to some interesting kind of like
synesthetic and embodied
experiences of them. I especially
experience this with like similarly with
like ceramics, like, you
know, I used to be attentive
to the ways that, you know, there's
different porosity in
ceramics that that I mean, I sort of
was like, it has to do with how the
molecules are clouded, try to get
together or something like I
had some idea that it must have something
to do with some of the
micromateriality in there. But
I feel like I have a little bit more of a
handle on that from working
with you. And so I actually
have a more powerful kind of embodied
experience and almost like a feeling
experience of objects
that is informed by that by that
experience with you.
That's, that's such an interesting
observation about the
different sensory channels that we're
engaging, even if we're just looking at
something with our eyes,
but really, it does become the
sort of whole body experience when you're
engaging your imagination
and consider how did a person
make this right? What must that have
process have been like? And that's the
sort of thinking that I
want my students to do, right, to
approach this as an engineer and say,
what was the manufacturing
like? What, what's the physicality of how
this material behaves as
someone's trying to shape it
into a product? And now you've got me
thinking on the side of how
could I use something a little
bit more artistic to get students to
engage with that more
complete sensory experience. So I'm
going to chew on that. But I do also want
to ask about another topic that is very
very topical in MSC and very much a
present day concern,
which is that we have this,
a much broader awareness, I think now in
our field, that there is a lot of
inequity and inequality in
society that is caused by engineering.
And in many of the problems
that we're dealing with as
engineers, that the the cultural context
in which we're doing our
engineering work is so critical
to doing it well and to doing it
ethically and to understanding how we're
going to affect people
in our engineering practice. But as
someone in the art world, I feel like my
naive belief from the
outside is that in the art world, it's
like you're always thinking about the
human element of these
problems. So what my question is then, as
engineers, what can we learn
from the art community and from
the museum community that's engaging the
public? What can we learn
about how to better get our
students to think about the cultural
context of their work? Gosh,
you know, I'm going to talk
about sort of how we engage in that kind
of work in the art museum.
And then let's see if we can
bridge that to how we can use that to
form the work of engineers.
I have maybe some speculative
ideas about that. But yeah, let me let me
so I was actually thinking about this
question ahead of time.
And I actually came up with like several
different metaphors for like
the value of art in these in
these sorts of discussions. So one is
like art as a mirror. So one of the
things that are, I mean,
it's not true of all art, but a lot of
art does address sort of
representation of people, which
we can connect to larger discussions
about identity. So
there's like the sort of in this
in art being visual means that we're, you
know, we're sort of
thrown on dealing with visual
identities, right, which is where a lot
of stereotypes reside
and a lot of bias reside,
right. So just the subject of art in
itself, which is about people and about
identity means that it's
kind of a mirror that we can hold up to
ourselves. And we can talk about
ourselves in relation to the
art and talk about our relations with
others in relation to the art. So art is
a mirror of identity
is one aspect. But then at the same time,
I would say art is a kind of
screen that it doesn't mirror
us, it actually allows us to talk to one
another without directly
addressing one another, we can
address the art. So or like a filter or
something like that. Oh,
that's one of the things I find
really valuable is like, when we're in
the museum, and we're
looking at a work of art that is
addressing like racism or some sort of
like, or a topic of social
justice. The main thing we try
to do is talk about kind of what the
artist is communicating,
and then kind of what our
response is to that. But so we're, we're
really talking about an
artist complex communication
about this topic. So rather than talking
about our own opinions, it
allows us to talk about issues
of identity and social justice, without
it being sort of
personalized. And it allows us to like
engage with like the artist is probably
saying something kind of
complex and interesting that's
not reductive. So it allows us to get at
these things without
it. I mean, if people feel
uncomfortable about addressing bias and
stuff like that, it's it's
a way of doing it without
them feeling called out quite as much.
Right? Yeah. Screen or a
filter. There's something there
that I want to connect to what some of us
do in our classes in
engineering, which is that there
will be this technical problem, usually
without a unique correct answer that we
want our students to
work on. But as we get the students to
frame the problem and to
describe and define what is the
problem you're trying to solve, this
often teases out many assumptions and
many, you know, sort of
unconscious biases that this yes have.
And just in that aspect of getting them
to describe what the
problem is, you're right, I think it
becomes a little bit less
personalized of here's how I feel
about my identity in the world. And it
makes it a little bit more,
as you said, just a little less
personal, where they can start to unpack
some of these ideas more
because there's this other
there's this third party that they're
getting to to use their
ideas. That's really interesting.
Yeah. And one of the things you said
there was actually the next
point that I was going to make.
And it was actually one of the places
where I could see
definitely see some intersection with
sort of the training of engineers, which
is like art is really good at ambiguity.
It's very good at like presenting things
to us that we can read
like compellingly read in
multiple and even opposing ways at the
same time. And so art has an
ambiguity in it that we can
like, we sometimes we have to like, get
past our initial simplistic
responses to it to get to the
ambiguity. But then if we have multiple
people looking at the
same work of art and having
different thoughts about it, that is also
another form of ambiguity of
meaning that has to do with
kind of social interaction around the
art. So all of these kind of
discussions, like help us to
sort of realize that there's multiple
ways to look at something.
And when you said you give them
technical problems without a unique
correct answer, I mean,
that's that's kind of the core
of things right there is like, there's
not a unique correct
answer to the to the meaning of
a work of art or to like questions about
sort of identity. It's like it's
something we have to kind
of talk about and work through. You know,
and just one other thing
on this sort of question of
bias, like one of the one of the great
values of art is actually
in dealing with biases that
so many biases reside in our visual
capacities, and they run on
autopilot, you know, like our
visual faculties are not designed to like
look at things, and we
don't actually accurately see
the world, we see a very filtered version
of the world. Like
before we even think about it,
our brain has decided, you know, this,
these are the things that are out there,
these are the things
that are worth paying attention to, and
then your eyes look at them and get
information out of them.
So like biases reside so automatically in
in visuality. And so
visual culture is a really
good way to kind of help people get go
through exercises to notice
how they jump to a conclusion
at first. And then when they looked more
and thought about it,
there was more going on.
Yeah, I think I think you just answered
my next question, which is
why should every engineer take
an art class, but I feel like we just
knocked it out of the park
on that one. Yeah, I think so.
Well, I, you know, there's two answers to
that. I mean, we could
talk about sort of the,
is the sort of socio cultural engagement
that we can get through
art. But then we could also
talk about, you know, engineers working
with like art materials. Yeah, there's,
you know, we've had,
we've been talking about bias, and we've
been talking about how our
our perception of the world
is filtered through our brain
unconsciously. And because there are so
many layers to this system of
how we perceive and engage with the world
around us, there's also
can be a lot of difficulty in
building just connections with people,
right to open dialogues
about difficult questions,
and to get to a place where you can have
these hard conversations
about problems that don't have
right answers. And I know that's a space
that you work in a lot,
because you have so many student
groups from different disciplines. And as
you mentioned earlier,
right, you have public groups
as well coming in. So what are your some
of your, what are some of
your techniques for, for starting
to build those connections and for
creating a space where people can talk
about these questions
in a productive way? That's a great
question. So I mean, like, first off,
like, I see one of the
most important roles that we play in
engaging with students in the public
around these sorts of
topics is like acting as facilitators and
trying to get people to,
like, talk and listen to one
another and respond to what one another
are saying. And the way we
do that is, like, you know,
there's a lot of talk of engaged learning
in sort of university
settings, we feel like we really
walk the walk the walk the talk of
engaged learning at the
museum and the way and there's
also these different definitions of
engaged learning, the one
that I think is like sort of
most salient, which actually I heard the
like my director say one time
was that engaged learning is
asking people to do something instead of
telling them something.
Right. And so one of the ways that
we so you would think like, how do you do
that? How do you ask people to do
something with a work
of art? We're standing in front of a
painting. What do you ask them to do?
Well, we ask them to
describe it. We ask them what they see,
and then we ask them what it
gets them to think about. And
we try to forefront all those sort of
active discussions, active
responses. We try to put that
upfront in the discussion before we bring
in any information about
the artist or the title or
anything like that. So we're really
trying to I mean, seriously,
we're trying to hear what people
think. Yeah, yeah. And that makes them
feel invited into the
discussion. Right. And then as
facilitators, a really important thing
that we do. And this
actually, you know, as I said,
my background was in German studies. So
when I was a grad
student, I did a lot of language
instruction, like German 101 and 102. And
there's some core things
that I learned in that pedagogy
that we apply all the time in museum
work. So one of the most important things
in language learning
is that people feel inhibited, right? And
they feel inhibited
because they're worried they're
going to make a mistake. Right. So the
language program that I was in was all
about not correcting
people. It was all about just like making
people feel confident that
even if they make mistakes,
they're going to be understood. So we
taught for comprehension rather than
accuracy. Right. And so
that creates an environment in which the
students aren't worried
about making an error. They're
trying to communicate for understanding
just like in cultural and social
discussions, we're trying
to communicate with one another for
understanding without worrying about
making mistakes. And then
being affirmative about what people say.
And then this is like a
key thing, what's called in
language instruction, what's called
recasting, which is where
you repeat what somebody said
correctly. Right. So one of the things I
often do in discussions
with people is people say
insightful things. Sometimes they don't
quite know how to
articulate it. I try to kind of take
what they say and repeat it in a way that
puts it in dialogue with the
things other people are saying,
or with some of the kind of like, you
know, sort of like
background knowledge that I have about
the piece or something like that. And so
this kind of invitation to
speak an affirmation of what
people are saying and then an active
effort to I mean, one of the
things I do in my work all the
time is I use ideas from other
disciplines and kind of metaphoric ways
that maybe are interesting,
but maybe kind of abuse them a little
bit. But in this case, I
would say the, you know,
within a discussion, the participants are
providing a kind of material,
right. And one of my goals is
the facilitator is to take that material
and work with it to make
something that the whole, to help
the group make something together. Yeah,
that's, that's fantastic.
And I think there's a good
overlap there with what we're doing in
engineering classes as well.
This idea of it's okay to be
partially correct, right? You need to
convey the ideas that you're having,
because so many of our
courses, especially our upper level
courses have so much of a teamwork
component, that it's not
expected for any one person to know
everything or to get it totally right.
But it's like, well,
if person A has a good idea, person B has
a different good idea,
person C has a different
good idea, you start to really put
together a very effective
approach to the problem that the
students are trying to solve. So then the
role for the teacher in that
context is to be I guess the
recaster, right, to take all these
aspects of correctness and to
be able to synthesize it and
say, it sounds like what you're proposing
is, and then to put it out in
a way that the students will
resonate with and say, yeah, that's
exactly what I wanted to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know,
I would add to that also, like as the
instructor in such a
setting, having as an explicit goal,
like helping the students to have an
experience of sort of social learning,
fun social learning,
it's actually fun to work on a team.
Right, collaborative, it's not
competitive. Yes, exactly.
Exactly. It's not competitive. And when
we listen to one another
and talk with one another and
facilitate making something together,
it's going to be like, it's
going to be a more enjoyable
experience. And we're probably going to
make something that's
cooler. Yeah, absolutely.
You know, and that, you know, just one of
the things that I talk
about, and you know, when,
you know, in the, you know, museum world,
we're always kind of
talking about our work to,
you know, other museums and to other
people at the university.
And one of the things I always
emphasize is kind of like the primary
goal of everything we do
at the museum is to give
students or the public, and when we're
working with the public,
an experience of fun social
learning. And like if they learn stuff
too, that's great. But if they leave
being like, wow, that was
really engaging to, I was listening to
other people and I was
being heard and we talked about
important things together. And we changed
one another or we
changed together in some way.
That's all like super important, core
stuff of our experience.
What I wanted to ask you is in
your experience working, especially with
public groups, do you see,
do you see the museum visitors
getting excited about the science behind
the art? And like, what does
it mean? And how does it work?
And is that a vehicle that we can use to
to drive more, you know,
interest in the sciences with the
public? Yeah, I think there's a lot of
there's a lot of room there to meet
public interest. And in
most of the most of that, most of the
questions that the public
have in this area are around
the topics of your making, like how was
this made? What were the materials that
were used? How do you
manipulate them? And like, I feel like
it's like the more expert that
explanation can be, the more
it gives people access to some really
deep understandings of the,
you know, the materiality,
the objecthood of what we're looking at,
which going back to what
I was saying earlier about
synesthetic experiences, I really feel
like those sorts of that sort of
understanding and knowledge
can really kind of undergird a more, this
is a more powerful and multifaceted
experience of works of art.
Yeah, it's, it's so good to be reminded
of how layered these
topics are, right? That there's,
there's the cultural context, there's the
aesthetics of the art itself,
there's the physicality and the
materiality of what it's made out of that
all these things
intersect, right? It's not just,
they're not even separable. You can't
have one without the others.
No. Yeah, you know, a really good example
of that is going back to the
the QR code tour that we that
the grad students put together for
material science for that curriculum
collection installation
we did a ways back. One of the, one of
the objects that they wrote about was a
piece of celadon wear
and it was, it was in the, like the
technical side of it was like, why is it
green? Like what makes
it green? But then, like, why did they
want it to be green? That had to do with
the popularity of jade
and the rarity of jade. And so it was an
effort to make a ceramic
that had similar color qualities
to jade. So it's like a really cool
example of like the
intersection between cultural history
and understanding and the science and
bringing the two together in a way where
each sort of like had
something interesting. Yeah, and we're
trying to parallel those same
multifaceted conversations
in our engineering classes where it's,
okay, what is the
technical performance of this
system? Sure, great. What's the value of
it economically?
Sure, but also culturally,
is this something that people want? Is
this something that will
convey some sort of status
to the owner? Like these are all aspects
of, of this problem of
product design aesthetics,
like does it look good? If it's ugly,
people aren't going to
want it. And it's so easy for
students to get in this narrow vein of
what is the technical performance that
any, any venue or any
vehicle that we have to get them out of
that limited mindset and
say, what about the rest of
the world? I feel like it's very
important. Yeah, yep. It
actually reminds me of like,
one of the definitions of art that I
really dislike is this
definition. Like art is anything
that doesn't have to do with survival,
right? Because it's like,
we have survival needs and
we make tools to help us survive. And
then art's like this extra
thing. And I'm like, when we think
about design, that's exactly where those
two come together. Like
the way a tool is designed
is like integral to how usable it is,
right? And it's integral to
how it like supports life.
So like, so like, design is a like a
very, like, it's a place
where sort of like the technical
side and the cultural side come
intimately together. And
they're vital, right? They're not,
it's not like, oh, we make a tool and
then we give it design just
so it looks nice or something
that design needs to be integrated into
the functionality of
the thing. Yeah, it's, it
sometimes gets to be this problem that's
left aside until the end. And
then people will try to tack on
the other considerations after they've
declared the problem
solved. And well, that's not going
to give you an effective solution. It's
going to be obviously disjoint. And
absolutely. And it goes, I mean, that
goes back to like early 20th century
Bauhaus principles of
design, which is like the meat, like
things should be designed
for the meeting of form and
function. And it's in design isn't about
putting a facade on
something in order to make it look
better. Design is part of it. It
certainly is. I do have to keep an eye on
the clock. But before we
wrap it up for the day, for people in the
audience who might be interested in this
sort of collaboration
that you and I have had, right, where
worlds have collided, and we
created this new thing that
didn't exist before. How does that
happen? For you and me, it was just as
you said, it was serendipity,
someone happened to reach out to someone
else. But if someone wants to start a
community engagement
program, or if someone wants to work with
their local art
communities or local museum, to have
that collaboration between the technical
discipline, right? And that legendary
other side, the humanities,
how do we get that started? What's the
right way for someone like me
to approach someone like you
and say, hey, we should hang out
together? Yeah. Man, I mean, in a way,
that's like part of my job.
So I mean, if you're at the university,
and you want to do something
interesting with a class or
academic program or anything at all, I
mean, I'm the person
you'd get in touch with, but
sort of just speaking in general. So I
guess I got sort of two ways
to think about this. So one,
as far as like working with communities
and just doing something that's
interesting to communities,
like doing something that's like making
like a hands on sort of
thing is going to be way more
appealing. And if you can, like, if
you're interested in
bringing, like, you know, like
knowledge about the properties of paper
to a broader audience,
doing it through like an
origami workshop or something would be
like the way to do that, because people
are always interested
in hands on activities. And then if you
can tack on the sorts of
like, expertise on top of that,
then it's like, you know, it's an
enticing package. And then
also, it's like you're going
back to that engaged learning thing as
you have people make
something and then ask what their
experience of the materiality was and
then bring in what you know about the
things, you know, that
sort of thing. So like really doing
something participatory and
inviting their involvement,
as far as like working with an
institution and, you know, trying to
partner with them to do things,
I would say, like, in general, like
culture workers are like
very overworked. And it's like,
there's so many cool things we could be
working on. And it's hard to decide what
things to prioritize.
So having some kind of organization or
some kind of clear idea of
what you want to do can be really
helpful. And then like working with the
museum as kind of a
platform to present a program that
you put together can be really helpful.
Also, another, I guess,
another sort of key part of
working with like cultural institutions
is like, we tend to work really far in
the future. So like,
you know, talking early about something
you want to do in the future is also
extremely helpful. Like
we're working on things that are going to
happen in two, three years.
We're working on things that
are going to happen next week, six
months, a year, two years, three years.
So it's hard to keep a
handle on. Yeah, I guess the takeaway I'm
getting here is actually
plan ahead and actually have a
concept for what you want to do. And it's
amazing how if you do that,
you can get people to, to be
on board with it. Yeah, yeah. And hands
on things, hands on things are great.
That's something I'm
always like, I'm looking for new ways to
add, just like drawing
activities or just, you know,
with a lot of classes, just doing
something where the students are doing a
little little bit of
making, even if it's just asking them to
draw some lines in response
to prompts. That's a, it's a
really, it's participatory and fun. And
there's not right answers.
All right. Well, yeah, since
it's time to wrap up for today, I'll say
if you have a minute and you
want to talk about anything
that you're doing right now, anything you
want to brag about
anything you want to plug to the
audience, tell us what's going on at UMA.
Oh, man. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So
just in my, in my work area,
we just put up a new set of curriculum
collection displays. One of
which is in this, like a very
cool, cool combo. So in my exhibition
space on one side, we have a class on
interfaith understanding.
So it's a lot of art about different
religious faiths and also about sort of
interfaith identities
and experiences. And then sharing that
space is a new class in the
history of art called Arts and
Cultures of Star Wars, which is actually
a collaboration with
the Museum of Anthropology
as well. And that's a class that's
looking sort of like doing sort of a
cultural critical look at the
sort of representation of otherness and
difference in the context of
Star Wars and sort of paying
attention to the way that so much of that
representation is sort
of conditioned by settler
colonialism. So those are some, you know,
those are the current curriculum
collection installations
we have up. Another thing I'd like to
just like give a plug for,
which is just because I think
it's a really interesting project is I'm
working with a faculty in
the School of Nursing named
Clayton Schumann on a project that we're
calling Art-spective,
which is actually, so
Clayton works in, he works on bias in
medical care. And he was
specifically looking for a way
to, looking for a new way to do anti-bias
training, especially
with neonatal nurses.
And specifically, he has this project
where, you know, he's
trying to reduce bias of neonatal
nurses toward new mothers suffering from
opioid addiction and trying
to support the mothers and,
you know, in recovery and in being
mothers. And but so I did a like, I did
like a, what's a pretty
standard sort of empathy building
exercise in museum pedagogy,
like I did not invent it. It's
called a perspective flipping exercise
where you basically look at a photograph
and kind of describe
it for as a from a third person
perspective. And then somebody else
approaches it from the
perspective of one of the people in the
image. And then you kind
of compare how you read the
image differently, depending on if you're
taking an outside perspective
or a first person perspective.
The person who takes the first person
first person first person perspective,
sees much more agency in the image, they
like give a story and they give reasons
to like whatever the
person's doing. Whereas when you do the
third person perspective,
people tend to be kind of
like biased and judgmental. So that we
did that exercise with him.
And we did some studies with
some nursing students. And we actually,
you know, he did some
before and after surveys and
proved statistically that it increased
the empathy of the
people who participated in it.
And so now we're actually working on
trying to turn it into an
online education platform
that like, hopefully, like, you know,
medical organizations can
can buy this as an anti bias
training and people will go on and
they'll sort of do the exercise online,
the way that we facilitate
it in person. But going back to the thing
we were saying about bias
earlier, so the thing that's
cool about this exercise is different
than a lot of other bias
training, is it kind of puts people
through an experience where they notice
their own bias and become
aware of it. And it's not like
somebody else was saying like, you were
biased right there. It's
like they notice it themselves.
And then they there makes people less
defensive and hopefully just like, like,
you know, more aware
of it and trying to reduce it in
themselves. So I think that's one of the
effectiveness. One of the
reasons that that's effective is because
it once it's like what I was
saying about art is a screen
in a way, it's like it allows people to
think about bias and think
about their own biases without
being put on the spot. That sounds
fantastic. I'm very much now thinking
about how that might be
employed in a case study analysis and
engineering class, right?
Describe this case from the
perspective of someone who experienced it
rather than what we see
historically after the fact.
But that's an exercise for a future
episode. Yeah, I was gonna
go on. I'll stop. I've taken
enough of your time. I'm really glad that
you were able to make time to join us
today. Great to have
you here. And hopefully I'll talk to you
again soon for everyone out
in the audience. We'll see
you next time. Great. Thanks so much.