Probably not but I was reminded recently of a conversation with a lecturer from IMD a while back which exposed the different expectations made of, art students on the one hand, and science students on the other. I was looking for an undergrad student to work on a project which had a highly visual element and required creativity. The idea was to explore different ways to present analysed argument and dialogue data to users alongside the source from which that argument was extracted. I naturally thought that a design student working in interactive media might be an ideal candidate and asked whether there might be a suitable student available. The way that things generally work in the School of Computing, at least for applied computing students, is that a list of available projects is circulated and any student who has their imagination fired can volunteer to take that project. Occasionally students develop their own ideas and then search for an academic with a relevant background to supervise it. The upshot of the conversation though was that most students from IMD had projects of their own devising and that any students who didn't have a project might not be worth taking on for the project that I had in mind.
I wonder whether this is in part due to the nature of the art versus science debate? In art having ideas is a prime motivator whereas in science we tend to require that you learn what others have done first before putting forward your own new ideas. Now I realise that these are very general, almost stereotypical, descriptions of educational approaches in these domains, and that there are some overlaps in approaches and relaxation of assumptions in certain areas, but as a rule of thumb, if you are creative, in an artistic capacity then you might consider pursuing some form of artistic qualification. Along the way you learn techniques, and other knowledge that support the expression of your initial ideas, and possibly develop new ideas. I personally doubt that many people pursue art without having some initial ideas of their own that they wish to express (although how well that expression is achieved is subject to much discussion) and this state of affairs seems to me to be perfectly reasonable. Conversely many people pursue a scientific education without possessing any initial ideas of their won beyond some inkling of the area of science that they find interesting. This seems quite acceptable because without knowing what has been done before you risk wasting your own time re-covering old ground. In learning about what others have done you quite often discover a fascinating unanswered question and decide to pursue it, thus a new research career is born. Rarely however is a science student's lack of insight into what is worth pursuing from a research perspective taken as a measure of their worth, rather it is to be expected. This is why the majority of computing students pursue projects that are suggested by academics rather than developing their own project.
Like so many areas the interesting aspect is in the overlaps, the boundaries between disciplines, and the interplay of the edges that define them. So as more designers become interested in computing as a medium, and as more software developers become interested in the design of their software artifacts from aesthetic rather than purely functional perspectives, then there are going to be more of these strange interactions and realisations. In my case I felt that an arts student, rather than a computing student, might be more likely to exhibit the aesthetic sensibilities that I was after for my project. In addition my project might have provided a new direction for the student that they had never previously considered. What I had not expected was that the lack of ideas on the part of the arts student might be construed as evidence against them. As we increasingly pursue collaborative, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary research, it is worth bearing in mind the differences in how we evaluate the worth, for want of a better term, of our students.
