Form follows function: it's time to re-design the environment for creative arts studies.(Education)

When the leading schools of art and design were built before the turn of the last century, great care was taken to ensure proper light exposure, flexibility of space, and durability of structure in their art studios. As a result, these studio spaces have been remarkably successful in supporting the fundamental, traditional needs of art and design students.

But the fundamental needs of art students have radically changed. In addition to traditional media and their associated tools, fundamental art and design studies now include new media and their associated digital technologies.

As the nature of art and design studies has evolved, so have their support requirements. Issues such as light exposure are less important than the need for sophisticated networking, bandwidth, throughput, electrical capabilities, and multifunctional usage.

Today, these evolving needs apply to virtually all core creative arts studies, yet most schools are ill-equipped to satisfactorily address them. Placing computers in a room and plugging them into a wall does not constitute a meaningful approach to modern creative arts education. We need to re-examine, re-define, and re-design the appropriate environments for modern creative arts studies--and we need to find models and sources for funding them.

Technology and Art

As great figures such as DaVinci, Rembrandt, and Daguerre have demonstrated, the relationship between the arts and sciences has always been central. Their enormous creative advances were clearly the result of their remarkable geniuses. But none of those advances could have been possible--nor perhaps even imagined--if the necessary technology had not first been available to them. This phenomenon is arguably more relevant today than it was during the lives of these great figures.

"What is crucial to the understanding of the value of technology adoption in creative studies is to recognize that our tools help to shape our perceptions and, thus, our conceptions," says William Fasolino, chair of the Department of Art & Design Foundation at Pratt Institute. "Digital technologies, with their power and flexibility, have the ability to change the very way the artist sees and interprets the world," he adds. "The plasticity of the human mind and nature enables technologies to become natural extensions of the artists themselves. In this sense, digital technologies are becoming a natural evolution of the human (and artistic) experience."