Science by design

Science by design

by Joanne Baker

The American land artist and critic Robert Smithson considered the art museum to be a mausoleum. By limiting the way in which artists' work is exhibited, he accused curators of "cultural confinement" and artists of "supporting a cultural prison" by their complicity. "Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells," he said.

Sitting in my rather cell-like university office, as an astrophysics researcher, I wondered if the same pattern applied to science. Divisions between disciplines are multiplying rather than being broken down. Scientists struggle to 'frame' their work by publishing it in journals. At a frantic and accelerating pace, hard-won results are hung, catalogued and then (mostly) moth-balled.

If museums have a stranglehold on art, could a similar boned corset be squeezing the air out of science? Increasingly, researchers are trained to fit work in fundable or attention-grabbing boxes rather than grappling with the bigger cultural questions that drew them to science in the first place. Money and celebrity seem to rule contemporary science as well as the art world. 

Smithson argued in the sixties for new forms of art to counteract the anaesthetic effect of museums to "separate art from the rest of society" and to dull the senses. Art should be brought out from the gallery confines to reinvigorate it, he said. He demonstrated this brazenly with industrial-scale gestures in the landscape. Giant 'pours' of asphalt, the catastrophic burial of buildings in debris piles and a geological Spiral Jetty emphasised nature's tendency to chaos and decay in situ.

At its most basic, science unarguably operates by disconnecting phenomena from the rest of nature. To unearth nature's laws, we dissect specimens in the lab and convert their essence into abstract forms and theories. To breathe life back into the man-made hypotheses, however, shouldn't we reconnect science with the wider world, nature and people?

After fifteen years of narrowly focussed research bearing witness to the outermost reaches of space, I certainly felt the need to ground myself. Initially this came through the hobby of gardening. After leaving my English terraced garden, bursting with plants, for an enclosed apartment in California, filled with books, I was drawn to landscape architecture. It offered a combination of art, nature and science that, I hoped, would broaden my outlook and plug me back in to the real world. What started as an evening class in San Francisco turned a few years later into a Masters degree in Greenwich. I don't think it is coincidental that both places are frontier towns and centres of exploration.

Landscape architecture is truly interdisciplinary, melding ideas from psychology, sociology, ecology and engineering as well as aesthetics to construct entire environments. Humans have always reconstructed their environment to heighten the senses or embody beliefs as gardens and sacred mountains. The public square is central to social interactions, be it political debate in the ancient Athenian Agora, café culture in Roman piazzas or revolution in Red Square. Working on paper set my imagination free, playing with infinite possibilities. With a stroke of the pen I could turn swathes of boring offices into a bustling marketplace, or forest, or swamp. Pedestrians and cyclists could reclaim cities from noisy cars and gum-stained asphalt.

Capturing the genius loci, or spirit of a place, is the goal of good landscape design. Magnifying and tending the natural world and its processes - including social patterns - is more important than pure beauty. A beautiful plaza is useless if no-one uses it. So a landscape designer works to co-ordinate complex and chaotic systems, like an orchestra conductor.

Chaos and complexity, however, are never easy. Messy real life can upset the logical scientist; their stress levels rise when managing people who don't follow the laws of physics. Architects, on the other hand, are well aware of the difficulty in managing a creative team - motivating and shepherding fragile egos - their professional success depends on doing it well. So they train their students in teamwork. As landscape students we organised group projects, including monitoring how well our team worked and noting the problems in others. Likewise, scientists could gain insight from actually observing how real research collaborations operate - or sometimes fragment - under pressure.

Design students often learn in a peer-driven group environment, or atelier. Students pin up drawings, give presentations and critique each other's work, face to face. Although this has the potential to turn nasty, on the whole I found the environment very constructive and supportive. Students, rather than tutors, bring in material and steer the discussion, in contrast to many physics classes where the lecturer hands down pearls of wisdom to the ignorant. By following a similar recipe - working together to develop new ideas - science students could become more empowered.

Although science is unquestionably a creative endeavour, creative methods are rarely employed consciously in either teaching or research. Rather, the myth that good ideas just pop into your head unaided, if you are clever enough, is widespread and worth challenging. Designers know that good ideas follow from hard work; creativity is something that can be nurtured and developed; tools can be learned.

Finding creative tools that work for you takes trial and error. Successful practitioners are good sources of ideas, and as a landscape student I enjoyed investigating and testing out the working methods of well-known artists and designers. Bridget Riley, for instance, employs a very scientific way of working, systematically experimenting with different geometric shapes, colours and scales using paper cutouts before painting her final compositions. Architect Bernard Tschumi thinks in terms of vectors of energy and movement in developing spaces. Landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson's thoughts are crystallised first in words.

What methods would a creative scientist use? Having never heard scientists openly discuss this, as far as I know, all scientists receive their revelations fully formed, probably in the pub.

Bringing these new ways of thinking back to the laboratory has changed how I work. I am more confident, wide ranging and questioning. Creativity needs to be fed and nurtured, so I jot down new ideas and attend intriguing talks. I think of the galaxies I study now as systems and pay more attention to the empty spaces between them - the pattern of mass and void. I would like to work in an environment where we can all throw our hats and ideas, however crazy, into the ring. However, the majority of researchers are still unaware of what they are missing and what science could be. Embracing creativity is still seen as an anomaly.

Creativity requires knowledge of the wider landscape - natural and social - in order to bring about the inner perspective changes that trigger new ideas. So, better science, using creative methods, will necessarily be wider science, reconnecting with cultural issues and the public.

Smithson argues that artworks should live out in the world rather than being isolated in museums. Similarly, using creativity, scientists should be challenged to place their science back in its original context, in the landscape and in society.

Joanne Baker, a NESTA Crucible awardee, was previously a Royal Society University Research Fellow in Astrophysics at Oxford University. She is currently Associate Editor at Science magazine.