Using Creative Process to Guide Integrated Art and Engineering Courses

This paper describes the design of two university courses that integrated practices and processes from the visual arts and engineering. In both cases, patterns of creative process were used as a means of integration. Researchers found that by focusing on process as a way to structure the integration of these two disciplines, students were able to create emergent, hybrid artifacts along the spectrum between art and engineering, beyond the range of their previous work. Creative process became the backbone that allowed students to integrate knowledge, materials, techniques, and culture across the art and engineering disciplines.