To address the complex problems facing the 21st century, we need to go beyond current thinking and approaches. Innovation that crosses traditional academic boundaries would provide new solutions that need expertise and understanding from multiple disciplines.  In academia, we speak of the importance of crossing disciplines, but little is done to instill this in our students. C.P. Snow, in his classic essay “Two Cultures,” raised the problem that the academy (that in prior times were more integrated) had become siloed to its detriment, and this has only become more extreme. Instead, we continue to force our students to focus—instead of expand—in order to succeed.  Individuals who cross disciplines are rare, not usually encouraged and at a competitive disadvantage.  In his 2014 book, “Colliding Worlds”, physicist and writer, Arthur Miller posits that we are approaching a “Third Culture” where art and science combine for Society’s benefit.

Yet, breakthroughs depend on thinking beyond boundaries. For example, Apple combines artists, social scientists, and engineers in the successful design of their products. A novel approach that may enhance creative thinking is to foster and cultivate individuals who think across interfaces of multiple disciplines.  Such individuals have been rare, and we posit that intentionally developing the ability to think beyond boundaries of an individual academic discipline is important to address the problems facing humankind that will require transformative creativity. We believe that innovations by interdisciplinary individuals can be supported and amplified by explicitly interdisciplinary institutions/spaces. We now propose a symposium to explore the value of an institute dedicated to Miller’s Third Culture.

What are the benefits when disciplines combine?  We have in the 20th century examples where creative minds were brought together resulting in synergism to solve great problems.  The Manhattan Project brought together scientists from different fields to address the critical task of developing a workable atomic bomb before the Nazis that changed the course of the war. This inspired Vannevar Bush whose report to President Truman to propose expansion of national research programs such as the National institutes of Health. A second example at the national level is President Kennedy’s challenge in the early 60s to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade. This unified mission was spurred by competition with USSR catalyzed many advances in science and technology. In universities, outstanding young scholars across fields are brought together to converse such as the Harvard Society of Fellows, (the author was privileged to be a member) that nurtured individuals who developed new fields including Marvin Minsky (artificial intelligence), E.O. Wilson (Sociobiology) and Noam Chomsky (linguistics) and especially John Bardeen, working both in physics and engineering, who was awarded two Nobel prizes. Several large corporations including Bell and IBM established laboratories that were permitted freedom to work on topics across disciplines and not tied to products. Bell labs especially were a fountain spring for creativity resulting in several Nobel prizes.  In the art world, Black Mountain College, founded 1933 (until 1957) using Dewey’s principle of Education and influenced by the Bauhaus School led to an Incredible flowering and training of artists, musicians and designers who developed the cutting-edge art of the mid 20th Century included Jasper Johns, Eva Hesse, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Anni Albers and Buckminster Fuller. Currently, art residencies such as the MacDowell Colony bring artists together who work on their own project but share dinners for cross fertilization. More recently, in the 2000s, Janelia Farms (funded by HHMI) brings together innovative investigators in an isolated location, meant to work in small groups on highly innovative tool building to benefit biomedical science.

Based on these examples, I believe there is value to bringing creative individuals together to address challenging problems.  To explore this, we propose a symposium to interrogate the concept of a Visionary Science Institute (VSI) to foster creativity in addressing the critical problems facing us in the 21st Century.  We envision that such an institute would nucleate around rotating themes/issues such as addressing climate change, quantum computing or emergent properties from complex systems. We believe this is timely to provide a home to bring creative people together, invite outside-the-box thinking and to train the next generation to be active innovators at this interface.

It is noted that the cited prior examples were predominantly White, European and male. This needs to change for the next generation. A powerful aspect of this proposed institute is embracing diverse voices, lived experiences, interests, and approaches. In addition to cross-disciplinary thinking, centering diversity in background and culture opens a wider array of thinking (outside the box).  Yet, current structures often fail to recognize the intrinsic value of such diversity, and in fact, further marginalize communities traditionally excluded from academia and industry leadership. Central to our mission is amplifying, supporting, and celebrating ways of knowing. Instead of advancing a status quo where success favors those who easily adapt to the norms of academia and excludes those who are different and must expend more effort to assimilate culturally, we strive to foster an environment that celebrates difference. An important means to address this is outreach to broader communities and we believe that such outreach would sustain and diversify the mission of the proposed institute.

The VSI will promote thinking between art and science to spark innovation in addressing the great unsolved problems of the world, both practical (addressing climate change) and theoretical (emergent properties of complexity). It is hoped that by actively catalyzing interactions between artists and scientists in a community of mutual respect and openness, truly creative solutions may be sparked that would have great societal impact.  Providing a home to scholars of the next generation that welcomes their out-of-the-box thinking would have lasting and powerful significance.