Creative Answers to Global Issues

Why do complex technical and social issues seem impossible to solve? Despite all the resources invested to find solutions to hunger and disease, violence and terrorism, environmental degradation--these planetary and human "conditions" appear to be always with us.

This article considers the possibility that focused problem-solving across traditional barriers between arts and sciences might contribute significantly to finding answers to difficult problems. A linked article, Artscience Problem Solvers, provides specific examples of creative thinkers who have made boundary-breaking progress.

In his book Artscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), David Edwards observes that in most organisations, ideas are developed "in proportion to the human and financial resources" received, and tend not to be developed very far before they are "handed off". In particular, innovations are often abandoned "when their translation threatens to carry them from one sector of impact to the next".

An example would be an idea for a drug to combat a disease associated with poverty, such as a respiratory problem linked to inadequate housing. Such a proposal would likely not be carried very far once a lack of market opportunity for the product had been identified.

Edwards observes that standard scientific method produces few solutions to complex multi-variable problems; and that artists, while perhaps having more creative freedom, do not make their reputations by solving practical difficulties.

Barrier-Breaking Approaches

Edwards' central idea--that complex issues require multi-disciplinary responses--is not new. It was 1959 when C.P. Snow delivered the controversial Rede lecture in which he remarked that artists and scientists had almost ceased to communicate at all. (Snow, The Two Cultures and A Second Look, London: Cambridge University Press, 1959 and 1964). Snow regarded this gulf as potentially disastrous to western society and a waste, observing that "the clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures...ought to produce creative chances".

Where Edwards takes the debate further is in his close study of how people in different disciplines and economic sectors have "translated their ideas" into useful outcomes, using "some combination of those processes we conventionally regard as art and science". A biomedical engineer, fiction writer and entrepeneur, he has deliberately worked to keep his thinking fresh by living in different parts of the world, thereby avoiding the "blindness implicit in the comfort of a home culture".

Edwards is a founder of Le Laboratoire, an "artscience" centre in Paris dedicated to finding "a way to move ideas more readily over interdisciplinary boundaries". The success stories of some of his colleagues, and the lessons Edwards derives from them, are included in the linked article cited above.

Solving global problems

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