Siloed disciplines can make solving today’s most pressing challenges – climate change, artificial intelligence, global health – nearly impossible. These issues do not fit neatly into a single department or methodology. Instead, we need bridges across disciplines, with arts and humanities integrated at the core.
The value of interdisciplinary research collaborations is not only in the outcomes; it is in the processes. Disciplines shape how people approach problems and what counts as knowledge. Scientists may look for reproducible data, designers for practical applications, humanists for meaning and interpretation. By learning each other’s vocabularies, metaphors and assumptions, students and researchers from across disciplinary divides expand their intellectual horizons. They look to what philosopher and urban planning professor Donald Schön called problem-setting – defining the issue clearly in the first place and understanding its context – before problem-solving. Problem-setting is a crucial step in identifying what questions matter and what we’re trying to resolve.
Outcomes matter – but so do processes
In an early class we co-taught, students from engineering, industrial design and marketing quickly discovered that a single word – such as “model” – meant something different in each discipline. For engineering students, a model meant a mathematical abstraction – equations that predict how a circuit or device will behave. For design students, it was a 3D mock-up of a product. For marketing students, a model meant a business framework for how a new idea might be monetised or scaled.
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At first, this confusion slowed progress. But once students began negotiating those differences, their projects grew richer. They recognised which meaning was being discussed and gained a better understanding of their project. What began as frustration turned into an education in epistemology: how knowledge itself is created, valued and communicated.
Mirroring realities of work today
This shift towards interdisciplinary thinking has major implications for higher education. Industry no longer throws designs “over the wall” from one department to another. Leading companies sit engineers, designers and communicators together from day one. If universities are to prepare students for this reality, we must mirror it. Arts and humanities are not optional extras in this model; they are integral to training and educating the next generation of thinkers and makers.
At Virginia Tech, we are often identified as a tech-oriented campus, where the College of Engineering is a flagship. And while that identity is real and strong, it hides a richer truth: the university’s research identity is deliberately blended and mutually reinforcing across liberal arts, design, architecture, the arts and the sciences. Through the work of the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), we are showing, in practical terms, how arts and humanities practices are not peripheral but integral to research that tackles today’s most pressing challenges.
For instance, in May 2025 during ICAT’s annual Creativity & Innovation Day, faculty and students from 13 departments presented projects that deliberately mixed art, design, engineering and the sciences. One team created “light and shadow instruments” – sculptural devices that trace sunlight angles during solstices, produce cyanotype prints and function as both architectural prototypes and performative instruments. Another team used haptic feedback in a virtual-reality simulation of a historic building, so students could feel wind, warmth and structural performance data. These examples illustrate the point: writing, performing, designing and imagining are themselves research practices, not mere add-ons.
Beyond campus, this approach widens a university’s global reach. Through ICAT’s ARTx: Art, Research and Technology Exchange, for example, scholars and artists jointly presented at the state-of-the-art Cube theatre and performed at global partner institutions in Canada and Ireland. The programme supports teams that include humanists, designers and technologists to deliver work that is globally visible. Importantly, funding mechanisms – for instance, ICAT’s SEAD (science, engineering, arts and design) grants – should explicitly require this kind of cross-disciplinary, arts-integrated research.
What does this mean for other academic institutions? In short, arts and humanities disciplines are not optional extras in the tech-university context; they are enablers of innovation, cultural translation, critical thinking and global collaboration. These disciplines make research enrich our work, and universities are stronger for it.
How to get started
We have three recommendations on how to get started that are low cost but high return, gleaned through lessons we learned.
First, just start. Initial steps can be small: a shared space, a modest grant or a pilot course can be enough to build momentum. Shared spaces remove the hierarchy of who feels like a guest in someone else’s lab or studio. Neutral ground fosters confidence, collaboration and creativity.
Consider using small seed grants to lower the barrier to entry. Even modest amounts mean that faculty and students don’t need to win large federal funding to test new ideas. Such grants let them experiment, fail safely and iterate.
At the ICAT, we provide small seed grants to student and faculty teams from colleges across science, engineering, art and design. These grants create opportunities for collaboration that would not otherwise happen. Out of them grow performances, installations, books, technical innovations, new curricula and even Fulbright awards. They are a reminder that when artists, humanists and scientists are in the room together, the outputs are more imaginative and the impacts longer lasting.
Finally, pilot programmes bypass bureaucracy and allow new teaching or research approaches to be tested before formal adoption. They show proof of concept that can convince departments and funders to support bigger initiatives.
The key is to create opportunities where disciplines can come together as equals, with art and humanities fully valued. From there, the collaborations grow, and so does the recognition that innovation depends not only on technical skill but also on imagination, empathy and cultural insight.
Lisa McNair is professor of engineering education and Tom Martin is professor of electrical and computer engineering, both at Virginia Tech. They are also interim co-executive directors of the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology.
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