When you picture a scientist, mathematician or engineer, what comes to mind? Someone serious? Formal? Brilliant, perhaps – but probably not an artist.
And when you picture an artist? Someone expressive? Quirky? imaginative? Chaotic – but probably not technical.
We're told that one half of the brain is creative and the other is logical. And that we're dominant with one or the other.
This is a myth that I've always discouraged.
Because we all have the aptitude for both – we just have to exercise them.
The confusion comes down to how creativity is perceived. It doesn't mean painting the Mona Lisa (which, in fact, was painted by a scientist).
Creativity means the ability to imagine what doesn't yet exist.
A lawyer who knows the law is competent. But a lawyer who knows the law and think creatively finds the legal loophole nobody else spotted.
And an engineer who understands circuitry can build what they're told to build. But an engineer with creative vision can see what that circuitry could become.
History is full of proof.
You'll know Brian May as the lead guitarist of Queen, writer of "We Will Rock You" and the solo in "Bohemian Rhapsody." But did you know he also holds a PhD in astrophysics, completed thirty years after he started it? And after building his iconic 'Red Special' guitar by hand, from parts from an old fireplace and a motorcycle, he began patenting guitar accessories from his own designs.
We remember Alfred Hitchcock as the master of psychological suspense. What's less known is that he graduated from the London County Council School of Engineering before he ever set foot on a filmshoot. His habit of drawing every scene before shooting is engineering – solving every technical problem before they became an expense on set.
Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood icon of the 30s, but at night, her evenings were spent at a drawing board, inventing frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology. The patent she filed in 1942 became the foundation for WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth. Sadly she never made a penny from it. And MGM actively discouraged her from being seen as anything other than a pretty face.
Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He also picked the locks of classified safes at Los Alamos for fun, played bongo drums in a Las Vegas strip club band, and painted nudes under a pseudonym. He believed the curiosity that drove both his art and physics were one and the same.
Richard Feynman observed a problem that goes beyond the right brain, left brain myth – people actively believe the two are in conflict. He didn't agree:
I have a friend who's an artist and he'll hold up a flower and say, 'I, as an artist, can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes a dull thing'. I think he's wrong. I think the science only adds to the beauty.Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
The reason I started Function & Form the way I did was because I kept seeing the same problem that Richard Feynman observed over 40 years ago – agencies operating design and web development as two separate disciplines, working in silos. Something was lost in the handover every time.
It never made sense to me.
As a designer, how can you not be fascinated by the way in which your vision is built?
And as a web developer, why wouldn't you want to build something of your own?
Function & Form is built on the intersection of both skills. Most agencies separate the two. We never have.