STEAM = STEM + Arts

We are RISD, Brown, MIT, Yale, Rutgers, BU, Harvard, The New School, UC Berkeley, UOttawa, UMichigan STEAM. STEAM stands for STEM + Arts/Humanities/Design. We strive to integrate the creativity and aesthetics of the arts; the problem solving tools and rigor of the STEM fields; & the critical thinking and ethical considerations of the humanities.

We believe that this unification powerfully drives progress toward the future.

As former President of the RISD STEAM Chapter, I've helped to found 7 new STEAM chapters and expanded STEAM as a primarily students' initiative across the nation + also into Canada.  I've also worked in the RISD Government Relations and External Affairs Office as STEAM Presidential Fellow.

What is the STEAM Catalogue?

The STEAM Catalogues, like a catalogue of a show, is a collection of documented work. At STEAM, this includes workshops, lectures, installations, discussions, and writing we create each year. Our fifth installment ( Catalogue 5 ) documents the two semesters of Fall 2015 and Spring 2016.

C A T A L O G U E    5    :    E  X  P  A  N  S  I  O  N

Designed + Curated Catalogue 5 with the inimitable Kenji Endo, Brown CS '18.
Following excerpt from my foreword here:

"Let’s start with the shape of the pentagon.

The five vertices of the pentagon stands for the five points of the STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics, a symbol for STEAM designed by Catherine Schmidt (RISD GD '14). Going further, now that STEAM, as a student-led grassroots movement, is expanding nationwide, the shape of the pentagon is different for each school. Each school has different needs and resources with which each specific chapter was founded on. The pentagon symbolically represents the pulling and reshaping of how the five disciplines of STEAM interact with each other at each school.

Each catalogue is the center point of the STEAM network, as the culmination of the students’ manifestation of the idea of STEAM, brought together in one place to be disseminated to educators, students, policy makers, and industry leaders. This is our story and the work we have done, are doing, and will continue to do as we diversify and expand. Each school will have its own story, its own way of working together to unite seemingly disparate fields of study or groups of people together, to forge new ways of learning, of growing, and of experiencing the world. Whether it is through meeting different people or creating work collaboratively with someone who sees the problem in a completely different light, there has always been a place for the sciences to co-exist and flourish alongside the arts. Our world is no longer about purism, but rather, inter-connectedness. We are the nodes bouncing around wildly, making connections with the communities around us, the resources available to us, and to other nodes that we collide with.

The pentagon assembles the different disciplines, joined together in a charged pursuit for knowledge, innovation, and new ways of seeing our world so that we may help each other get outside of our single point (of view) and together, form new areas for exploration and expansion."

Interested?