New STEAM Exhibit Highlights Innovative Collaborations

In 2021, professors Nobuho Nagasawa, Department of Art, and Mei Lin (Ete) Chan, Department of Biomedical Engineering, (BME) were brought together by an electrical engineering major who sought to incorporate art into her engineering work.

The partnership that resulted came to fruition with an innovative collaborative exhibition the next year called “STEM + Art = STEAM,” which aimed to highlight the intersection of art and science. The third iteration of the event took place December 4 in the second-floor foyer of the Staller Center with the theme, “Archi⋅texture: Becoming Bionic.”

Seven student teams showed off projects highlighting a part of the body, giving attendees a glimpse into the interdisciplinary creative process. Chan said the goal of the project was to feature the human body. 

“Traditionally, people think about prosthetic orthotics to be something that we will hide,” she said. “We wanted to say, ‘don’t hide it.’ Think of a personality thing. Think of a persona. How can you enhance it, showcase it, and be proud of who you are? That was the idea behind this project.”

One featured project was titled “Two Left Feet,” and illustrated the lingering effects, often unseen, of an injury.

“The story behind this project is that a girl was walking one day with her two left feet, and she fell and broke her ankle,” said project leader Kaitlyn Lambert, a psychology major with a concentration in chemistry and biology. “After she broke it, she had time to heal and on the outside it seems healed, but she still feels pain or a ‘clank’ whenever she moves her ankle a certain way. So the story behind it is to try to show how, no matter how long people have to heal, they can still be in pain. We also included a projection of an MRI scan of an actual broken ankle. This is based on a real story and we wanted it to be as authentic as possible.”

Another project was called “Drainpalm,” led by Alex Noll, a journalism major with a minor in studio art. 

“The story is about a plumber who was working on a research facility’s garbage disposal and had his hand destroyed in an accident,” said Noll. “But he quickly used a lot of the tools in his kit, as well as some of the plumbing and the glassware and tubing from the facility to create a hydro-powered makeshift hand.”

Nina Hartling was one of the BME students who collaborated with Noll.

“Our group was working on creating these attachments, with the bigger attachments being the tools that the plumber used to fix his hand,” said Hartling, a biomedical engineering sophomore. “It was really fun to be able to work through all the different iterations and communicate with Alex through the whole process.”

“This experience was a really good example of collaboration between two groups that are both good at different things,” said Noll. “There’s a lot of input from each side and feedback that would change as the vision changed. And I think it led to a much cooler thing than I initially envisioned.”

“When incorporating art and engineering, it’s really difficult to make something work the way you want it to while making it look pretty,” said Angee Diaz, an engineering major who collaborated on “Two Left Feet.”

“There’s an irony to it; making something simple and charming is actually a process that’s difficult and grueling. I think it taught us a lot about how we look at a lot of the technology we have today and a lot of the arts that we have today. And I think it gave us an appreciation of how much thought there is to it, because it may seem simple or easy to do from the outside, but behind all of that, there might be a dozen scrapped designs that might have been overcomplicated.”

Chan said that though she has no art background, she has always been interested in crafts. “Now I have two kids and I always find an excuse to do art/STEM projects with them,” she said. “When I talk to my son, who’s seven years old, and ask what he wants to do when he grows up, he says, ‘I want to be a scientist and an artist.’ What we are doing resonates with students, even at seven years old.”

“As I think about art plus engineering, I keep thinking it equals ‘humanity,’” said Executive Vice President and Provost Carl Lejuez. “Looking into the future, it’s not hard to see how people’s lives might dramatically change because of these collaborations. Thank you all for a great example that I can give every time I’m trying to tell Stony Brook’s story in a meaningful way.”

For Nagasawa, it is a source of pride to see the event gain more recognition support each year. She thanked Lejuez and Art Department Chair Linda O’Keeffe — who both expressed their support for future initiatives in educational innovation, technology entrepreneurship, and interdepartmental collaboration — as well as College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean Andrew Singer, College of Arts and Sciences Dean David Wrobel, and Kara DeSanna, assistant provost for Academic Program and Curriculum Management.

“Most importantly, the students did an excellent job,” Nagasawa said. “Professor Chan and I are extremely proud of what our students accomplished.”

— Robert Emproto

More photos by John Griffin: