Connecting the arts to engineer job skills
Ben Knapp has told this story before, but he keeps going back to it.
From cave paintings, through Walt Disney painting cells on film, to the digital algorithms that allow us to draw and even light objects on digital frames today, he explains that art and engineering have always propelled one another. Knapp’s current project is all about applying that intersection to the modern business world by expanding upon an old formula with a new twist. He calls it: da Vinci’s Cube.
Starting with his own network, Knapp, executive director of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, and his team have been interviewing executives from different companies every week for the last six months. The companies are wide-ranging in both scale and scope, from sole proprietorships and consultancies to school systems and large commercial companies, spanning technology, environmental issues, and even a wine company. Despite their inherent differences, Knapp said they can all gain something from applying the same lens to their hiring practices.
Before trying to explain the three-dimensional visualization of da Vinci’s Cube, it helps to start with the two-dimensional blueprint off which Knapp and Tom Martin, professor of engineering, built their vision.
Pasteur’s Quadrant is a model created by Donald E. Stokes — who wrote a book with the same name — that aims to classify scientific research along two axes. The first is the motivation of a quest for knowledge and understanding, which he connects to the work of atomic physicist Niels Bohr. The second is the consideration of use, for which he forwards Thomas Edison as his example. Meeting both criteria, with use-inspired research, is Louis Pasteur, for whom the model is named.
But in order to model for innovation in our modern world, Knapp and Martin felt this template needed an update. How could they account for the emotional intelligence required for innovation and develop a new framework by which to evaluate the skills required to fill these positions?
“Tom and I had both seen, around the same time, presentations by corporate leaders on Pasteur’s Quadrant, and we both had the idea contemporaneously that there’s more to things than just use and knowledge,” Knapp said.
Enter, sentiment: the third dimension.
“Being a National Endowment for the Arts research lab is to connect the arts with social science,” he said. “We’re looking at the arts and innovation through the lens of these ethnographic interviews.”
The initial phase of the project will finish in February 2025 with the hope that they’ll have finished 100 interviews by then. But the goal is to continue to build the breadth and depth of the interview pool over the next several years, expanding the database to provide better and more far-reaching insights into the process.
While some of the companies are waiting for more comprehensive results of the project to take action, others have found immediate benefits to taking part.
“We had an interview where we had a person say, ‘We would like to use this as part of our interview process,’” Knapp said.
As the results come in, Knapp hopes they can help not just the companies who've taken part in his project, but be a blueprint for those everywhere looking to hire better.
Ben Knapp will be the featured speaker at Tech on Tap at Port City Brewing Company in Alexandria on Wednesday, June 26, at 6 p.m. Reserve your tickets.
