Week 1: Two Cultures

As a student who major in computer science and have a strong interest in design, I have experienced the phenomena mentioned in the readings "Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution" and "Third Culture: Being in Between" through my first college year.

UCLA has a quite separate campus organizing with art majors on the north campus and science majors on the south. Moreover, many courses in design and media arts majors are not available to students in other majors, even those which are closely related to other fields, for example, game design. Due to this separation in education, I barely have a chance to study design.

Game programming and design cooperate together

However, things changed after I joined a game-developing club. I was not restricted to my major and could active as both a programmer and a designer. During the development, I found out that science and art are closely intermediate. Programmers had to change designer's ideas into code and designers had to think about how to make their design easier for people to use with current technology. Only with this cooperation between art and science could our team make a good game. Luckily, being the "third culture" in this club enabled me to discover the beauty of this merge.

merge of art and science

To be honest, I never thought about the separation of art and science seriously until this week and suddenly all my previous experiences linked up. Indeed, gaps exist between art and science but they are never entirely separate. The "third culture" act as a bridge between them and light up lots of new possibilities. I believe this "third culture" will become the mainstream of education in the future as Sir Ken Robinson mentioned in his video about changing the education paradigms. With different academic fields link together, new ideas will bump up, for example, those that may change the world.



Sources:

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo 34.2 (2001): 121-25. Web. 03 April. 2016.

TheRSAorg. "RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms." YouTube. YouTube, 2010. Web. 03 April. 2016.

"The Two Cultures." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 03 April. 2016.

SkookumScipt. Web. 03 April. 2016. <http://skookumscript.com/unreal/>. 

EQ. Web. 03 April. 2016. <http://www.eqsa.co.za>.

Sogeti Lab. Web. 03 April. 2016. <http://labs.sogeti.com/author/joo-serk-lee/>.