Humanistic Engineering

Catalog description

The course discusses the nature of the co-dependencies of various human endeavors, like art, science and engineering, and the degree to which traditionally non-engineering elements, like meaning, fairness, or artistic creativity, should be considered by present processing / computational systems and methods in engineering. The course starts with presenting the main theories in philosophy, art, psychology, and engineering design on the nature and characteristics of evolution and progress. The main elements of engineering design for innovation are being discussed and how it relates to humanistic values. Computational methods towards mimicking and generating creative outcomes are presented and then compared to human creativity. The covered topics include the evolution process in art and engineering, its defining stages and elements, existing computational approaches towards co-achieving human and engineering goals with computational art as an example, the importance of expertise. The course offers exposure to existing software tools related to computational creativity.