Design and the Liberal Arts

I gave a keynote address on design thinking and the liberal arts to the Associations of Departments of English and of Foreign Languages Midwest meeting and joined my colleagues Virajita Singh and Remi Douah in leading afternoon design-thinking workshops. The workshops generated a lot of creative ideas, such as the “gamification” of the liberal arts in which students would read literature in order to play educational games. And I argued, In the keynote, that while STEM fields have overshadowed the liberal arts, the former have triggered their own demise as repetitive and predictive knowledge gets converted to software. What can’t be digitized?  The creative and caring skills of a liberal-arts education.  Tom Fisher