Nicholas Meisel is researching how implementing art education into additive manufacturing design coursework can improve engineering students' design skills. Credit: Poornima Tomy/Penn State.
Q&A: What can the next generation of engineers learn from artists?
Oct 3, 2025
By Ty Tkacik
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Engineers are often characterized by their analytical thinking, but the role creativity plays in their work is frequently overlooked. However, current engineering education curricula struggles to help students develop and apply their artistic abilities, skills that could ultimately enable them to become better designers, according to Nicholas Meisel, associate director of engineering design graduate programs and associate professor of engineering design and of mechanical engineering.
Meisel is the principal investigator on a new project, supported by a three-year, $400,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), that looks to integrate arts education into design for additive manufacturing coursework — more commonly known as 3D printing. Meisel aims to develop an evidence-based framework for professors to implement artistic practice into additive manufacturing design courses, helping engineering students receive an effective, consistent and interdisciplinary education.
In the following Q&A, Meisel discussed why interdisciplinary education is so important when preparing students to use additive manufacturing technology.
Q: What are the biggest limitations with current engineering curricula? How does this project address them?
Meisel: Engineering courses are amazing at helping students establish the technical skills necessary to ensure functional and reliable designs, but successful innovation relies on more than just functionality — it requires creativity, vision and an ability to see beyond traditional solutions. Engineering design coursework, such as capstone design courses, can help address this, but ultimately these courses are still limited as they rely primarily on engineering as their frame of reference. With this project, we’re looking to expose students to new perspectives, as there are so many things that engineers can learn from designers in other disciplines outside the traditional engineering framework.
Q: Why does integrating the arts into engineering matter when working with additive manufacturing technology?
Meisel: Additive manufacturing technology enables parts to be much more geometrically complex and freeform than is typically seen in designs created with traditional manufacturing. Unfortunately, it can be tricky for engineers to fully leverage this potential, since we’re used to working with simple shapes, standardized materials and relatively rigid modeling software.
Artists, however, are trained to harness creativity, materials and tools in a way that can promote designs outside of how engineers typically think. With both artists and engineers leveraging additive manufacturing nowadays, it is essential that engineers learn how to adopt best practices from the arts to improve the innovative potential of their designs. These practices include art-focused skills like “deep noticing” — which involves trying to see the details and nuances of a given context beyond just normal observation — using color/texture/patterns to augment meaning in a design and considering the sociohistorical context behind a design. They all have the potential to support engineers at various stages of the design process in a way that can ultimately lead them to more innovative outcomes.
Q: How do you plan to integrate the arts into existing curricula?
Meisel: Our research team, which includes my colleagues Aaron Knochel, associate professor of art education, and Sarah Zappe, assistant dean for teaching and learning and director of the Leonhard Center, will investigate how we can take existing practices from the arts and integrate them into engineering design curricula through educational interventions. For example, “deep noticing” is one technique taught to artists with the goal of helping them more accurately capture and understand what makes a design or art piece truly unique.
During the first year of the project, we’re going to develop an intervention specifically aimed at teaching the idea of “deep noticing” to students and then quantify any significant differences that it has on their ability to identify design requirements when given an engineering challenge. Specifically, we’ll look at how the intervention affects the quantity, variety and contextual breakdown of the requirements that they come up with. Then, we’ll develop additional interventions in the following years aimed at helping teach engineering students artistic practices to help with later phases of the design process.
Q: Are there specific courses at Penn State that you plan to use for your project? How will the students enrolled in these courses benefit?
Meisel: We plan to work with students in both first-year design courses, such as “EDSGN 100: Cornerstone Engineering Design,” and third-year design courses, such as “ME 340: Mechanical Engineering Design Methodology.” These are courses that enroll hundreds of students each year and help them understand what it means to be an engineering designer. By implementing our educational interventions into these classes, we could potentially have a substantial influence on how these students approach the act of design. Our hope is that, by the end of the three-year project, our findings can go on to continue supporting students in these courses, ideally introducing hundreds of engineers to arts-based design skills each year for many years to come.
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