#Foundational to having the ability to synthesize your own rather than just like. copy-pasting concepts at random

[serpentface]

how do you come up with the ways cultures in your setting stylize people/animals/the world in general in their artwork, i.e. jewlery, rock carvings, statues, etc? Each culture in your world seems to have a very unique "art style" and I love it a lot - makes them seem that much more 'real'. This is something I struggle with a lot in my own worldbuilding and I'd love to pick your brain if possible 😁

I think a starting point is to have a research process based in the material realities of the culture you're designing for. Ask yourself questions like:

Where do they live? What's the climate/ecosystem(s) they are based in? What geographic features are present/absent?

What is their main subsistence method? (hunter gatherer, seasonal pastoralist, nomadic pastoralist, settled agriculturalist, a mix, etc)

What access to broader trade networks do they have and to whom? Are there foreign materials that will be easily accessible in trade and common in use, or valuable trade materials used sparingly in limited capacities?

Etc

And then do some research based on the answers, in order to get a sense of what materials they would have routine access to (ie dyes, metal, textiles, etc) and other possible variables that would shape how the art is made and what it's used for. This is just a foundational step and won't likely play much into designing a Style.

If you narrow these questions down very specifically, (ie in the context of the Korya post- grassland based mounted nomads, pastoralist and hunter-gatherer subsistence, access to wider trade networks and metals), you can direct your research to specific real world instances that fit this general idea. This is not to lift culturally specific concepts from the real world and slap them into your own setting, but to notice commonalities this lifestyle enforces - (ie in the previous example- mounted nomadic peoples are highly mobile and need to easily carry their wealth (often on clothing and tack) therefore small, elaborate decorative artwork that can easily be carried from place to place is a very likely feature)

For the details of the art itself, I come up with loose 'style guides' (usually just in my head) and go from there.

Here's some example questions for forming a style (some are more baseline than others)

Are geometric patterns favored? Organic patterns? Representative patterns (flowers, animals, stars, etc)? Abstract patterns?

Is there favored material(s)? Beads, bone, clay, metals, stones, etc.

When depicting people/animals, is realism favored? Heavy stylization? The emotional impression of an animal? Are key features accentuated?

How perspective typically executed? Does art attempt to capture 3d depth? Does it favor showing the whole body in 2 dimensions (ie much of Ancient Egyptian art, with the body shown in a mix of profile and forward facing perspective so all key attributes are shown)? Will limbs overlap? Are bodies shown static? In motion?

Does artwork of people attempt to beautify them? Does it favor the culture's conception of the ideal body?

Are there common visual motifs? Important symbols? Key subject matters?

What is the art used for? Are its functions aesthetic, tutelary, spiritual, magical? (Will often exist in combination, or have different examples for each purpose)

Who is represented? Is there interest in everyday people? Does art focus on glorifying warriors, heroes, kings?

Are there conventions for representing important figures? (IE gods/kings/etc being depicted larger than culturally lesser subjects)

Is there visual shorthand to depict objects/concepts that are difficult to execute with clarity (the sun, moon, water), or are invisible (wind, the soul), or have no physical component (speech)?

Etc

Deciding on answers to any of these questions will at least give you a unique baseline, and you can fill in the rest of the gaps and specify a style further until it is distinct. Many of these questions are not mutually exclusive, both in the sense of elements being combined (patterns with both geometric and organic elements) or a culture having multiple visual styles (3d art objects having unique features, religious artwork having its own conventions, etc).

Also when you're getting in depth, you should have cultural syncretism in mind. Cultures that routinely interact (whether this interaction is exchange or exploitation) inevitably exchange ideas, which can be especially visible in art. Doing research on how this synthesizing of ideas works in practice is very helpful- what is adopted or left out from an external influence, what is retained from an internal influence, what is unique to this synthesis, AND WHY. (I find Greco-Buddhist art really interesting, that's one of many such examples)

Looking at real world examples that fit your parameters can be helpful (ie if I've decided on geometric patterns in my 'style guide', I'll look at actual geometric patterns). And I strongly encourage trying to actually LEARN about what you're seeing. All art exists in a context, and having an understanding of how the context shapes art, how art does and doesn't relate to broader aspects of a society, etc, can help you when synthesizing your own.

[josephborrello]

Moment of Inertia, Issue #13 | Full Bloom

In the last Moment of Inertia, I discussed the detriments of STEM education as we know it today. In this edition, I'll put forward some of my own ideas on how we can ensure students (of all ages) are equipped with the technical tools they'll need to be empowered in the world of tomorrow.

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Full Bloom

When last we left this two-part series, I was making a case for the notion that the biggest detriment to advancing the goals of STEM education is STEM education itself. The bundling of STEM skills, technologies, and training, rather than being more accessible to all students, has to date resulted in a kind of winner-take-all educational situation where, instead of treating each letter in that acronym as different subjects that people can independently choose to learn, you have to subscribe to the whole bundle, like it or not Well, I've got news for you, folks. You don't need to know much more than elementary school math to be a great technologist and coder. I would argue that you don't even need to know the "S" in STEM at all to be competent at the "T". That being said, I do think everybody should have working knowledge of each of the disciplines represented in the STEM acronym, I just don't think STEM should be its own, standalone curriculum. The centuries-long removal of the STEM disciplines from the liberal arts has left entire generations and populations behind, not because they weren't interested in learning STEM topics, but because they weren't interested in subscribing to the whole package. What I'm really proposing, then, isn't the end of STEM education as much as it is the reintegration of STEM education. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics represent a set of tools that everyone should be utilizing in their lives regularly, if not daily. Political science stands to gain as much from big data and APIs as computer science, and sociology benefits as much from differential equations as aerospace engineering does. Whenever possible, we should be exchanging teaching expertise between disciplines, creating opportunities to show both students and peers new opportunities and capabilities created through the utilization of tools from the STEM toolbelt. One of my favorite examples of such an opportunity is the Sunlight Foundation "a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that uses civic technologies, open data, policy analysis and journalism to make ... government and politics more accountable and transparent to all." They provide a collection of APIs that make it easy to comb through the myriad amount of government data that gets generated every day in sessions of Congress, publications in the Federal Register, and meetings between politicians and donors, among others. For anyone who knows how to navigate a simple python code, these tools provide an amazing level of access to information and, perhaps more importantly, the power to very quickly aggregate a lot of data for the purposes of gleaning trends, outliers, or any other collection of information you might be interested in. The problem here is that the intersection of people who have the time, interest, and skills to do anything with these technological tools is very small. (At best I've got 2 of those 3 things.) Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone in the United States had the ability to go through this data? The amount of political action and government accountability that would result would be unprecedented in the history not only of the United States but of representative democracy writ large. And it's just sitting there, out in public, waiting for those few people who both possess the technical skills needed to access the data and the care to do so. I don't know about you, but I don't only want to empower a small subset of the US's software developers to hold their government accountable, I want everyone to be able to do it. The problem is that we've created a system where, in order to leverage this tool, you're expected to also be taught, broadly, how to code. As someone who codes very frequently, I can attest to how backwards this concept is as an educational strategy. Nobody really "codes". 99% of the time software developers google the problem they're having, or the function they want to perform and then copy-paste some lines of someone else's code into their own. (So yes, I suppose someone had to "actually" code at some point, but the bigger picture here is that the vast majority of the "T" workforce doesn't even regularly put their STEM education to use, they just pull from existing examples and snippets, kind of like a mosaic.) If our STEM workforce isn't even writing their tools from scratch, why do we want to create a STEM training paradigm where we expect students to do it? You want more people to use technology in the social sciences? Give them the code they need to get data from one of Sunlight's APIs. Just give it to them. Don't tell them to figure it out themselves, or even understand exactly how it's working. That's not STEM education, that's a bachelors degree in computer science. People are naturally inquisitive when they get a new tool. Show someone how to get the legislative data from the most recent session of Congress and in short order they'll understand the patterns and structure of the code enough to understand what one section they'll have to change to get data from previous sessions of Congress. When the only difference between one set of data dates.json?phrase=united+states&start_date=2009-01-01&end_date=2009-06-01 and another dates.json?phrase=united+states&start_date=2009-06-01&end_date=2009-12-01 is the dates you write into one line of the code, then you don't really need to understand the fundamentals of computer programming to be able to leverage the technology in a meaningful way. You just need to be shown how to set it up and make it run on your computer. I think somewhere along the line, we got a little carried away with STEM education. It went from adding new and important tools to everyone's repertoire to trying to make everyone into a software developer or aerospace engineer. That's not what this world is going to need. You don't need to understand how a website server works to know how to get data off of it, and you don't need to understand how to synthesize a polymer to know how to use a 3D printer. STEM education shouldn't be about training everyone to reach the ultimate level of technological competency and achievement. It should be about making people aware of the tools and opportunities that exist and then showing them just enough to understand how to make use of those tools and opportunities. If you teach a man to fish, he'll be fed for a lifetime, it's true, but nobody ever said anything about teaching that same man how to make his own fishing line. --- If many of my comments and prescriptions here over the past few weeks have felt generic, it's because I've tried to keep this core argument intentionally broad. Ultimately, the tools we add to our belt with vary from person to person, and from field to field, but we should all be well-versed enough to hold our own at a surface level - not everyone needs to know how to operate a router, but we should all probably know how to use a drill. I do have some more specific thoughts on these subjects as they relate to graduate education, and graduate education in the life sciences in particular, and I do plan on sharing those thoughts here as part of a tangential series, "GRO Your Own" (if that series title doesn't make sense to you yet, I promise it will). The GRO Your Own series won't be coming in the next edition of Moment of Inertia, though. I've got some other, unrelated, musings that've been knocking around in my head for a while that I'd like to share first...