Creative Medicine Series
For over 10 years, the Creative Medicine Series at Brown University has brought together practitioners across the medical humanities and the arts. The series invites guests to share their work, and different approaches for exploring, examining, and better understanding the fascinating relationships between medicine, healing and the arts.
Dr. Jay M. Baruch, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Alpert Medical School at Brown University, Emergency Physician and CfC collaborator, invited the CfC to speak at the Creative Medicine Series hosted at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.
A Practice of Uncertainty: How Design Embraces Contingency
Lecture by: Justin W. Cook
Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Complexity and uncertainty are common features of our everyday lives. However, we tend to do everything we can to minimize their presence and effect. This effort operates at the small, transactional scale (e.g., handrails on stairs) as well as large and systemic (e.g., how we organize and structure knowledge). As such, the achievement of expertise within a discipline can also be misunderstood to be the elimination of uncertainty. But what if, in order to articulate and realize new futures with better outcomes, a practitioner needs to have a productive relationship with complexity and uncertainty? This dynamic characterizes creative practices, especially design, and is part of the reason why design has relevance today in unexpected places.
This talk will explore what can be gained by introducing a greater balance between the evidence-based clinical practice and a practice of uncertainty.
This event, presented as part of Creative Medicine and co-sponsored by the Department of Emergency Medicine, was free and open to the public.