This week, the art collective I co-founded, Sojournposse, will be showcasing our digital and analogue artworks for a show entitled “East Meets West” at the London Design Festival. The patron of the event is an engineering company, Nissan Design Europe.

The show will also be a great start to my graduate course in digital anthropology, which is to begin next week. It has been my ambition to marry the arts, literature, science and technology together through such a project.

This year’s festival – to be held concurrently with the London Digital Week and London Fashion Week – will have more than a marketing buzz. Creatives, one of the first professional groups to suffer the consequences of the economic downturn, are fighting back with an out-and-out celebration of creativity and innovativeness.

You get the usual suspects participating in the event: the designers, the photographers, the engineers, the architects, the material scientists, the marketers, and of course, the ‘digital creatives’ (arguably, the lot from computer engineering that has the most fun).

But where are the medical device people?

Every day we read about, and watch the online videos of, products that infuse pharmacology with engineering and computer science using the latest RFID, drug-eluting pill technology, or products that, by some clever biotech means, can grow human tissue or regenerate cells.

Surely, with the convergence of multiple disciplines such as the arts, sciences and technology, you’d think there would be at least one or two representations from the “borderline” medical device camp at the London Design Festival who can demonstrate how cutting edge medtech has become.

Some of the devices featured on Clinica's website certainly deserve to be showcased at the festival.

Without neglecting the aesthetics, the brains behind these creations employed various disciplines to come up with products that not only work with the human body, but look like they’re meant for the design museum. If architects and car engineers can be classed as ‘designers’ or ‘creatives’, and therefore merit a place at the London Design Festival, then why not the medical device engineers?

Innovators are creatives too, right?

But when it comes to creative acknowledgements, scientists don’t have it as good as the creatives, I was told.

IP Freely, who has written for Open Surgery before, said that because science doesn’t make great viral videos, people often ignore the creative thinking behind a new scientific concept or invention ("Why are scientists paid less than creatives?").

“The sciences are very creative,” he insists. “To really think up of something new, there must be an understanding of what has been done.” But because the public has the attention span of a “retarded goldfish”, they’d get excited “over an advert for selling mobile phones, while creative types congratulate themselves on how clever they are and how much cash they've made with it”.

“Meanwhile,” he argues, “the poor physicist technician in Korea who developed the technology that makes the phone work, who sweated over how he can put a device that carries out a zillion processes in a femtosecond into a chip the size of an ant's penis, takes home his £25k salary and has little recognition. ‘He's just doing his job.’”

Hard to believe, since the likes of Ben Fry, the father of data visualisation, and world wide web founder Tim Berners-Lee have done a lot to make their science ‘cool’.

Perhaps scientists could learn a thing or two from creatives about promoting – or “framing” – their sciences for public understanding. Of course, you can have your best research highlighted in a journal with the highest impact factor known to science publishing, but that brilliant work cannot be expected to speak for itself while gathering dust on the shelf. Sometimes, being the best kept secret doesn’t help.

But why make the distinction?

Both the creatives and innovators share the same values.

They cherish originality, they care about reputation and credibility, and both are deeply affected by intellectual property theft.

The only difference is that while creatives are encouraged to challenge the status quo, scientists have to keep their own ideas, and each other’s, in check. They use controls and analysis, and peer review, to ensure the hypotheses follow the appropriate ‘laws’. Ideas are rigorously tested to prove that nothing is ‘out of the ordinary’ of the physical law of nature. Out of respect for their fields, scientists shy away from controversies.

To the creatives, the means of proving one’s point, and respecting one’s art, can be quite the opposite. “In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love,” says Salvador Dali. “After that, be a snob.”

Snobbery is optional, but what superstar architect or industrial designer doesn’t have a diva moment? Who knows what Steve Jobs did to get those engineers to realise his iPhone dream, but the end results were good. Pre-iPhone, WAP (wireless application protocol) mobile phones were a joke. He believed in it before we did.

Legal and social complexities aside, both the creatives and innovators should enjoy the same level of acknowledgment from society. And both could do with learning about each other’s best traits – and let go of the ones that do nothing but confirm the stereotypes.

The medical device man may not receive the kind of glamour enjoyed by the likes of Phillipe Starck, but if he innovates and creates, then his creativity should not be confined to a particular type of trade show only. After all, it’s his scientific creativity that will get his industry out of this financial mess. He deserves to have his imagination celebrated at one of the world’s leading design festival.

Nissan Design Europe’s East Meets West will run from Wednesday 23 September to Friday 25 September 2009 at its design HQ in Paddington, London. Sojournposse curates and collaborates with various disciplines.