The STEM acronym -- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics -- is presently widely known. While the acronym's origin is often dated to 2001, its impulse was foundational to GSSM's origins, and is explicit in present GSSM activities. Lesser known, but of growing momentum and impact, is the STEAM variant. Here, I briefly describe the relevance of STEAM to STEM practitioners and our society at large. These needs and opportunities will demand engagement within primary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong education. STEM and STEAM differ by the letter 'A:' the Arts. As motivation, consider an alternate 'A': Apple, Inc. Presently the most highly-valued publicly-traded company, one might speculate which competitive advantages have helped it realize this position. While underlying circuits, algorithms, and associated engineering are clearly important contributors to Apple's success, their masterful integration with world-class design -- both of physical, visual, and interaction varieties -- has been central to Apple's attainments. While the Arts are often regarded from fine arts and performing arts perspectives, applied arts are most evident in the Apple context. In STEAM contexts, applied, fine, and performing arts all have prospective relevance to STEM. That said, much art does not engage STEAM. Nonetheless, the Arts can play transformative roles in representing and communicating complex STEM activities, provoking contemplation of their implications, anchoring these in diverse cultural contexts, and inspiring broader impacts. This relevance -- and arguably, criticality -- of the Arts to STEM can be viewed from many vantages. Writing here in the context of the GSSM (from which I graduated in 1991), I will begin with a personal one. I had minimal exposure to the visual arts or (relative to product design) physical fabrication until undergraduate internships at Interval Research. When I applied to graduate schools, my admittance to the MIT Media Lab, where I completed my M.S. and Ph.D., was conditional. While my software and electronics background was appreciated, I was told a critical weakness had to be addressed before enrollment. Given my planned topic -- interactive 3D graphical representations of Internet content -- my first advisor (Ron MacNeil) felt no amount of computer science (or STEM) background were alone sufficient to achieve success. To assist my remediation, he pushed me to enroll in a night school adult education course -- in Graphic Design. Without at least this modest literacy in visual language, he felt the prospect for achieving successful communications was low. More than teaching how to draw, the deeper lesson was how to see. Indeed, this class, alongside MIT's How to make (almost) anything, was perhaps the most transformative course of my life. These lessons have profoundly shaped my research trajectory. Our research combines the design and study of tangible interfaces with applications in computational genomics and other computational science domains. Tangible interfaces are an area of human-computer interaction in which ecologies of physical objects serve as representations and controls for diverse associations. For example, if one were to reconceive a chess set, a given piece might represent images or video, a person or company, or countless other associations; and be "mediated" (computationally augmented) by an underlying tablet, overhead projectors, etc. Commercial examples include the Nest thermostat, Sifteo cubes, and Neurosmith music blocks. Closely-related areas of present mainstream excitement include the Internet of Things, Maker movement, 3D printing, and augmented reality. Good design is central to the success of tangible interfaces. The world, as touched by technology, is replete with choices; attention and engagement must be earned. Similarly, in the computational sciences, interactive visual communication is critical both to achieving, communicating, understanding, and rendering relevant scientific discoveries. In the case of computational genomics, my collaborations today engage datasets and analytic results spanning hundreds of gigabytes in some cases, and hundreds of terabytes in others. As biomedical sciences progress from thousands to millions and billions of genomes, these volumes will grow by many orders of magnitude. This evolution in scale is partly a product of movement from academic laboratories into mainstream medicine, both in the clinic and the home. As every person, in near futures, will make personal, family, and societal genomic choices, with profound implications -- not only for one's own life, but regarding genomes shared with grandparents and grandchildren -- the presence of accessible tools to help engage and comprehend will be transformative. These implications are not limited to genomics, but engage global priorities as diverse as climate change, energy, water, and countless others.