towards a digital bauhaus teemu_leinonen_v21

8/14/2019 Towards a Digital Bauhaus Teemu_leinonen_v21

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Art, Design and Technology - A Multidisciplinary Approach

Recommendations for the planning of UNESCO’s Art, Designand Technology Master Classes in the Arab States

Teemu Leinonen & Philip DeanMedia Lab

University of Art and Design Helsinki, [email protected]

http://www2.uiah.fi/~tleinone/

Introduction

From a historical point of view the separation of crafts, technology, design and art

is a recent phenomenon. This distinction has been caused by economical andcultural change, especially in Europe. The separation is artificial. In the

information society these domains best serve people and society when studied,

considered and discussed in close relationship to each other. It’s time to bringthem together.

During the late 18th to the early 19

th century in Europe the romantic movement

introduced the myth of the artist as someone with a strong vocation and mission,

who also had a given and understood role in the community. Later on the myth ofthe artist evolved to include characteristics of a suffering and misunderstoodgenius. The romantic movement transformed craftsmen into artists.

Afterwards the industrialization process required an increasingly skilful workforce

that was able to develop new goods and products to the continuously expandingconsumer markets. Industry needed products that were primary intended for massproduction. Industrialization transformed the craftsmen into technicians

(engineers) and designers.

Standardized and fixed conceptions of what is an “artist”, a “designer”, a

“technician” and a “craftsman”, the definitions of what they do and formaleducational qualifications, also served the rationalization within industrialproduction. If your business needs a designer or technician, or in some point evenan artist or craftsman, you can always search easily for one from the Yellow Pages.

The information society requires multidisciplinary professionals that are able towork in multicultural teams that produce artefacts, products, media and art thatare meaningful, bring up important issues and contribute to the development ofthe information society that focuses on well-being, both spiritual and material.

Traditional professional roles should be reconsidered. We should admit that tosolve wicked problems that are related to peoples’ well being we needmultidisciplinary professionals and teams.

Towards a Digital Bauhaus

The most significant social, cultural and industrial movements have always

combined art, design, technology and crafts. For example, in the early 20th century

the art education reform in Germany that resulted in the Bauhaus, the mostfamous art school in Europe, based its program on crafts and arts with a focus on

design and technology. In the Bauhaus the reason to take a multidisciplinaryapproach to art education was vital for economic reasons. The ability to produce

sophisticated and high-quality goods was seen as essential when competing withAmerica that was rich in raw materials.



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The Bauhaus school’s program included foundation studies on materials, colourtheory and three-dimensional design to support students to locate their own areasof interest where they could employ their creativity. The aim of the school was to

rescue all the arts from isolation by educating craftsmen, painters, sculptures,architects and designers of the future that were able to establish and work in co-operative projects where different skills were combined. The Bauhaus Manifestoproclaimed: “there is no essential difference between the artist and the

craftsman”.

Within the foundation studies the teaching and learning in the Bauhaus took placein workshops, not in studios like in most art schools of the time. The aim of theworkshops were to educate reflective practitioners who were, with the support ofthe whole community, focusing on their own creative practice, rather than on

learning some ready-made technique. The workshop teaching offered the studentsthe possibility to work ‘hands on’ and ‘minds on’.

Professor Pelle Ehn (1998) from the School of Arts and Communication at MalmöUniversity in Sweden has introduced the concept of the digital Bauhaus as a model

for art and design institutions of the 21st

century. According to Ehn “the Bauhausdesigner was a collective designer and his design manifestos envisioned a new unitof art and technology in the service of the people”. In a digital world art educationshould educate designers to be reflective and to work collectively. Designersshould be able to participate in networks of minds and to unite art and technology

to serve humanity. In the digital Bauhaus the objectives and working should be thesame as in the original Bauhaus, even though the materials and the context arenew.

Information Society and Convergence

If the steam engine was the corner stone of the industrial society, the media-

machine is the corner stone of the information society. A Media-machine is acomputer with (1) information and media processing ability, and (2) a network for

communication, group work, sharing of resources as well as for information andmedia distribution.

The essence of the media-machine is not the machine (hardware) itself, but thepeople (and the software) running the machine. To utilize the media-machine wemust empower people to take care of it - to make the machine to serve people’s

needs. This requires that people have skills not only to carry out informationprocessing with the machine but skills to play and work with knowledge generatedfrom the machine processed information.

Convergence is often used to describe the merger of traditional media, electronics,

IT and telecom technologies, industries and practices. Convergence is somethingessential for the information society. Already we have seen how Internet terminalshave become televisions and telephones, telephones have become Internetterminals and televisions, and televisions have become telephones and Internetterminals.

Education’s natural response on the convergence development is the multi-disciplinary programs and courses that are able to bring together differentdiscoveries and approaches from different fields of studies. To reach meaningfulresults in art and design education we must bring together artists, designers,engineers, scientists, social scientists and historians and put them to work together

with “wicked problems”, mix their roles in the process and ask them to teach and

learn from each other.



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As much as convergence offers endless possibilities it nevertheless, simultaneously,introduces complication and risks. Probably even more than ever before artists anddesigners must be responsible and socially conscious.

Art and Design Education in the Information Society

In the information society we need skills to adopt knowledge, skills to cultivate

knowledge, skills to create new knowledge and skills to share knowledge. Theseskills are best developed by practicing, working and playing with artefacts, such aswritten documents, drawings, blue prints, objects and compositions etc. We mayadopt the existing cultural heritage, cultivate it and create something new out ofit. Then we share our artefacts with others – contribute our artefacts to the pool of

cultural heritage.

The Media Lab of the 130 years old University of Art and Design in Helsinki iscelebrating its 10th anniversary this year. The mission statement of the Media Labpositions it as an institution that is actively involved in information society

development through critical participation as artists and designers. The aim of the

laboratory is to explore, discover and comprehend the new digital technology andits impact in society; to find and exploit the possibilities it opens tocommunication, interaction and expression and to evaluate, understand and dealwith the challenges it poses to design and creative production. The aim includes

the need to educate people whose expertise and sensibility extends beyond thetraditional gamut of art and design.

The director of the Media Lab in Helsinki, Professor Philip Dean (2004) has statedthat Media Labs around the world - especially those adopting an art and designapproach - should have a crucial role in the coming years in creating and applying

the glue between technology and people, between theory and practice and inguiding our information society towards adolescence.

The information society needs an art and design approach that is based on thetraditions of humanity, spirituality and philosophy. The position of being critical is

not enough – we must actively participate in the shaping of it. The informationsociety must be designed.

Recommendations

To contribute to the process of achieving the United Nations Millennium

Development Goals (MDG) the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Planof Action the Master Class on Art and Design, Technology and Culture in the ArabStates should be:

(1) Based the on the specificities of the Arab World/Mediterranean and meet thelocal needs.

(2) A collaborative effort of Arab / Mediterranean partners and partners fromother parts of the world.

(3) A multi-disciplinary program with teaching staff and students with different

backgrounds including various areas of design, fine arts, computer science,media and journalism, politics and social science, history and art history andhumanities in general. The aim should be to build up a multi-disciplinarylearning community that will benefit from each other’s skills and knowledge.

(4) All teaching staff and students of the Master Class program should already

possess firm basic computer skills and have expertise in at least one mediaproduction or programming practice and related tools.



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(5) The Master Class should mainly be composed of a series of collaborativeworkshops - face-to-face and virtual – where study groups are activeproducers of artefacts, art pieces, media, design proposals, prototypes,

software and research papers. The aim should be to learn ‘hands on’ and‘minds on’.

(6) The production and project of the study groups of the Master Class shouldrange from fine arts, to theory, to social and cultural services, to

commercialized products.

(7) The Master Class should encourage collaborative learning, co-design,creativity, reflective practice, Design for All, usability and accessibility andthese topics should be integrated to be part of the learning objectives of theworkshops.

(8) The Master Class should emphasis the artist’s and designer’s responsibility insocial, cultural and economical development and build up students socialconsciousness in respect of local and global cultural traditions and heritage.

(9) The main topics of the Master Class should be interaction and communicationdesign, digital audio and video production, art and design methodology, local

content and digital art and design.

(10) The aim of the Master Class should be to educated reflective practitioners inthe field of art and design, technology and culture that will find employmentand implement further projects in industry – from media and high-tech to

traditional industries taking advance of the new information andcommunication technologies in their business – and in private and publicorganizations operating in the fields of information society, education, artand culture.

(11) The objective of the Master Class should not be to educate only artists.

However, we may expect that some students of the Master Class willorientate towards becoming artists and artists should also find the programuseful.

towards a digital bauhaus teemu_leinonen_v21

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