Symposium "What's on" CUMULUS Aveiro 2014

by Catherine Saracco & Aude Berthier

Here are the most striking ideas gathered from the symposium

 What’s on: Shifting Education

« When Design Is Not A Science » was an invitation to identify design research as a material thinking action. The academic legitimacy based on the hegemony on the text is thus being questioned: design research is engaged in reality and encounters the sensual and material world. But, simultaneously, the world of artefacts fails to produce a sound knowledge by itself. This raises the question of the appropriate methods to reflect on practice-led design research processes.

« The Specialized Generalist: Art & Design and the Osmotic Oxymoron ». We also heard that the designer today is a specialized generalist, and that design research as a heuristic process makes it tricky to make creative processes tangible.

« Redesigning Design Education: Project-Based Learning and Spatial Education » looked into the dissemination of project-based learning methods in the civil society. Building bridges between academia and society appears to be a major issue in order to shift the way we traditionally think education. Bottom-up education, community centered project, citizens empowerment, organic vs. hierarchical leadership… were just so many notions expressing the need for undertaking real-life projects.

What’s on: Social Engagement

« Bringing Design to Life: Anthropological Considerations on the Social Implications of Design »: this was an attempt to define « social design » not by referring to the world of artefacts, which are already embedded in a constructed reality (the Dasein), but as a way to perform social ongoing processes.

« Social Interventions on Urban Borders ». Along a partly demolished border area in Shanghai where poor Chinese inhabitants are accommodated, design students from Tongji University helped making this place more comfortable and socially alive.

This immersive research practice gathering different stakeholders consisted in a bottom-up process, with informal communication processes and different levels of implication between the designers, inhabitants and the University. This raised the question of the relevant methodological tools to be used at the interface of practice and academia, in order to convey faithfully ethnographic experiences.

« New Services Models and New Services Places in Time of Crisis » was presenting a kind of Fablab services network in Milan where the very notion of service is completely reshaped by citizens’ new responsibilities: they are becoming both users, providers and connectors acting for the wellbeing of those who are in need.

« Urban Farming: Aesthetic Interventions and the Right to Public Place » introduced a project in Canada aiming at reframing the social-spatial dynamics through urban gardening.

This form of design activism raises the question of how politics interplay with social environment through an aesthetic claim. It also questions the prevalence of an over-design way of looking at social issues, in which the designer’s professional skills may be overestimated.

« On the Conditions for a Collaborative Practice in Design »: “open design” is nowadays considered as a generalizing practice among designers and is often presented as an alternative to mass production. Thus, a new dynamics is shaping up where copyright objects coexist with open source systems (both designed by designers), enabling users to have access to design contents and to modify, assemble and distribute them by their own means.

In a nutshell: in the future, will the designer cease completely to design original objects to merely become an open source systems creator and provider?

What’s on: Cultural diversity

« Local/Global Antagonisms: Cultural Analysis of the Contemporary Bathroom and Its Elements in Turkey » rendered the results of an ongoing doctorate research led at Izmir Institute of Technology, focused on a group of Turkish persons aged from 35 to 70. The main purpose of the investigation was to examine the cultural uses of the traditional bathroom (Turkish toilet) and to compare it with the apparition of “western” furniture (shower-stall, French toilet). In the end, the group of interviewees showed to adapt and reinvent the design scenarii of the bathroom, mixing Turkish and Western habits (for instance, they installed a stool inside the shower-stall in order to proceed conveniently to the religious ritual of ablutions).

« Notes from Complex Times: Reflections on Teaching and Learning in an Art & Design Foundation Program in Doha, Qatar » recalled the teaching experience of a Canadian professor at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. In terms of attendance, art and design programs are traditionally neglected to the profit of sciences (as they are perceived positively considering science students employment rates). Last year, students of the Art and Design Foundation displayed a series of interactive design short video clips picturing Qatari women’ condition and statute. This proved to be a token for design’s power to explore social contemporary issues. It also showed that design is in fact a multicultural tool, where Middle Eastern and Western culture and creativity combine.