Academic Insights
What is Place? A Visual Conversation about Mediatization and Identity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Analee Paz, Zachary Vernon
“Los Angeles, California is glitzy Hollywood Boulevard.” “Laredo, Texas is the dangerous Rio Grande.” What shapes the true cultural identity of a place? Now more than ever, the evolving role of the cultural identity of place is reinforced most strongly by mediatization rather than through active and inclusive intercultural communication. This often leads to misrepresentations and misunderstandings. In teaching culture through design education and using design as a tool to promote cultural knowledge, this discussion presents a conversation between two groups of students led by two collaborating educators from Laredo, Texas (Texas A&M International University) and Los Angeles, California (California State University—Los Angeles). This research serves as a specimen for an active and inclusive intercultural communication exchange project for further application across educational campuses on a local, national, and international spectrum. Through a series of exercises, students are asked to delve into the cultural identity crises in their respective cities. The students are also asked to investigate their own perceptions about the other city, thus identifying the societal representation of that city. Finally, the students are asked to exchange their discoveries. This preliminary discussion explores how cultural identity of place is understood to support or reveal mediatization. The findings demonstrate important perspectives of cultural design and how to better understand place, self, and connection. This ongoing experiment leads not solely to the issue of design education, but of how to learn and teach design in a world of cultural silos, change, and diversity.
Understanding Design Teaching
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Merav Salomon, Liat Brix Etgar
Teaching Design in the Academy is built on the backbone of teachers who are first and foremost practitioners, and whose teaching education is primarily based on their personal experiences as design students. Nevertheless, their teaching is often a creative and productive action, which deserves reflective conceptualization. Bezalel Academy’s Art & Design Teaching Center uses an innovative reflective methodology to explore and cultivate the practice of academic design teaching, with the purpose of deepening the teacher’s knowledge and skills, framing the challenges, and developing new methods. The aim of the center is to cultivate and further develop the academy’s existing rich polyphonic teaching traditions and enhance our teachers' cultures and identities as leaders of the profession. Bezalel’s Art & Design Teaching Centre was established in 2017 as a pedagogic and research initiative, positioning the teacher at the center of observation, examining the notions of teaching as a creative field of study, with its diversified practices, methodologies and styles. The center focus on the question “HOW we teach?” as a complement to the question “WHAT we teach?” in order to encourage our teachers reflect, analyze, critique, and validate their own teaching practices. Our paper will present Bezalel Art & Design Teaching Center’s unique mode of operation as a dynamic and responsive autonomous body functioning within an academic organization, generating constant opportunities for new knowledge and serving as an agent of change in the academy’s teaching and learning culture.
Deep Thoughts about Seemingly Insignificant Things
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brenda Mc Manus, Ned Drew
As designers we have the ability to reinvent ourselves with each venture. This is where it is a unique process. So, what happens when we invest our time in an immersive, seven-month project of solving typographic challenges in which a team of novice and advanced design students from two undergraduate universities work in tandem with two design professors on the production of a limited-edition letterpress book of ABCs? The project and accompanying workshops centered around the value of collaborative creative thinking and the use of letterpress printing as a tool for acute typographic problem-solving. As they addressed technical, conceptual, and visual aspects of typography, the team was exposed to various “sub-problems” that demanded effective teamwork and innovative solutions to produce the edition of 360 letterpress books. The book project serves as a case study outlining the lessons learned and unexpected discoveries that emerged in exposing students to an immersive, long-term, hands-on typographic process. The project ultimately raises the question, in an increasingly ephemeral digital design world, does an immersive physical creative process yield educational merits that can serve as an effective learning tool? And concurrently, it examines the question, what is the role of craft in contemporary design education?
The Un-teaching, Non-tools, and Non-actions of NeighborGapBridge: Radically Creative Approaches to Art and Design Education in a Liminal World
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patricia Kovic, Blanka Domagalska
The question of how to prepare design students to effectively create and produce in a world of ever-shifting matrix of new technologies, rapid environmental change and economic instability is the most significant challenge facing design educators today. There is a need for new communicational structures and reaching outside of one’s field of expertise to bridge gaps and work in unexpected ways. The NeighborGapBridge course creates an environment in which collaborative thinking amongst students from different departments, industry and community is taken outside of existing structures and allowed to flow, based on natural affinities, needs, imagination and available resources. This is a radical break from traditional, rigid teaching and collaborative techniques, in which we collapse fixed, vertical structures. Think: Facilitators (not teachers) listening to and witnessing the process. Free-associative conversations (not lectures). Enthusiasts (not experts). Classes with no fixed beginning or end. This environment is achieved by non-tools, non-actions and un-teaching. We use de-familiarization to undo expectations and fixed identities. We place participants in a liminal space where crystallized cognitive structures are loosened and dissolved. This process is reportedly uncomfortable, confusing, freeing, stimulating and explorative, leading to discovery and new synthesis. In order to bridge the gap, one becomes the gap, the liminal space, the space in-between. This allowing to fall apart and simply “be” is a feminine technology, leading to true thinking and acting “outside of the box.” In a world that is running out of answers and time, we cannot afford to ignore this radically creative approach.
