(a bit edited from the original email)
hi parallel school,
your project seems interesting as i've been thinking along similar lines about the institution and design education, being at the sandberg institute graphic design masters in amsterdam.
the sandberg is in fact quite open and lacking a strict curriculum, and ironically this caused me some creative paralysis early on! it's pretty good now actually, and quite empowering to be in such an environment. anyway, in spite of it's 'openness' there is still the issue of work that is geared toward 'presentable' outcomes which i find slightly problematic, if only for that fact that it follows a very conventional logic embedded in design practices that there has to be a solution... it's this notion of the solution and its finality that i often find troublesome... that a solution represents a resolution without considering that there are incalculable effects. on second thought, that's not what i really mean. i guess what i'm trying to get at is that maybe design should be more honest with itself and admit that it is also in the business of posing problems, but that these problems can be quite useful. this sounds quite vague, but at the moment its hard to think of very much design work that does this consciously...
i've also come to consider that the work of design is the very mechanism of institutionalization, in that it renders concrete things that are intangible -- from identities to social relations. whether or not this is something that is to be resisted, or embraced (or just how to deal with this idea in general) is still a question i have.
- chris
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Hi Chris, interesting point you got there. I'm curious what you think about Dunne & Raby's "product design" work. The issue of "problem finding", as opposed to problem solving, seems to be quite central in their work, mostly by designing objects for anticipated, often dystipian futures.
I meant "critical design", sorry
hey there,
I also want to congratulate this initiative.
Its great to see the creation of a platform that stimulates students to initiate discussions instead of just following established schools of thought.
It has been said that design is a discipline in transition between art an architecture and that the dialogue between opens new possibilities and contexts. Unfortunately, I think that only recently has this become a common knowledge amongst all designers.
We probably still see the design practice as an hermetic discipline limited to "problem solving" instead of an unbound field legitimized by research.
hope to see this project grow!
Welcome to the parallel school of art Chris.
This questioning is something we often discuss with my friends at ENSAD. We have very "good" teachers in the sense "maître explicateur" as Rancière use the term (teachers who explain you what to do and how to do and think in a relevant way). It's maybe the most important thing we have the impression to learn actually, a rhetorical. One a second hand, we are encouraged to have a critical thinking (in the way institutions agree with). Maybe somewhere, for these two reasons, I have a certain pleasure to be involved in this school. Because I feel, or have the intuition that making a research relevant is the perfect way to transform it into a non-research. I see the Parallel school as a break, a playtime for researching out of the necessity of result. However, we have to show (formulate) something to others if we want to share and spread thoughts as we do with this blog. I just hope that showing reflexions, waverings and not suceeded stuff will be enough not to become what we critic.
Personnaly, I try consider my answers as possibilities and not solutions... enjoying when the possibility is not totally good.
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