Design (and) Fiction teaching unit
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
This Design (and) Fiction teaching unit was managed by the Ecole supérieure d'art et de design TALM-Angers and the École de Design Nantes Atlantique. It allowed rich and varied interdisciplinary crossovers with the different approaches to design and the processes from publishing to industrialization, through different business components (scenography, graphics, space, interactivity, product, transport, etc.).
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
In 2020 was launched the Design (and) Fiction teaching unit, resulting from a partnership between the École supérieure d'art et de design TALM-Angers and the École de Design Nantes Atlantique. It is an education module using design methods, tools and codes while proposing an anticipatory stance upstream of an innovation process. This means being able to better explore the issues and major challenges of the transformation of society before even thinking of responding to them.
This training module won the call for initial education projects of West Creative Industries. This call for projects is intended to support new teaching units that respond to the evolution of creative, engineering and innovation skills and professions.
Key objectives for sustainability
As a highlight and important part of the teaching unit, the workshop BIEN MAL FAIRE [Doing good bad] with Julien Berthier took place from 11 to 14 January 2021, raising many questions about the sustainability of our lifestyles.
The health crisis in which we have been immersed since the first confinement has led to the emergence or resurgence of a large number of questions in the public debate: telecommuting, home schooling, apéroskype, essential/non-essential activities, barrier gestures, social/physical distancing, pollution, zoonosis, reclaiming of nature, relationship to non-humans, valorisation of professions, etc.
The workshop started from the presupposition that design can have something to do with these questions, in its capacity to formulate hypotheses of response and allow us to project ourselves into them or to specify the consequences of these phenomena.
The students took one of these questions and used it as their framework for intervention.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Design Fiction is a theoretical and practical module to discover the forms of critical design: critical design, design fiction, speculative design, design activism, etc.
Key objectives for inclusion
As a highlight and important part of the teaching unit, the workshop BIEN MAL FAIRE [Doing good bad] with Julien Berthier took place from 11 to 14 January 2021. The aim of the workshop, responding to issues of inclusion, was to "Do good bad". That is, to provide a complex and equivocal response. To seek to embody in an object, an action or any other tangible form, both a proposition and its critique. We try to break the comfortable categorisation between Good and Bad by imagining something that is not Good OR Bad but Good AND Bad.
In contrast to this (legitimate and even well-meaning) quest for the object as a miraculous solution to society's ills, it is appropriate to offer here a proposal that makes reality more complex rather than simpler, and which, through its ambiguity, will bring the subject it deals with into debate.
Results in relation to category
The teaching unit was launched in distance learning on Friday 4 December 2020 between the two schools. This event resulted in :
- the launch of the teaching platform ;
- the interventions of Max Mollon (designer-researcher and teacher, founder of the design fiction club la Gaîté Lyrique) and Elizabeth Hale (designer, researcher, teacher) and the virtual round table moderated by Bastien Kerspern (co-founder and designer of Design Friction), in the presence of the artist Julien Berthier ;
- the students' video booth : make a video sequence of the "video booth" type lasting 30s (+/-5s). This video sequence presented an object (to be taken in the broadest sense) which, in your opinion, demonstrates a critical point of view on our lifestyles.
Different axes and tools have been developed during this launch:
- introduction to critical design(s) ;
- the step-by-step approach to critical design;
- critical of the critical design(s) ;
- collaborative lexicon of critical design;
- points of view and feedback;
- the reflective and participatory gallery.
A workshop with the artist Julien Berthier took place from 11 to 14 January 2021.
How Citizens benefit
Civil society is the main subject and beneficiary of the module, in the sense that its central objective is to accompany the major changes in our society by proposing a critical approach through design. Subjects such as consumer habits, the reinvention of social life in the context of a health crisis, etc. have been addressed.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
This training module won the call for initial education projetcs of West Creative Industries. This call for projects is intended to support new teaching units that respond to the evolution of creative, engineering and innovation skills and professions.
Learning transferred to other parties
The method and structure of the teaching unit, described below, could be tranferred to other interested parties.
Presentation of the course
The project is developed across three complementary facets :
- workshops included in the pedagogical curricula of the schools to bring together mixed teams of students around a common objective ;
- a collaborative production of design fiction proposals aimed at raising questions and triggering debate ;
- the constitution of a set of resources in digital and hard copy versions for expanding the project with partners.
Teaching methods
As part of the Design option at the ESAD TALM-Angers and the MDes programmes at the École de Design Nantes Atlantique, the Design (and) Fiction teaching unit led to the validation of three ECTS credits over one year. The students were evaluated together on their learning, and during the workshop before a jury composed of lecturers from both partner institutions.
