New European Bauhaus Designer
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Project Description
We are living in an hyper-connected world, where the physical, the digital, and the virtual dimension co-exist and shape our experiences. To merge these three dimensions in a sustainable, inclusive and aesthetics modality, it is necessary to transform and evolve design (and designers) towards a transdisciplinary essence. By taking inspiration from fields such as neurosciences, cognitive psychology, sustainable science, and social science, the idea is to present the New European Bauhaus Designer.
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Description of the project
Summary
We are living in a hyper-connected world, where the physical, the digital, and the virtual dimension co-exist and shape our experiences. To merge these three dimensions in a sustainable, inclusive and aesthetics modality, it is necessary to transform and evolve design (and designers) towards a transdisciplinary essence. The field of design is focusing its attention more and more on the future, thereby different sub-fields are emerging, which try to propose, with various methodology, alternative visions and paths. For example, speculative design and design fiction, through the use of storytelling and diegetic artifacts, want to foster dialogues and reflections about trends, technologies, society, and environment, and their implications in our future life. Also, foresight is a methodology which influences future design practices in the field of management, market, and business. An interesting and emerging field is transition design, which aims at tackling complex and wicked issues, especially regarding environmental and social sustainability, and energy, to develop plans and actions to be done in order to facilitate long-term transformations (5-15 years). What we want to propose is the description of a new designer, who we define as New European Bauhaus Designer, highlighting the necessity for a transdisciplinary approach, which should merge design’s principles with future thinking, philosophy of technology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, sustainable sciences, and social sciences.
Key objectives for sustainability
Achieving coexistence between man and the natural environment is the most difficult challenge facing humanity in this era. The role of the designer will be, and must be in a short time, that of ferryman. He will have to bring the digital revolution, which is investing us, to a usable element for the realization of systems and productions that can avoid waste and emissions, primarily. Obviously, behind this enormous challenge, there are also social inequalities and economic problems that are a direct consequence. Once again, the designer must be able to create new systems, think about spaces, and re-design objects that can accompany society towards a more beautiful, inclusive and sustainable future. The field of transition design, which can be considered a future-based and transformative design discipline, tackles wicked issues, especially at environmental and societal level, trying to understand the connections that occur between complex problems, and to develop long-term strategies to fulfill alternative futures. With regards to research within the area of sustainable science (contaminated by cognitive psichology and neuroscience) one ability that a designer should nurture is imagination. Imagination has the power to combine previous knowledge and experiences into something new, and it can foster the creation of new meaning, acting as sense-making capabilities: both problem solving (and setting) and sense-making are two fundamental aspects in regard to design. The formation of trained and competent designers is the main foundation to be able to shape a future consistent with the objectives set in terms of sustainability and inclusiveness. The design, followed by a creative and transdisciplinary view, will lead to the resolution of the major issues of the 21st century. For this reason, the European Union must invest in their education and training.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
The figure of the designer will play a central role in connecting the digital environment to the physical one and technology to the person/system, making the transition to a digitized and democratic reality. The transformation that will take place in workplaces, from manufacturing to offices, in private homes and public spaces on a digital, physical and virtual level will have planners and designers as architects, which is why it is necessary for them to be able to perform Transdisciplinarity and see inside the "grey areas" of the environment. The progress and the technical development of technologies are surely important and fundamental, but what a designer should fulfill, while addressing technologies, is the definition of new uses, contexts, and experiences that can transform the way in which we perceive them. An interesting ability related to experience and perception is the phenomenology-based imagination, the form of imagination which influences our aestethic and experiential engagement with every kinds of “product”: therefore, experiential design become one of the most compelling field of design to be thaught, in order to achieve aestethically satisfying results.
Key objectives for inclusion
We acknowledge the digital domain as the one able to foster inclusion and inclusive societal practices. It is therefore of primary importance for designers to analyse the anthropological and social changes imposed by the incoming digital transformation. Relationships between individuals are less solid. Today's society has been defined as 'liquid', in which the social ties between individuals seem to be becoming inconsistent and more fragile, but also because of the way in which a person lives the community and is led to the immediate consumption of goods with a consequent drive to buy a new object. This has led to coin the term "Techno-liquidity", and to express hypothesises regarding how the use of modern communication tools has produced a profound anthropological mutation in all aspects of human life. The digital revolution allows knowledge and information without limitations or censorship to any individual regardless of his or her social extraction or cultural level. On the other hand, it has opened the chasm of an existential malaise in which we find ourselves connected. The pandemic has highlighted and amplified this fact, especially in the new generations, where the physical connection and relationships have been missing more than any other, leaving room for experiences and contacts in virtual/digital and abstract form, thus rethinking habits and gestures in new or unusual places, with the consequent cancellation of spatial dimensions that are confined to a screen. Especially at systems level, the possibilities arising from new technologies can led to design the intangible and connected future; the focus must be on transformations and relative possibilities. The New European Bauhaus Designer should be able to read the changes which we are experiencing and, therefore, produces innovative contents, and so, he/she should foster the use of digital technologies to achieve the goal of social inclusion.
Innovative character
Transdisciplinarity is defined as an intellectual space where connections between several isolated topics can be explored and revealed. In order to respond to the complexities of modernity, it is crucial to move away from mono-disciplinarity to connect and integrate personal expertise. It is crucial to understand what motives underlie the emergence, or rather, the revelation of Transdisciplinarity. The Multidisciplinarity, requires that research on a topic is no longer confined to a single discipline but to several simultaneously, without the presence of a real dialogue. And, in this world, is no longer possible. While, with the Interdisciplinarity, we begin to integrate disciplines and working methodologies that have points of contact, no longer seeing them as separate entities for the achievement of a goal. Transdisciplinarity is different in that its approach, as defined by Jean Piaget in 1970, aims to go beyond and intertwine disciplines, avoiding the fragmentation of knowledge and aiming for an integrated and unified understanding of the world. The boundaries between disciplines are like the boundaries between states on Earth, they fluctuate in time but the continuity between them remains unchanged (B. Nicolescu). The formation of this new type of connections should not lead to the application of automatic systems of individual disciplines, but to the development of more complex and amplified processes aimed at unitary knowledge.
