Design (and) Fiction teaching unit

Project

304294

Status

Submitted

Award category

You want to submit

NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS AWARDS: existing completed examples

Project title

Design (and) Fiction teaching unit

Full project title

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.).

What was the geographical scope of your project?

Does your project address mainly urban or rural issues?

Does your project refer to a physical transformation of the built environment or other types of transformations?

Has your project benefited from EU programmes or funds?

Has your project won an EU prize?

Your project is fully completed?

When was your project implemented?

How did you hear about the New European Bauhaus Prizes ?

On whose behalf are you submitting the application?

Please provide a summary of your project

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.

Please indicate the main themes of your project with 5 key words

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of sustainability (including circularity) and how these have been met.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context

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.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience beyond functionality and how these have been met.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context

Design Fiction is a theoretical and practical module to discover the forms of critical design: critical design, design fiction, speculative design, design activism, etc.

Please give information about the key objectives of your project in terms of inclusion (equal opportunities, public participation, citizen engagement, co-design, universal design, accessibility, affordability, etc.) and how these have been met.
Please highlight how the project can be exemplary in this context

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.

Please explain how these three dimensions have been combined in your project.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary

The three dimensions (aesthetic, sustainable, inclusion) were combined in the integration of sustainability and inclusion issues into the themes and methods developed by this design teaching unit, teaching that is directly related to aesthetics.

Please give information on the results/impacts achieved by your project in relation to the category you apply for

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.

Please explain how citizens and civil society were involved in the in the design and/or implementation of the project.
Please also explain the benefits that derived from their involvement.

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.

Please explain what kind of global challenges the project addressed by providing local solutions

The project has mainly provided local solutions to the following global challenges :

• consumer habits,
• reinvention of social life in the context of a health crisis.

 

Please highlight the innovative character of the project as compared to mainstream practices in the field of the project.

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.

Please explain to the potential of transferring the projects’ results or learnings to other interested parties and contexts.
Please provide clear documentation, communication of methodology and principles in this context.

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.

Is an evaluation report or any relevant documentation available?

If you would like to upload additional documentation, please upload it or write it below

By ticking this box, you declare that you are not in in one or more of the exclusion situations foreseen under Article 136 of the Financial Regulation.

By ticking this box, you declare that all the information provided in this form is factually correct, that you assume sole liability in the event of a claim relating to the activities carried out in the framework of the contest, that the proposed project has not been proposed for the New European Bauhaus Prizes 2022 in any other category or strand and that it has not been subject to any type of investigation, which could lead to a financial correction because of irregularities or fraud.

By submitting your application, you guarantee that you are the author or have the rights to proceed with the application and to authorise the use of the project, concept, idea, and that you have obtained any necessary consents, licenses or assignments from third parties and included copyright notices when necessary.

By submitting your application, you understand that all the applications that meet the eligibility requirements will be shared for the purposes of the selection processes, and notably published on the secured platform https://prizes.new-european-bauhaus.eu/ and for the purposes of the promotion of these on the New European Bauhaus website and/or other European Commission communication channels. In this sense, the applications would be widely available. Applicants should ensure that they present their ideas, concepts, projects, in such a way that they could be shared without giving rise to intellectual property related concerns. If your submission is selected as one of the finalists, it will additionally be shared for the purpose of the public vote that will take place. The European Union is granted a licence to use and share your application with the general public and the official external experts for the purposes of the selection process, including the voting. The European Union has the right to use the images and visual materials and the description provided in the application for communication purposes related to the contest and beyond. Rights granted comprise the right to store, reproduce, display, publish and communicate or distribute copies in electronic or digital format, including, but not only, through the internet. Unless you have disclosed your name, the European Commission has no obligation to share your name when using or disseminating your contribution to the public. The European Union cannot be held responsible in case any submitted idea, project, concept is found to infringe third parties rights. The European Union shall be neither responsible for the use that third parties may do of the applications or related content.