In seiner Funktionalität auf die Lehre in gestalterischen Studiengängen zugeschnitten... Schnittstelle für die moderne Lehre
In seiner Funktionalität auf die Lehre in gestalterischen Studiengängen zugeschnitten... Schnittstelle für die moderne Lehre
An interdisciplinary attempt to see how views of knowledge are relevant to design practices and an exhibition concept about personal knowledges strategies.
Today, designers have become a sort of mediators between society, technology, and environment. They want to enable meaningful and educating life experiences for people, find useful applications for the products of research, and last but not the least, reduce the human footprint on our planet – all at the same time. If we are willing to use an understatement, we can venture into saying that the designers’ role has evolved into a rather challenging way. In order to cope with this new situation, which also implies an extended range of responsibilities, designers may be required to explore new ways of thinking and new perspectives as well. One perspective worth inquiring is a better understanding of human knowledge as this shapes each of us deeply and designers haven’t really dealt directly with it so far.
Knowledge is very deep concept that is treated by a broad range of disciplines and traditions with very different focuses.
Please see my theoretical work for more details and sources (in the „Material“ folder).
Knowledge can be seen an intrinsic quality driven by the constant evolutions of the socio-technological landscape. With the rise of the digital networks and the algorithms as well as the introduction of a broad range of new tools and possibilities, personal knowledge practices are shifting.
The new situation is defined by the fact that knowledge is not fully framed any more by some authorities that we used to call “domain experts”: everybody is now able to “publish” and attain a very broad audience, and the amount of information available as well as its pace of development have dramatically risen. Further, the retrieval of information is driven by algorithms which internal logic remains mostly opaque or shaped by online behaviors patterns that may not truly reflect the deep complexity of human interactions (see Filter bubble). Accordingly, each of us is now in charge of judging the context he or she is embedded in and the trustworthy of the information that are encountered.
In details, I investigated very different aspects related, amongst others, to social networks, Wikipedia and Big Data.
Please see my theoretical work for more details and sources (in the „Material“ folder).
At the end of my theoretical work, I could work out five perspectives to describe what knowledge is:
We are our knowledge
Knowledge is uncertain
Knowledge is a social construction
Knowledge is a human process
Knowledge is a digital habit
In the 1920s, Otto Neurath was interested in providing the visitors of the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna with an experience allowing them to develop a personal knowledge on how the society was organized and how they could thrive within it. The exhibitions, based on the self-developed visual language ISOTYPE, harnessed topics related to health, housing, unions and taxation.
The challenges discussed in the theoretical analysis are become critical for the whole society: there is a shift from a world organized around the production of material goods to a world focused on the generation, the processing, and the distribution of information based on the knowledge emerging in the networks. Accordingly, I intended to design an exhibition based on an ISOTYPE-esque visual language, rooted in the age of the networks, that highlights the chances and challenges implied in the contemporaries personal knowledge practices.
In order to make this complex topic understandable to the public and working out directions for the conception of the exhibits, I used a practice introduced by Otto Neurath: I tried to rephrase the challenges related to personal knowledge practices into a series of questions: “How good do I understand the underlying logic of the digital tool I am using? Which information source do I trust? Which not? Why? What are my habits online? Am I satisfied about the way I am using digital tools? How dependent am I from them? What are their positive effects on me? What are their negative effects on me? Can I do something about it? Who are the people that I am following online? Where do I know them from? etc.”
The exhibition is divided in three main areas:
Please see my theoretical work for more details and sources (in the „Material“ folder).