From Bauhaus to a School of Schools?
Jan Boelen on the Bauhaus as the model for a future “school of schools”
Almost one hundred years after its founding, the Bauhaus, which began to revolutionize learning, has itself solidified into the sacred cow of design education. In order to expose the magical moment of disruption, curator Jan Boelen and his team were transforming the Istanbul Design Biennale 2018 into a huge field of experimentation for a necessarily restless and puzzled educational offensive.
Doubting a biennial, doubting design
Why do another design biennial? What is the urgency when in the world today there are more design festivals, design months, design weeks, design parties, and design events than ever before? These questions directed our initial research trips in preparing for the fourth Istanbul Design Biennial. As we visited Turkish organizations, universities, cultural institutions, and factories, and spoke to designers, students, professors, and experts living and working in Turkey, the question was quickly flipped back at us: never mind another biennial, why do design? What is it for? What is design? A prescient question for a creative discipline that, not even two centuries since inception, seems more slippery than ever to define.
The slipperiness of design begs the question: what are we teaching our design students? Not much, judging by the hundreds of generic design portfolios submitted annually to master’s programs: the same realities, rendered in the same software programs, by students from China to the United States, all tasked with designing solutions for the design solutions-turned-prob- lems from the previous generation. Design schools are still emulating the Bauhaus workshop-will-ab- sorb-the-school education model that advanced an apolitical universal aesthetic prioritising manual craftsmanship above all. What was once an avant-garde design education movement has over the course of 99 years become a global institution.
An educational web
“Halletmek practices appear in the street in many states: fixing broken objects, modifying objects or spaces, merging things together, upcycling found/old objects and making interventions in the urban space,” explains Nur Horsanalı, a recent graduate from the Istanbul Bilgi University, who set out to document the makeshift ways that people in Istanbul intervene in designed objects “in order to domesticate the public space, to provide needs that occur in everyday life, and most interestingly, to overcome the municipality rules and prohibitions.” Halletmek is a Turkish word for which there is no exact English translation, but it broadly translates as “to sort out”, encapsulating an everyday hands-on attitude of refiguring through rearranging, resolving, adjusting, getting things done, resolving, or reconsidering. Horsanalı’s project is not only an inventory of hacked designs and a taxonomy of halletmek strategies, but a web of learning by doing and learning by designing, stretching from the street to the ivory tower. The first project we selected for “A School of Schools”, its principles have become leitfmotifs: Halletmek inverts the relationship between ignorance and expertise, emphazises everyone’s agency on their surroundings, and shows the web of knowledge exchange that spans a city.
An expanded field of design
“The biggest threat to the limits of what we can imagine is our assumptions. Those opinions, biases, and expectations of which we are unaware or do not question. These could have been shaped by our experiences, beliefs, culture, family, and ultimately, society at large,” writes Turkish designer Ebru Kurbak in the catalogue of “Stitching Worlds”. A four-year long research project, “Stitching Worlds” questions our understanding of history as a linear progression by resurfacing the role of textiles in the development of contemporary electronics, and how gendered worldviews have influenced the technological accelerationism of today. Although the knitted, embroidered, sewn, and crocheted devices produced are functional and exquisitely crafted, the works are not intended as solutions or alternative technologies, but to ignite doubt in the inevitability of our material environment and the historical narratives that we have been schooled into believing.
While design education might not have evolved much since the Bauhaus, design itself certainly has gone beyond functional pragmatism and save-the-world solutionism. Global design history reveals that design is much older than the industrial turn that systematized it into a discipline in the West. The intention, process, and execution of improving the material quality of our existence with domestic conveniences – from stool, headrest, and vessel to chair, pillow, and dining utensils – not to mention vernacular architecture, organic genetic modification of crops, and body modification, are evidence of our irrepressible urge to create and evolve our environment alongside our selves. With the codification of the discipline of design as a hinge between aesthetics and technology in the late 18th century, a scholarly inquiry into the nature, history, and potential of design also began. Only relatively recently have we seen this academic reflection of design not only becoming a field in itself, separate from art and architecture history, but also studied in the same design schools defined by the Bauhaus’s workshop education model.
A space of exception
“Measuring tools are mythological objects which reflect our civilization’s technological evolution. Units, tools, and standards used to be specific to the cultural background they emerged from,” Juliette Pepin told us after her research visit to Istanbul. “As a foreigner it was striking for me to see the paradox between Istanbul’s great global diversity of architecture, languages and history, and the large amount of measuring tools found in its streets, museums, and bazaar. As if they were waiting to be used in order to standardize the unstandardizable diversity of the city.” Building on her previous MOTS project that introduces children to the plurality of language, for “A School of Schools”, the French designer has developed a workshop program to introduce school students to the design potential of disruption and transmission in learning and creativity.
The desire to quantify the impossible is a hallmark of the universal education system that assesses students on a predetermined hierarchy of capabilities and skill sets. Learning is not the only function of education. In its utopian manifestation, education is also the time and space for studying without predetermined out-come. Studying might be characterized by the irrepressible urge to following a butterfly without knowing where it may lead or whether the ends might at all qualify one to being more employable, nor develop a useful or consumable finding. Without the potentiality of studying, we can only reproduce and repeat what we already have and know. It is this type of attitude we have seen not only in designers such as Pepin and others who have visited Istanbul on research trips to develop new projects but also in the designers who have developed projects in their own context. It is a characteristic of the expanded field of design.
In neoliberal education and design for commercial ends, it might seem that moments for such study have become harder and harder to find. “Studying is a kind of educational state of exception wherein the studier is abandoned, exposed to sovereign violence without the protection of the law,” notes American philosopher Tyson E Lewis while evoking Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception in the context of education. Schools, cultural institutions, and biennials are all spaces of exception in their potential to offer states of temporary suspension of normal functioning, in which utopian ideals might be achieved. By installing a physical manifestation of “A School of Schools” in Istanbul, we sought to explode the schoolhouse’s scenography of exception from building to city. The streets become the corridors of happenstance learning, connecting cultural institutions that each function as spaces for study around multidisciplinary complexities rather than siloed subjects.
