In the last year after writing my book, I spent a lot of time thinking about the #bauhaus and what it would look like today. Here’s what I would get students to experience to break the mould of design education as an enabler to capitalism and consumption:
First class: get a ‘smart’ object that is broken. You have technical support to open it but you need to find out what’s wrong on your own. Mechanical, electronics, software. You have to do the research on your own or ask ‘Masters’ for guidance.
Next: you visit local businesses and apply for work placements a few hours a week while you study. This is compulsory and the business must be local.
You build or maintain some of the shared infrastructure used by your student community. Agora space, library, supply shop, cafe.
You run a crowdfunding campaign for a collaborative product and deliver it while still in the program.
You get a series of lectures on internet identity, security and safety. Your get theatre people to come and workshop these concepts with you to extend these ideas into real life.
You submit all your written work on Medium or a wordpress blog you maintain yourself.
You visit factories in your local area AND China.
You are given history lessons every semester that focus on a particular decade and cover politics, economics, conflicts, botany, sociology, architecture, design. With ever class you understand how these things evolve or repeat themselves.
You spend a class designing paper posters ANd an online campaign. You compare their impact in your local community.
You visit science research labs, you talk to people who write for a living. You attend an event they organise. You see the difference not only in output but language. The same is repeated with a tech company.
You spend a week sorting rubbish for a recycling centre.
And you get a lot of time to think, to look, to talk to each other. The wifi will be crap.
If anyone likes the sound of any of this, has some land somewhere with some defunct building in a rural area on a commuter line tona big city, it’s a lifelong dream that I’d love to try to work on.
I would call it The Low Carbon Design Institute.
