The Nantes Case (...beginnings...) by Theodor Barth

The Nantes Case (...beginnings...) by Theodor Barth

Theodor Barth, anthropologist, PRE Design Rapporteur & Scientific Advisor SINTEF

Oslo, Monday May 15th 2006: we were in for a late afternoon dinner at the Teketopa café – around the block of KHiO-design – ordering dishes from a menu of Late Levantine cuisine. As we took our seats around the table, Maziar told us smiling how Anke and Thomas were arriving with their lugage from downtown Oslo, discussing various positions in postmodern theory. Maziar had chaperoned the two members of the PRE Design forum from Holland and Denmark through the streets of Oslo, as they arrived from the airport.

The dinner table gathered a taskforce of PRE Design people to prepare a presentation of the forum at an international workshop, organised by the Cumulus network and hosted by L’école de design Nantes Atlantique in France (June 10th-17th 2006):

• Anke Coumans from the Hogeschool voor Kunsten (HKU) in Utrecht – Holland
• Thomas Leerberg from Designskolen Kolding – Denmark
• Ted Matthews from the British Council – Norway
• Halldor Gislason from KHiO-Design (Dean)
• Soley Stefansdottirm – Graphic Designer, Designer in Residence
• Maziar Raein from KHiO - MA Design, (Wayleader) PRE Design Convenor
• and myself; Theodor Barth, anthropologist, PRE Design Rapporteur & Scientific Advisor SINTEF

The Report

The idea for the present report came about as a result of a quick hearing around the table, during which Maziar explained the relevance of involving me a reflective practitioner from outside the design-discipline to add a voice in the PRE Design exchange, to feature the social robustness of the experiences, solutions and exchange grown by PRE Design in the area of studio teaching (in counter-distinction to auditorium lectures).

We discussed whether I should write an ethnographic account of the Oslo PRE Design encounter, or whether I should write an inspirational document based on our professional exchange. As a result of this discussion I decided that the best solution would be for me to engage myself as an anthropologist in a proactive exchange with fellow researchers and teachers in the design field, while writing the report as an exampler in ‘reflective practice’, which – in my field – is what is understood by ethnography. Starting by surveying the limits of what I can say.

The role of the Oslo meeting was to co-ordinate activities and distribute tasks before the Nantes workshop, and draw up an horizon of activity programming in the aftermath: the meeting therefore was based on previous knowledge from the earlier gatherings, where experiences in the embodiment of theory in the practical setting of the studio, were shared by design-school educators who saw the need and fruitfulness of creating a network for professional exchange between design schools in this field. In a society where designers are also facilitators, design becomes ever less an “add-on” to information and increasingly emerges as a co-generator of content. Their role definition is changing, and increasingly shift from being problem-solvers to act as problem-definers.
In the wake of these developments, the design practitioner faces a challenge calibrating her skills in show-and-tell to the needs of clients, customers and users (based on interaction with them). S/he is, in many ways, like an anthropologist: a participant observer in social contexts that require her to handle situations in which s/he is alternately “inside” and “outside” of the interaction. On the one hand s/he invites the clients into a collaborative relationship in the design process. On the other hand s/he can use her overview to understand the needs and present condition of her clients, while drawing on her methodology to present her insights in the form of suggestions rather than statements, examplers rather than phrases.

The report constitutes an effort in this direction. I am sure this will surprise some readers, since the report evidently is presented in written form. But then, I am writing from the researcher’s, teacher’s and studio-practitioner’s point of view: the etymology of studio (It.) is ‘I study’, and in my studio I am reflecting on the affordances in relationship with my clients. In the studio showing sometimes means telling. But never quite in the same sense as in the retreat of the academic study or the auditorium: I do not want my users to reproduce my ideas, I want them to rebirth them.

And consequently, my efforts have a different, more practical and – in some aspects – more ambitious objective. I wish to create a path within and beyond the problem presented to me, to allow the client not only to solve his problem – or, deal with it – but to move beyond it. There was a consensus among the designers that involving me as an anthropologist, a professional from a different – though in some aspects adjacent – field would be in this sense constructive. Because the problems they are working with a sufficiently mature to warrant an interdisciplinary discussion and thereby benefit from being seen from a different angle and framework.

For how can we otherwise deal with processes in which – from an objective point of view – there is more than one beginning, and more than one ending? A professional multi-vocality – providing the skills of the disciplines are sufficiently overlapping – will add depth to our perception and management of the emerging design tasks with which we are concerned. Objectively, beginnings are multiple and so are endings. But they converge – and, in this sense, defined – in relation to various groups of end-users: clients, customers and citizens. They are not only moving targets, but are engaged in their movement. They colour their environments in ways that their environment may/ not return, and thereby allows them/not to reflect on their practice. New possibilities, new needs, new services.

The Meeting

Attending: Anke, Thomas, Dori, Maziar and Theo.

The morning-session of our meeting at KHiO the day after was devoted to aspects of the activity programming in PRE Design related to funding. As the convenor of the Oslo session, Maziar chaired the meeting. While Dori – Halldor Gislason – participated in his capacity as Dean of the Design Faculty of KHiO. The extent and types of funding were discussed in relation to time-lines and the critical mass of the network. The ideal mass of the PRE Design network for professional exchange between design schools gravitated towards six institutions. While the organising process of PRE Design agglomerated into time zones represented below in the form of activity circles (Fig. 1 ):

FIG 1 - PRE DESIGN GATHERINGS

Previous Meetings

Retention Protentsion
After the activity circle called ‘Nantes’ the participants in the Oslo workshop (‘now’) were agreed that the next activity circled – called ‘Pilot Project’ – should be initiated by immediately addressing the financial concerns that some of the members found particularly pressing.

Since the Pilot Project would be concerned with the substantiating the objectives and time-lines of the PRE Design exchange for the next five years, various sources that might fund the project – by seeding PRE Design or fully financing targeted activities – were discussed, in view of establishing a funding policy for this particular phase. These possibilities were discussed in relation to the PRE Design network portfolio (design school institutions from East- and Southern European countries).

Part of the ‘Pilot Project’ activity circle would therefore be to work up a substantial project – with the EU programmes as prime target – with a more ambitious agenda, particularly in the research area. One of the professional issues to be addressed in the ‘Pilot Project’ activity circle therefore is to determine a sense of research that makes a difference to the design-field, and adds value to ongoing activities in the education sector. And, contingently, setting up a mean-and-lean administrative strategy that would divide and carry out the work-load of writing an application – and bringing in the needed competencies to this effect – in an intelligent way.

After the morning session, Dori left the meeting, and the remainder turned to the issues that needed to be clarified in the PRE Design documents featuring the present aims and objectives, planned activities and debate questions drafted from issues retained from the earlier PRE Design encounters: the Reflective Zone, held in Utrecht (2004), and subsequent workshops in Lisbon and Copenhagen, and finally the first working group meeting in Oslo (November 2005). In the objectives document it is presently stated that:

“As a consequence of these events, design colleges need to take a full account of the connection between design practice and education, in order to distinguish the characteristics of research for their own particular needs. Moreover, a clarification needs to be sought in order to refine the use of the term research as defined by the university system.”

Furthermore, PRE Design aims at monitoring the current responses of design educators to meet the needs of design practitioners in meeting the challenges that faces them in the knowledge economy, and articulate the role of research and theory in this connection. This emphasis on the importance of interconnecting positioning, processes and products in the design field, more generally, addresses the aim of enhancing terminologies that spur a discussion of design as a voice in society (and, particularly, in the broader research literature on reflective practitioners beyond the design field).

These aims underpin the PRE Design objectives of:
a) developing a platform for knowledge for exchange and practice of design education;
b) to advance the understanding of the role of research at all levels of design education;
c) to create a debate forum for designers and design educators.

These core thematic issues were linked up with questions at the fringe of the PRE Design activities, bordering unto the environment and larger context in which design schools are currently evolving.

In this line of thinking, the design schools were discussed as places of gathering, where the fixed territorial boundaries of modern institutions are replaced by boundary spanning activities: i.e., the activities at the boundary of educational institutions, keeping in touch with what is going on “out there”. Not only by securing a steady turnover of practitioners coming in from the outside, but also in building a system of mentoring, peer-to-peer partnering of “equals” in lifelong learning and “match -making” between:
a) students at various levels and
b) practitioners, established in co-operation with the design school. In establishing such relations of visibility, the design school would both assume the functions of an expo-area for ongoing research in various design fields and a hub.

Between the core of PRE Design aims and objectives and the questions at the fringe of the thematic field of the design discipline, the main activities of the PRE Design forum is grouped in the form of a thematic cluster: to create the network in conjunction with Cumulus (primarily), open then network, promote a series of activities. The activities: a tutor exchange programme, an online debate-forum, facilitation of regular thematic meetings, the creation of a compendium with keywords and phrases to develop a debate on critical issues, grooming trans-national mentoring, “match making” and peer-to-peer relations.

The Nantes case evidently constitutes a première for the PRE Design forum. In preparation of this case, we discussed the contents and premises of the Nantes presentation: more precisely, how to present an offer in an order of sequence and form that brings the Cumulus audience to the participative core of the PRE Design arena, rather than being involuntarily caught by the lecturing format to which international seminars and workshops often are conducive.

To this effect, we decided to use – as soon as possible – the PRE Design web-portal as a working tool while developing the contents for the presentation, as a presentation tool in Nantes, and as a documentation tool for the harvest of learning following Nantes. Thomas (Kolding) showed us a dummy prototype of a candidate platform (Gunther) affording a simple and interactive iteration of the PRE Design web. Maziar showed a sample of WritingPAD contents of initiating relevants to the PRE Design compendium . While I pointed out some cohesive features of the community development on the Underskog platform (Eng. Underwood) .

The relatively short time-frame of the working group in Oslo, forced us to adopt the ‘need-to-know’ policy to manage our compound of knowledge fragments. But since I neither had nor have a detailed knowledge of the cases, I have decided that the best use of my professional resources – at this juncture - is to outline a framework for the case that may serve to accommodate new users from Nantes onwards, and to spur the generation of objectives and time-lines from Nantes and onwards.

The Case

The blueprint of the procedure I have followed in this report is:
1) to start out with the details on how the report came about to elaborate its format (the report);
2) span the horizon of PRE Design intentions emerging from the execution of this design on PRE Design interaction (the meeting);
3) extract implications by exploring the between-space of productive differences between 1 and 2 (the case).

The purview of this relatively formal procedure is to suggest possible modes of communication between the core and fringe of a thematic field: i.e., establishing a situational pre-requisite for:
a) foundation building;
b) boundary spanning, which I understand as the two parallel efforts of the PRE Design forum.
The activation of these procedures in the present exampler is intended as a demo of how the integration of the scholarly space-time into practice may be established through situation specific procedures (rather than walling in scholarly territories) that may serve to discover and discard opportunities for design schools in the contemporary setting.

From the practitioner’s point of view the importance of positioning, process and product in successive acts of re-design, moves her into the contemporary world of information systems: not as an add-on to her artisanal competence, but its implication into new fields, other ways of working and a more relational mindset in the exercise of her trade. The designer arguably holds the key to one of the more important roles in the “knowledge economy”: s/he offers responsive environments that not only reflect people’s tastes, but their lifestyles, activities and values. S/he acts as a facilitator and innovator of self-reflexivity. In sum, s/he is an entrepreneur in bringing reflective practice into communication.

This turn from the edge of R&D to the user-end may, indeed, be of general strategic importance: the shift away from getting the message across to implicate the users in creating the message, is exactly what we do when using the web solution to move within and beyond the Nantes presentation.

• Within – when using the PRE Design web as a presentation-tool we place our audience within the problematic of use, since we have already used the portal as a collaborative tool in preparation of our case for the workshop.
• Beyond: the phrases and terminologies of the debate in Nantes will initiate the ethnography of the online compendium, while the reactions the participants will choose to post after the workshop will serve to initiate the network.