Transcript What is Medialogy? - Aalborg Universitet

Electricity and
the Hybrid Imagination Mixing Technology and Culture
Andrew Jamison
Aalborg University
Based on:
PROCEED (a Program of
Research on Challenges and
Opprtunities in Engineering
Education in Denmark)
The aims of PROCEED are to:
• improve the education of engineers, so that they might better be able
to meet the challenges they can be expected to face in their working
lives,
• compare the different ways in which the challenges have been
responded to in Denmark as well as internationally,
• identify examples of “best practice” in regard to reforming
engineering education, and
• reach out to engineering educators in a series of interactive
workshops and seminars
Challenges Facing Engineering
The sustainability challenge – how to deal with
environmental problems, energy and other resource
exploitation and, not least, climate change
The societal challenge
– how to deal with the
permeation of our societies by technology with new
design skills in socially responsible ways
The technoscientific challenge
– how to combine
scientific understanding and technical skills in new forms
of competence
Contending Response Strategies
A market-oriented, or commercial strategy:
emphasizing entrepreneurship and innovation
An academic-oriented, or professional strategy:
focusing on expertise and independence
A socially-oriented, or ”hybrid” strategy :
combining technical training with cultural engagement
Different Conceptions of Design
Product-driven, ”technical fixing”
the designer as consultant or entrepreneur
Project-driven, ”design for design’s sake”
the designer as a skilled craftsman or artisan
Problem-driven, ”hybrid imagining”
the designer as change agent, or activist
Hybrid Imagining, or ChangeOriented Research

Problem-driven, rather than disciplinary, or market-driven

A focus on processes of socio-cultural change

Reflective, rather than explanatory or commercial ambition

Participatory, interventionist methods

Personal engagement in what is studied
Hybrid Imaginations
in the Renaissance
Artists and engineers in combination
Connecting magic to humanist movement
Leading to the scientific revolution
and the experimental method
For example:
Leonardo da Vinci,
the artist-engineer
Hybrid Imaginations in Industrialization
Scholars and craftsmen in combination
Connecting science and romanticism
Creating engineering sciences
And engineering universities
A Hybrid Imagination:
Hans Christian Ørsted
(1777-1851)
• mixed Naturphilosophie with experimentation
• to look for the ”spirit in nature”...
• discovered electromagnetism (1820)
• and founded DTU in 1829
Hybrid Imaginations in
Industrialization, 2
 connecting technology and society
 mixing technical skills with social consciousness
 creating, among other things, the professional designer
 and the use of wind energy for electricity production
A Hybrid Imagination:
William Morris (1834-1896)
 A romantic poet turned designer
 Combined artistry and socialism
 Mixed tradition and innovation
 A utopian who was also practical
A major influence on:…
 Interior and industrial design
 Architecture: Wright, Gehr y, Utzon
 Urban and regional planning
 Socialist politics and culture
 The ”education of desire”
From ”Useful Work versus Useless Toil”:
”Our epoch has invented machines which would have
appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of
those machines we have as yet made no use. They are
called ”labor-saving” machines – a commonly used
phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do
not get what we expect. What they really do is to reduce
the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled.”
”
A Hybrid Imagination:
Poul La Cour (1846-1908)
- a ”populist” scientist-engineer
- taught physics at Askov folk high school
- wrote Historisk Mathematik and Historisk Fysik
- built laboratory for wind energy experimentation
- founded Danish Wind Electricity Society in 1903
The Poul La Cour Museum, Askov
Hybrid Imaginations in
Modernization
 (re)combining artistic expression andengineering
 focusing on the human and cultural dimensions of
technology
 creating professional schools and colleges for design
 and bringing humanities into engineering education
A Hybrid Imagination:
The Bauhaus (1919-1933)
"art and technology –
a new unity”
A Hybrid Imagination:
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
 American writer and social critic
 one of the last ”public intellectuals”
 one of the first ”human ecologists”
 a cultural perspective on technology
 active in regional planning movements
From The Culture of Cities, 1938
”Today we begin to see that the improvement of cities is no
matter for one-sided reforms: the task of city design
involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization. We
must alter the parasitic and predatory modes of life that
now play so large a part, and we must create...an effective
symbiosis, or co-operative living together.”
Hybrid Imaginings in the 1960s and 1970s
 combining the ”two cultures” (C.P. Snow)
 connecting technology to the ”counter-culture”
 ”grass-roots” or community -oriented engineering
 and a social movement for ”appropriate technology”
Hybrid Imaginations:
Computer Liberation
Stewart Brand,
creator of Whole Earth Catalog
Steve Wozniak,
Apple’s co-founder
 outgrowth of 1960s counter-culture
 based on the ”hacker ethic”
 led to making of personal computers
 idea to make information free and open
 lives on in open source ”movement”
Ted Nelson’s
Computer Lib (1974)
Grass-roots engineering
 Mobilization of traditions of popular education
 People’s high schools, cooperative movement
 Linking of universities and civil society
 Organization for renewable energy (OVE)a key actor
 Many local socio-technical experiments
 Especially in wind energy as alternative to nuclear
”Appropriate technology” in the 1970s
The New Alchemy Institute Ark
Nordic Folkcenter for Renewable Energy
A Hybrid Imagination Today:
At the discursive, or macro level
 connecting technical solutions explicitly to social and
environmental problems
At the institutional, or meso level
 organizing spaces for collective learning across society
At the personal, or micro level
 combining scientific-technical competence with sociocultural understanding: cultivating change agents
For example:
Fritjof Capra
• physicist-turned-environmentalist
• author of many popular books
• founder of Center for Ecoliteracy
“Since the outstanding
characteristic of the biosphere is
its inherent ability to sustain life,
a sustainable human community
must be designed in such a
manner that its technologies and
social institutions honor,
support, and cooperate with
nature's inherent ability to
sustain life.”
For example:
The Alley Flat Initiative
The Alley Flat Initiative is a joint collaboration between the
University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development,
the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation,
and the Austin Community Design and Development Center.
The Alley Flat Initiative proposes a new sustainable, green
affordable housing alternative for Austin.
From the
website:
The initial goal of the project was to build two prototype alley
flats (aka granny flats)- one for each of two families in East
Austin - that would showcase both the innovative design and
environmental sustainability features of the alley flat designs.
These prototypes will demonstrate how sustainable housing
can support growing communities by being affordable and
adaptable. The first of these prototypes celebrated its house
warming with the community in June of 2008, and the second
prototype is slated to begin construction in early 2009.
Professor
Steven Moore
Moving into the second alley flat...
The long-term objective of the Alley Flat Initiative is to create
an adaptive and self-perpetuating delivery system for
sustainable and affordable housing in Austin. The "delivery
system" would include not only efficient housing designs
constructed with sustainable technologies, but also
innovative methods of financing and home ownership that
benefit all neighborhoods in Austin.
http://www.thealleyflatinitiative.org/
Appropriating reality