In our previous post, we looked at some specific case studies of narrative-centered learning environments that helped us in our projects.

For a few months now, our small (and heterogeneous) team has been inventing a new narrative-based “design” educational model adapted to the age of digital information.

As we mentioned many times, we love the idea of community. We find that it is one of the best places to learn, understand who we are and what kind of attitudes we have (or miss) within a group, find others that share the same visions and ideas and with whom to collaborate with in the future.

A community in which to mix on-line and off-line activities. A place for participants to get to know each other, share references, play together and influence others through a series of hands-on exercises.

A community in which to play games. A network created by game moderators (teachers) and players (students) completing missions (exercises) together.

A community in which to test one’s social influence. A place to explore the potentials of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. A place for learning to communicate and transfer knowledge in the most efficient way.

A community publishing daily through its own social media accounts the players’ most interesting works, the most “liked”, the most commented…

A community as a source of interest and reference to others. A place in which participants become coauthors of an important collection of content and material.

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Design Royale

Design Royal was an experimental project for the 2011 Milan Design week: an on-line workshop, party-in-progress and mind-boggling night. An ongoing project made by people from all over the world and built through human relationships. It consisted of a pop-up event-exhibition involving 14 days of digital work using social media (facebook, twitter, flickr), 14 days of physical work in Milan hideaways and 5 days of play, work and games on-the-spot. All of this for one night at the secret garden, a magical hidden space where everyone was invited.

http://design-royale.com/
@d_royale on Twitter
design-royale on Facebook
Videoleaks on Vimeo

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Whoami

We have been planning and developing an on-line / off-line game, open-source and auto-generative school system.

A school model that can be multiplied on different themes (design, fashion, photography, cooking). An Italian-based global network able to mix digital and traditional tools to connect a worldwide design community.

Whoami’s primary objective is to enable the players to increase their design-related skills through a series of practical activities and get them to understand which kind of designer they are thanks to the Whoami social influence algorithm that calculates each player’s strength, wisdom, charisma and amability. In the digital world, facebook is where the game takes place, twitter is where interesting content from the game is published daily and tumblr is where the players’ works are archived. In the physical world, players meet and build things together during workshops set in Milan or at Abadir in Catania.

http://www.whoami.it/
@WHOAMIgame on Twitter
whoamigame on Facebook
#WHOAMIgame on Instagram

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Design 101 (or design basics)

We participated to a competition for Iversity in which we had to propose a course via MOOC (Massive Open On-line Course). We are quite happy because it was announced this morning that we were one of the 10 winners!

Our course, which will start in fall 2013 consists of a journey into contemporary design through 101 exercises.

In this course, the student transforms his everyday life into 101 projects. In every given exercise, he is immersed into a particular subject’s universe through a series of references. Proposed films, books, websites, music to help him develop informed criticism on the certain task he needs to accomplish.

The content shared and published through social media is redirected and reorganized into a digital archive available to all. At the end of the course, students have the possibility to print this archive into a book in which they are a coauthor.

You can watch the trailer here: https://www.iversity.org/courses/design-101

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Ceramic Futures

This is our new project which is starting today…

Ceramic Futures: from Poetry to Science Fiction is a 2 month design challenge between the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) Rome, Politecnico di Milano (PoliMi) and Abadir Academy. Students from these schools will explore imaginative products and future contexts for ceramics by combining traditional mediums of design to an online diary connected to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

http://www.ceramicfutures.com/
@CeramicFutures on Twitter
CeramicFutures on Facebook
#CeramicFutures on instagram

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Stefano Mirti
@stefi_idlab (on Twitter and Instagram)
www.facebook.com/stefano.mirti.3

3^rd Open Global Systems Science Conference

Beijing, October 2014

First Announcement and Call for Papers

 

In 2014, it will be time for GSS to go global. Therefore, the 3^rd Open Global Systems Science Conference will take place in October 2014 in Beijing.

Moreover, there will be GSS initiatives in Europe

–      including an annual CONNECT-GSS conference by projects financed by the EU’s DG CONNECT –,

in the US

–      including a major complex adaptive systems conference with GSS as its main theme at Arizona State University –

and more. In particular, we will strengthen the links to the complexity science community.

The precise date of the 3^rd open conference will be established on the basis of the constraints of people willing to play an active role in preparing it. A preparatory workshop will take place in Beijing, October 2013. This workshop will lead to a joint journal paper presenting GSS to the broader scientific community. Whoever is interested in participating in that workshop is kindly invited to express their interest in a

–       mail to: 3rdOpenGSS@global-systems-science.org

–       together with a 200 word abstract of an intended contribution to the 3^rd Conference.

–       The deadline for abstracts in view of the preparatory workshop is September 30, 2013.

–       Abstracts for conference contributions are also warmly welcome from people who do not want to participate in the preparatory workshop.

–       An extended deadline for abstracts submitted after the workshop will be announded at the end of the workshop.

The preliminary scientific committee consists of Guido Caldarelli (IMT Lucca), Carlo Jaeger (GCF Berlin and BNU Beijing), Antoine Mandel (Sorbonne Paris) and Ye Qian (BNU Beijing). It will be expanded after the preparatory workshop.

For a start, the structure of the 2014 conference will be based on the synthesis paper “GSS: Towards a Research Program for Global Systems Science”. That structure will be modified on the basis of the discussions at the preparatory workshop.

One interesting possibility would be to look more closely into the relation between the global narratives provided by scientists and narratives provided by artists. To make this a serious intellectual exercise, we could invite philosophers currently developing a fictionalist stance in the philosophy of mathematics (see e.g. Mary Leng’s Mathematics and Reality, Oxford UP 2010).

As usual, the debate leading to the 3d Open Global Systems Science Conference will take place on the GSS blog (www.global-systems-science.org).

Design as a Narration

To use design as if it were a tale, a story, a litmus paper with – as ingredients – our fears, our vanity, our manifest desires and those unmentionable, without forgetting irony and the taste of paradox.

In the first place design is desire. Necessities can be faced if we understand them first of all as desires. Designing a better world was a dream of the last century: why should we commit the same mistakes again?

Perhaps it would already be sufficient a design able to describe the world, able to make visible the most ambiguous and difficult physical and conceptual places: those that nobody wants to think about.

At most, if we want to be really ambitious, a design that tries to open up some daylights towards other possible worlds.

Walter Aprile, Stefano Mirti, 12 notes and ideas on design (and on teaching it in a cynical and cheating world). In: Hans Hoger, design research, Editrice Abitare Segesta, Milano, 2008.

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In our previous post, we defined the conceptual boundaries for our projects.
Now, it is time to better define what we want to do through a series of specific case studies.
In terms of keywords, we are talking about: school, education, design, innovative, community.

 

Learning through narratives

We believe narrative-centered learning environments to be the most effective ones, “schools” as engaging worlds in which students are enabled to build and tell stories which are meaningful to them. Schools themselves have to be part of the narrative line. Whether these stories are organized into fictional or nonfictional narratives is not relevant for the time being. The important thing is that they are self-referential, purposeful and composed of connected events. Here, the goal is to define a school where the student feels to be part of a “story”. This doesn’t happen very often, and this is the reason why it is such an important ingredient.

Furthermore, a very important thing not to be forgotten is: “form follows fiction”.
People don’t need and don’t want new chairs, new houses, new things.
People want new stories.

The Pyramids, the Brooklyn Bridge, an iPhone or a pair of Nike shoes are not simply physical objects. Their main feature is to be a fascinating story.
For schools, it should be the same.

 

Case studies of narrative-centered schools  

In order to proceed forward, we spent some time mapping the most interesting design schools taking this specific point of view into consideration (design schools based on a fascinating and exciting narrative system).

Here, a summary of some of the most interesting narrative-centered schools in the design field:

Architectural Association (1847-)
This independent school of architecture, one of the most prestigious and famous in the world was “in/famously founded by a pack of troublesome students”.
http://www.aaschool.ac.uk

Bauhaus (1919-1933)
This school brought together the most outstanding masters and students seeking to reverse the split between art and production by returning to the crafts as the foundation of all artistic activity.
http://www.bauhaus.de/bauhaus1919

Vkhutemas (1920-1930)
A school where workshops were established in order to prepare master artists of the highest qualifications for industry, and builders and managers for professional-technical education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkhutemas

Black Mountain College (1933-1957)
Operating in an isolated rural location, this informal and collaborative school, with an interdisciplinary approach, encouraged experimental intelligence and plurality. http://www.blackmountaincollegeproject.org/

Ulm School of Design (1953-1968)
This school acted as a community whose methodological and structured field of study embraced aesthetics as a primary factor, “whose members bestowed structure and stability upon the world around”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulm_School_of_Design

MIT Media Lab (1985-)
“At the Media Lab, the future is lived, not imagined. Interdisciplinary researchers design technologies for people to create a better future.”
http://www.media.mit.edu/

Fabrica (1994-)
This communications research centre aims to combine culture with industry and offers young people the opportunity for creative growth and multicultural, multidisciplinary interchange.
http://www.fabrica.it/

Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (2001-2005)
Ivrea explored business in addition to design and technology for developing innovative products and services, giving people new ways to interact through communication, network and information technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_Design_Institute_Ivrea

 

Mentioned below are some recent examples of schooling institutions where the “narrative” element is central.

KaosPilots (1991-)
“Everything starts with the individual and the individual passion and drive and then spreads with the knowledge of our interdependency. Students at the KaosPilots must explore what they consider to be a positive societal change, and then adjust their actions to aid this development, while allowing and helping others to do the same.”
http://www.kaospilot.dk/

Institute without Bounderies (2003-)
A Toronto-based studio that works towards collaborative design action and seeks to achieve social, ecological and economic innovation where everyone seek to live, learn, work, and play together as a global community.
http://worldhouse.ca/

Khan Academy (2006-)
“Providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere. Whether you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology.”
http://www.khanacademy.org/

The School of Life (2008-)
Based in a small shop in Central London, the School offers a variety of programs and services concerned with how to live wisely and well, directing people towards a variety of ideas, from philosophy to literature, psychology to the visual arts that exercise and expand the mind.
http://www.theschooloflife.com/

P2PU (2009-)
An online open learning community allowing users to organize and participate in courses and study groups to learn about specific topics. A DIY wiki-type mentality where anyone can create a course as well as take one.
https://p2pu.org/en/

Trade School (2010-)
A self-organized learning space where students barter with teachers for instruction. Anyone can teach or take a class.
http://tradeschool.ourgoods.org/

Code Academy (2012-)
Committed to building the best learning experience inside and out, the Code Academy’s vision is that every student should have the opportunity to learn how to code, allowing much importance to computer science and computer programming as part of the core curriculum in education.
http://www.code.org/learn/codecademy

—

Stefano Mirti
@stefi_idlab (on Twitter and Instagram)
www.facebook.com/stefano.mirti.3

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the editorial board, please find attached the latest version of the Orientation Paper – Background Material (06-06-2013). If there are any brief additional reactions and comments, I’ll be most happy to introduce them in the last version to be closed later this month after the conference.

Thank you so much for your contributions and enthusiasm so far!

Looking forward to meeting you in Brussels!

David