Preface: Travelling concepts beyond the Bauhaus
The Center of Industrial Design (CDI), founded in Montevideo in 1987 in the context of so-called cooperation programmes, is regarded as a pioneering institute of modern design in Uruguay. As part of the programme COOP Design Research at the Bauhaus Dessau, Lucia Trias, a former student of this new institution for modern designers, investigated in her master thesis the mechanisms of design knowledge construction at the CDI. The formation of this school for industrial designers, Lucia Trias deduced, was closely linked with development discourses that attributed a pivotal role to design in the modernisation of the South American nation. Here, European modernism’s claim to universal validity as a model for economic and political progress in other regions was just as much part of the vocabulary of European ‘experts’ as the notion that design can be inextricably linked with innovation, creativity and optimisation and can contribute to the resolution of economic problems. A view of design as a problem-solving activity, as had been established in the West, was now also introduced as an instrument of aid delivery. New schools such as the CDI in Montevideo were assigned a key role in this.[1] Lucia Trias’s research paper, written in the historic Bauhaus Building nearly 100 years after the foundation of the avantgarde school, not only bears witness to the longue durée of the problematic narrative, which describes the designer’s profession as an essential building block of industrial modernism, but also exposes the discipline’s close interconnection with (neo) colonialism and imperialism.
In the historical narrative, the historic Bauhaus in Dessau is inextricably linked with the evolution of those designers who, in the second half of the 20th century, are criticised for their deeply problematic alliance with a consumer-centred society and the associated reckless exploitation of natural resources and environmental destruction, which call for new blueprints for a socially responsible and environmentally friendly design. Victor Papanek (1923–1998) was among the early protagonists of a radical critique of consumerism and a rethink of the design profession as a social practice orientated towards the everyday needs of the masses. This included his engagement on behalf of regions then described as the ‘Third World’ and his impetuses for a shift towards local resources and cultures of making. Contemporary social design and transition design movements build on the impulses that Papanek provided in the 1970s.
Common to all these critics is a wrangling about the problematic modern legacy of the profession, which also involves the historic Bauhaus.
Walter Gropius had described the agenda of the Bauhaus workshops in Dessau as aspiring ‘to produce designers that, through their knowledge of material and work process, were in a position to influence the industrial production of their day’. In fact, the Bauhaus was in step with a series of educational institutions that were asking questions about the new profession of the artist-designer in capitalistic industrial production. The founding of schools of arts and crafts as imperial instruments to empower German industry on the global market and the cooperation with the German Werkbund had already created a trajectory for the artist-proletariat – the ‘surfeit’ of students of over-filled art academies – and simultaneously paved the way for a new role for the artist, whose precarious position in the capitalistic economy was now transformed into that of an avantgarde designer.
In this sense, specific conditions and types of knowledge are embedded in the DNA of the new profession of the designer, which are projected in the discipline’s convergence with Western industrial modernisations, consumer society and technical progress. And it is precisely this model, perceived as universally valid, that was then exported worldwide by educators, in publications and in formats for academic exchange, and caught on in newly established design institutions like the CDI in Montevideo. The reference to the authority of the Bauhaus played a pivotal role in this.
The journal at hand examines this intensely ambivalent evolution of the new designer, deeply rooted in the logic of Western modernism, but without following the hegemonial narratives of linear design histories that frequently found their starting point in the avantgarde Bauhaus school. Instead, the journal, which originated in the context of the digital atlas ‘Schools of Departure’, sees itself as an accumulation of contributions that pursues the continuous production of new meanings and interconnections between schools, actors, objects and ideas. This might enable the development of a dynamic virtual and open structure of interconnected learning as transcultural practice. This is the objective of the e-journal at hand, which follows the branching paths of the development of the designer’s profession in the context of new design schools.
Here, the pedagogical approaches associated with the Bauhaus are not understood as a legacy in the sense of a tradition that perpetuates itself, which revolves around the ‘original’ of the Bauhaus. Rather, the e-journals pursue a methodical process that draws on notions such as ‘Travelling Concepts’ and ‘translation’. Learning experiments, ideas, materials, narratives and radical educational media move through time and spaces; however, this journey does not follow the linear notion of a universal claim to validity of these ideas. Of interest here are the complicated and often also bumpy paths of translation processes that, as Walter Benjamin proposed in his essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, only coincide with the original ‘just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point’ and are likewise subject to transformation through time. [1] How can these ‘acts of translation’ in historical contexts be apprehended as continuous productions of meanings through contextual shifts? The journals are structured with reference to the discourses of ‘Traveling Concepts of design and art education’ which, with always shifting connotations and attributions of meaning, keep the schools’ and initiatives’ movements in search of answers in a process of constant exchange and motion. In the process, how do they resist the temptation of a continuity-minded concept of legacies that are linked with the Bauhaus tradition? By also bringing into view divisions, the untranslatable, faults that, as Doris Bachmann Mehdick emphasises, place historical processes of change ‘in a tension-filled confrontation with contrasts and similitudes and, in doing so, brings into focus a fractured range of meanings through distortions of history‘.[2] In this sense, the Travelling Concepts describe instead ‘routes of appropriation’ that do not follow the idea of a chronological sequence of past, present and future, but move between different geographies, times and cultures.
Thus, this journal aims to pursue the ‘bumpy route’ to the evolution of new designers in a network of knowledge regimes, technologies, economies, institutional frameworks, material cultures and social practices. In this respect, seen together the contributions do not propose a straightforward travel route that permits visitors to trace the movements that shape and discipline the designer through changing times, spaces and geographies. Instead, it is the diversions, dead-ends and misunderstanding, the distancing and the distortions that give voice to the multifarious movements in search of social and environmentally friendly design in both historic and contemporary transition processes.