The following post is the second part of an ongoing conversation between guest authors Rick Bennett and Andy Polaine, friends and partners in Omnium – a research group of academics, designers, artists, programmers and writers who work collaboratively (and from different countries) to explore the potential the Internet allows for what they term – online collaborative creativity (OCC). We asked Rick and Andy to explore the topic of online collaboration through a collaborative online conversation. Stay tuned over the next few weeks (or months?) as this unique meeting of minds unfolds:
ANDY: Rick, I hope my mocking hasn’t wounded you too deeply! I think you probably underestimate how au fait you are with new technologies and I think this brings us onto a couple of points that refer back to what you asked me about in your final questions.
One part of this is that certain technologies make their way into general culture very quickly and some don’t. It seems obvious to say that, of course, but the key here is that those that are in transition are the ones that are most obvious and the ones that people tend to get excited about at conferences. It’s why there are a horrific number of academic papers about ‘Web 2.0′ and why so many e-Learning software vendors market themselves with nonsense like ‘Now with added Web 2.0′ or ‘Web 2.0 enabled’. The problem is that they’re often not all that exciting when you look under the hood and many of the hyped technologies never make it into the mainstream.
What I think are more interesting and relevant to observe are technologies that have either snuck in through the back door or are developing independently and then suddenly coalesce into something like a tangible whole and shift the landscape dramatically (which is really what Web 2.0 is/was a case of).
In the first instance, something like e-mail is a great example. I find it more possible to imagine a life without a phone than a life without e-mail and I suspect many of our students would say the same about instant messaging (mobile or otherwise). Whilst teaching and collaborating in an online web space seemed to freak out, frankly, many of our academic colleagues, none bat an eye-lid at the notion that they might have been collaborating via e-mail with their peers across the world for years. So, those kinds of technologies that embed themselves so quickly in our everyday lives are interesting precisely because it feels like we turned around and they were just there. As an interaction designer and someone who tracks emerging trends, I want to know why. The answers are complex and we don’t really have space here, but they’re cultural, technological and to do with time, place and design.
The second instance is probably more relevant to what we’re speaking about when thinking about design having an influence on the planet and educational futures. I always use the phrase ‘slime mould and suburbs’ for this. They’re both examples of things that grow independently until they merge to form a whole, which is what happened with what we know, for better or worse, as Web 2.0.
In terms of my background with Antirom and other collaborative studios, it’s the old ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ idea. In terms of new technologies – and other emerging cultural trends, by the way, such as ageing populations, climate change, tuition fees to name but a few – there are a whole set of developments that are converging.
Again, in order to be a bit briefer here I’ll skip to the potential results, which are that higher education faces a possible future where there are fewer and fewer students on campus (ageing population = decline in numbers, higher fees = decline in numbers and more students working full-time) and degree programmes that are less relevant (student perception of value for money for education, which may be viewed as simply ‘training’ by them vs. free ‘training’ they can get online, what you’ve accomplished vs. what the piece of paper says you’ve studied). And that’s just scratching the surface – for more it’s probably worth pointing people towards a recent presentation called The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be.
So, where does that leave higher education, in particular those teaching design? One thing that seems to me to fairly clear is that departments are increasingly outmoded. I believe that’s true across entire universities actually, but definitely inside art and design colleges. The distinctions that once set up those boundaries have become so blurred as to be more than useless, they’re a hindrance to true cross- and interdisciplinary work.
When I spoke of the ‘tyranny of upgrades’ I was really talking about this shift. An obvious part is that you just can’t keep learning the new versions of the tools you use. So you can’t rely on just teaching that either, which is what a lot of design education has become. The risk is that you’re either overwhelmed or your skills go out of date. Process and approach – the way you do things – is really much, much more valuable and always has been.
I also think that educational spaces need to be radically re-thought. The idea of classrooms, labs and lecture theaters makes little sense to a population of students who almost all have their own machines (usually laptops) and would prefer to work on them. I think there’s a lot to learn from social networks and online communities here. How do you create a space that people want to hang out in? What do you offer in return for their participation, which in turn makes it a good space to hang out in? Setting that up is a skill that relates more to throwing a good party or running a successful restaurant than to traditional ideas of pedagogy.
Lastly, how does all of this fit into making the world a better place? I think that the main thing that we can really draw upon is the fact that so many of our students – and us – have become used to the idea that contributing to a project benefits us manyfold in return, whether that’s an open-source project, Flickr or consuming less. So the idea of a collaborative design project that helps anything from building up a worldwide movement to a small community somewhere isn’t so alien. But that’s a shift in thinking that has yet to happen on large scale in education, where the individual is privileged (and graded) over the collective.
I think that’s probably enough from me right now – what I think would be good for me to ask is what your experience of working within an institution like UNSW has been like in this context? Also what have your experiences – successes and failures – been of setting up and running the large online projects as well as the most recent, [re]frame project?
RICK: Andy, despite our regular derogatory banter over the years, which admittedly is childish but incredibly funny, you know I have always enjoyed reading and listening to your thoughts. I have a short attention span and not many people can keep me in a conference room or lecture theatre for anywhere near an hour without getting fidgety, bored and wanting to leave: Stefan Sagmeister did … and Neville Brody did … and I am sure one or two others over the years … but I am always enthralled by your presentations (no matter what form they are in). In light of this, I did enjoy reading your first response in this conversation and I will attempt to answer your final points here below.
I have been thinking of my response in regard to experiences being within a large university setting that you posed. Having visited many, many institutions over the years i think it better to answer in more general terms relating to art & design education than to single out my own institution. One of the most surprising (and alarming) things I found when i first stated teaching in 1993 was that hardly anyone at tertiary (higher) education had any teaching or learning qualifications. Its easy to look at such large institutions and spot all the things wrong with them but there are also many fascinating and worthwhile things that go on to. In terms of staffing though I do think that teaching staff at the ‘coalface’ are stretched too far these days in terms of all the administration things they are required to do and on top of that trying to keep their own practice or research going too. I am a firm believer that its better to do some things really well than lots of things poorly. There are so many facets to consider about learning and teaching in the visual arts that personally I found it important to study for several years and become qualified to strategise my own teaching approach and to base it on sound theory along with innovations of my own built on working experiences.
I also feel it vital as a teacher to maintain ones own creative practice and to be very familiar with what else is going on at the same time internationally (and not just in your own discipline). I think one of the main issues I will bring up here – and subject of this conversation – is creative collaboration (whether online or not). Back in 1998 when I founded Omnium, it was exactly this issue that I was trying to explore as it simply appeared to me that the professional workplaces were becoming more and more collaborative. Your own involvement with Antirom, and your neighbours Tomato, were two classic examples of this and similar practices were springing up everywhere and are now the norm. I felt that when I looked around at how creative people were being taught, practice and education were becoming ‘dislocated’. Now that’s a dangerous situation as the two should be interdependent and rely upon each other. Still to this day, and I feel confident in saying this as I have researched this extensively, the way most colleges teach their students in art and design is singularly and teamwork and group projects are the rarity. I believe that the late 90′s saw a real transformation in the way people worked creatively in terms of becoming far more collaborative and plural. I still don’t think education has reflected this yet. I believe it finally admits it needs to be but just doesn’t know how to do it. The main obstacle in its way seems to be assessment and how to grade students who have worked as a team. I find it very sad if this is the case as new ways of assessing need to be found perhaps. I would go one step further and one which is probably too confrontational for many and that is to remove the assessment anyway. Of course in some educational disciplines this would be unadvisable as there are correct ways and dangerous ways of doing things (surgery or engineering to name but a few) but in Art & Design? Are we really that confident and wonderful in what we do to be able to grade people precisely and affectively? I believe that assessment can still be carried out affectively, and that would apply to group work too, but we are marking the wrong things.
Let me expand a little … recently several people in my own design school (myself included) have been voicing there opinion in the last few years that our curriculum is out of date now (written in late 80′s early 90′s) and that our discipline areas should not govern our school structure (as they do in most colleges). An exciting development has emerged recently in terms of structuring studios, departments and schools into issue based areas such as environmental and sustainable issues; social and ethical issues, indigenous and south-east Asian issues, outreach and community issues; etc, etc … Frankly, I love this idea but will we all be bold enough to implement it.
So in essence, in terms of design (and art) education I feel I have learned two main things in the last decade: we certainly do not know more than our students which governed the didactic approach to education for many years; and that we should observe the trends of our students to inform our curricula. We must after all provide students with the skills (cognitive and technical) that they will need in the workplace and in any other creative ventures they encounter. Thats what we are there for and not to always do things the way they have always been done.
I will save the response about online projects and our social outreach projects for the next episode as that is a very interesting move for omnium in the last year or two. Its been very rewarding but a steep learning curve, especially working in countries where issues like corruption and poverty are standard ways of life. What is reassuring though is the high levels of technology that exist in the poorer countries. It is a myth to believe you can’t use the internet or other mobile technologies in projects there because of the lack of accessibility or knowledge – and with that in mind I see this becoming the working ground for more and more designers in the upcoming years.
Andy, I hope that sheds some light on the things you asked me and in turn to lead into the more socially aware work detailing we have been doing, can I ask you to outline our intentions for the initial Omnium Creative Network and why you believe the system we set up could only really be described as disappointing in terms of response rate. After all the membership rate was high. It seemed the more people we attracted the weaker the community became?
