Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Current Issue

This article explores the innovative fusion of critical disability studies and research through design (RtD) within a university course. Through partnership with Luca Szabados, who has a congenital limb difference, the course shifted from a traditional ‘design for care’ paradigm to a collaborative endeavour, embracing the co-Ability framework rooted in posthuman perspectives on disability. This transformative journey challenged traditional hierarchical classroom structures, emphasizing bidirectional and non-linear interactions in the learning process. It placed a strong emphasis on experiential approaches, fostering meaningful validation derived from Luca’s experiences and aligning with the principles of design for social innovation. The course employed prosthetic prototypes as tools to foster knowledge construction through embodied interaction, shedding light on the underlying normative assumptions embedded in the designed environment. The various methods applied during the semester facilitated emergent learning outcomes, leading to an enriched understanding of the complex ethical and political dimensions of disability’s intersection with design. This course exemplified the potential to reshape educational ecology in university settings and advance disability studies within information processing through design, emphasizing the value of situated learning.

Revolution RETOLD is an educational research project that utilized a local fashion retail store operated by the university as a place-based learning opportunity for connection between fashion design and merchandising students and their community. The project aimed to situate students within their local community to address real-world challenges within an actual retail setting. More specifically, this store learning lab course was developed for students to address the need for more sustainable practices, experiential marketing and explore a new era of retail and manufacturing at an existing store within their local community. Students in the course worked together to develop a concept that included key items, retail experiences, visual displays and marketing. Key items were created with thoughtfulness to more sustainable manufacturing processes such as zero-waste pattern-making, upcycling and use of local labour. Retail experiences engaged the local community through repair and upcycling workshops, while visual displays focused on second-hand use. Students were tasked with creating weekly working reports from store visits that identified store traffic and sales reports while also completing peer evaluations and self-reflections of their experience. Student responses suggest this place-based learning experience had a positive impact on learning in the following ways: (1) reflections on strengthening weaknesses, (2) learning to negotiate and compromise and (3) improving communication skills.

Artists have always related to what happens around them, both on local and global levels. The professorship ‘Artistic Connective Practices’ at Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, the Netherlands, addresses the notion of ‘artistic connectivity’ as a lens towards artistic research in relation to society. One of the central approaches of the professorship is the form of artistic research residencies: artist-researchers engage in the context at hand, from a socially engaged perspective and work with what the people and contexts have to offer. We choose for a situated approach and consciously leave space for the residencies, their forms and purposes to emerge from the ground up. In this article, I share the notion of artistic connectivity and the approach of socially engaged artistic research residencies and explore how such approaches can contribute to situatedness as a conceptual framework for socially engaged artistic practice and research.

This article reports on the preliminary findings of an ongoing study by the Faculty of Architecture and the Service-learning Office of the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) on whether and how service-learning can act as a lever for integral education. While integral education aims to foster the whole person’s development, service-learning typically seeks to give students ownership of their learning process and simultaneously attend to community needs. Using the Doelland service-learning initiative as a case study, we distinguished five principles and mechanisms that can function as levers with transformative potential. Solidarity was identified as an overarching principle that grows through a circular process resulting in even deeper connections and mutual support among educators, students and the community. Applying the insights from this study to architectural education can allow students and societal partners to learn and experience how architecture can become a critical, inclusive and situated practice.

How might we imagine and develop innovative ways of coexisting with the interplanetary telecommunication infrastructures (IIT hereafter) that shape our daily lives and make global communication possible? This article explores the constraints and possibilities that these infrastructures pose to generating situated forms of knowledge. While IIT are foundational to enabling communication across the globe, their physical, technical and economic requirements and obligations often hinder meaningful civic participation and limit opportunities for creative engagement. At this critical moment, we ask: What kinds of practices and approaches can acknowledge the elusive, distributed and transspatial nature of interplanetary signal flows, while also supporting a framework for inhabiting both urban and interplanetary environments? Drawing from the ‘Manifesting space cities’ workshop (held in May 2023 at Concordia University, Montreal), we reflect on the strategies we developed to critically examine and creatively interact with IIT. By bringing together diverse forms of knowledge – ranging from disciplinary and technical to tacit and expert – we examine three relational techniques: critical cartography, sensory attunement and place-based pedagogy.