Last week I heard Sara Diamond, President of Ontario College of Art & Design, talk about The Fine Art of Context Creation: Cross-Disciplinary Methods in New Media. Here’s some of what I heard:
Artists
- Artists are social critics & lateral thinkers that identify and fill in gaps in tool kit.
- They develop their own tools and fill gaps in dominant tool systems, which often results in pushing technology & science forward.
- Do it for selfish reasons: want to make something but the technology is not there.
Designers
- Designers sniff the zeitgeist. They have a "trained" gut feel.
- Designers also push technologies but they are more process based: understand the user, understand materials
- Designers are eager for stuff to work (generalization). They really care if things works (unlike artists).
- Represent a productive mix of optimism & pessimism; mix of pushing boundaries & containment
Contemporary Context Demands Cooperation
- A co-reliance of knowledge is needed for developing solutions
- Need to bring processes and knowledge together to achieve viable prototypes
- Boundary Objects are gifts between cultures, terms that are redefined through collaboration or emergent use
- Taught to approach problems in different ways in science, engineering, and design
- Our challenge is not the technology but the communication between people.
- Leadership needs to shift within teams based on tasks
- Share physical & network process+ spaces
- People like structures and will do incredible things with them
- Method 1: Participatory Design
- Method 2: Rapid Prototyping
- Method 3: Take things out to the public
- Really important for engineers to engage with the design process
- Important for designers to understand how hard it is to build things