DESIGN MEANS SHAPING — THE NEW EUROPEAN BAUHAUS
German version available
More than a hundred years ago, in 1919, the “Staatliches Bauhaus” was founded in Weimar and its social utopian ideas had an impact far beyond design and architecture — until today.
A “laboratory of modernity”, in other words, whose new edition was initiated by the European Union last year.
How successful this will be depends on the actors and their allies who will come together to form the “New European Bauhaus”. Here is the impetus for a new movement as formulated by the EU:
The New European Bauhaus initiative makes the connection between the European Green Deal and our living spaces. It is a call to all Europeans to develop and realize ideas of a sustainable and inclusive, aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally appealing future together.
The new European Bauhaus is an emerging interdisciplinary creative movement — and you can be part of it!
· It is an experimentation and networking platform to foster collaboration between thinkers and doers who want to shape our future forms of coexistence.
· It is a bridge between two worlds: Science and technology on the one hand and art and culture on the other.
· It is a call to take a new perspective and see our environmental and digital challenges as opportunities to change our lives for the better.
· It is a new approach to finding innovative solutions to complex social problems in a participatory process. The aim of the initiative is to align our thinking, our behavior patterns and our markets with new ways of living and building, among other things by influencing public procurement.
(Source: European Union, https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/about/about-initiative_en)
INTERDISCIPLINARY AND PARTICIPATORY
In any case, it is interesting and encouraging to see that design in its interdisciplinary and participatory process is seen by the EU as crucial to address the key challenges of our time.
Taking new perspectives, experimenting, thinking and doing, finding innovative solutions to complex problems — all this applies not only to the business context, but also to the social tasks we face. Participation and sharing are essential factors in counteracting what we are currently discussing as the “division of society”.
COMPROMISE IS INDISPENSABLE IN DEMOCRACY
This is also how Angela Merkel put it when asked by the Süddeutsche Zeitung (a well-known Newspaper in Southern Germany) what worries her when she thinks about Germany: “I fear that we are increasingly having problems with compromise-building, which is indispensable in a democracy.”
However, compromise is always preceded by the acceptance of different points of view — promoted by openness and respectful discourse. Therefore, it is certainly worthwhile to take up the history of the Bauhaus movement in order to counteract simplification and the formation of bubbles and, in the end, possibly even to develop new utopias of our coexistence.
Author: Stefan Wacker Stefan Wacker
