BioBauhaus: design and life sciences
In 1919 Walter Gropius merged the College of Fine Arts and the School of Arts and Crafts into the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. It was the making of a new type of art school, a pioneer of modernity. In 1923 Gropius summarized his vision with the radical formula “Art and Technology — A New Unity.”
Studies at the Bauhaus began with the obligatory preliminary course, which taught methods for working with creative materials using a new and sometimes experimental educational approach. This was followed by training in the workshops, which broke the division between theory and practice.
The practical work in the workshops was at the heart of education at the Bauhaus. Individual workshops adopted a dual mentorship approach, with two complementary mentors: a “master of form” as the artist responsible for design and aesthetic aspects, and a “master of works”, a craftsman who imparted the technical skills and abilities related to the craft.
Design is by principle an interdisciplinary field. It was born from the combination of crafts and engineering and arts. A very revealing output was a survey about the perception of design, science, and art that Open Science School organized during a workshop at Tsinghua University (清华大学) in Beijing in May 2016:
From this survey it is clear that at least the perception of Design is as an interdisciplinary field of study: it mixes the ideas and concepts of both art and science. However, it is different from all of them. Design has an objective and a methodology, it tries to solve a problem or to question a subject, just as science or engineering can do. On the other hand, it doesn’t rely on the scientific method to drive conclusions and uses many artistic tools to convey its message and conclusions. We believe that science and art are both creative fields of study. Design nowadays has diverged and expanded, having developed tools linked to ethnography, arts or technology that allow us to connect to people. Hence, design seems to have bridged some of the gaps between science and art.
As a synthetic biologist, I see designers as a keystone in the development of technology through their questioning of the interaction between people and technology as well as its future impact. Synthetic biology has the capability of changing nature, including us — humans. With the development of technology, we are able to engineer and design organisms to create or destroy. Concurrently, we ought to take into account how this technology will influence society beyond its technical use. How will it affect the language, laws and relationships between living material and society? To help with these questions, I have been part of a team within the association Open Science School with the objectives of creating spaces of interaction between artists, designers, and scientists.
“Scientists are very much entangled in their culture and this culture is not pristine, untouched by other cultures and practices.” (Bruno Latour).
Bruno Latour’s theory of construction of scientific facts explains how science lacks contribution from other disciplines. Having an input outside the scientific method into science is not a refusal of the scientific method. It is both an acknowledgement that the problems science aims at resolving are beyond the reach of scientists alone, and also a realization that science is embedded in a culture that we need to consider when defining scientific facts. Co-Lab workshops is our attempt to prove that such effort is needed to connect science with people from different disciplines to challenge the ways technology can be utilized in various settings and scenarios.
We initially asked ourselves “how do we facilitate the communication of science and design?” We were inspired by the Bauhaus teaching method which replaced the traditional academic pupil-teacher relationship with the idea of a community of artists working together. Learning by teaching allows a very effective transfer of knowledge, because it makes participants stronger in the skills that they master and also creates an space to acquire new skills. In order for true collaboration to happen, mutual respect must exist. These dynamics flip the teacher-student role constantly and effectively create an horizontal scenario for interaction to happen.
We challenge the gap existing between these disciplines, creating an universal language for interdisciplinary idea generation. During the Bauhaus Weimar period, the workshops were co-led by a craftsman as a master of works and an artist as a master of form. We also co-assign the leading role of the courses to a scientist and a designer and show how real conversations, controversies and agreements take place between them, so that the participants acquire their own perspective and are encouraged to challenge the content they are receiving.
Being able to exchange knowledge is the most valuable tool that a community can have. Being able to use the skills that we have learned from our field in another discipline makes us valuable. Through the collaboration and discussions in the workshop, we hope the participants will be inspired to bring back these workshops to make this happen in their city, spreading the significance of interdisciplinarity.
Most importantly, we hope to encourage participants to connect and form valuable relationships and to help bridging the gap between disciplines. At the end, we believe that we need to start creating a community of people who are interested in discussing and engaging in these issues which are bigger than those which a single discipline can manage. I have realized that any kind of collaboration is initiated by a personal understanding and an inter-personal relation, and that’s exactly what we want to spark between scientists and designers.
Bauhaus wasn’t only famous because of their design and avant-garde art, but also because of its liberal approach to politics and lifestyle. Their parties and celebrations were legendary. Because of this, they were repeatedly expelled from city to city following the expansion of the Nazi Party in Germany. The school was officially dissolved in 1933 in Berlin, a fact that actually contributed to the spreading of their ideas internationally. We resonate with this engagement and actively promote non-discrimination, gender equality, copyleft, and the democratization of science and technology.
