Work done by students at SfG Biel/Bienne (1999).
The body is education
In the present scenario of design education experiments are emerging that explore the senses as an indispensable condition to produce knowledge through the body.
By Azalea Seratoni
This article (qui in italiano) has been featured on Progetto Grafico, an international graphic design magazine published by Aiap, the italian association for visual communication design. The issue #31, “Around the body”, has been edited by Claude Marzotto, Jonathan Pierini and Silvia Sfligiotti. You can subscribe to the magazine here and buy the current issue here.
Design as a discipline originated at the Bauhaus, thanks to the experiments introduced on the preliminary course known as Grundkurs in Weimar and Dessau, Grundlehre at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and then in English-speaking countries as Basic design. Two artists, Kandinsky and Klee, invited to hold classes on the Grundkurs at the Bauhaus, were to turn their personal poetics into transmissible knowledge, objectifying and defining the discipline, in a way that culminated for Kandinsky in Point and Line to Plane and for Klee in the Theory of form and figuration.
Walter Gropius also called Johannes Itten, who introduced a different model of transmitting knowledge, closer to the oriental disciplines and based on the idea of training able to put the student in a position to act.
In Ulm, Giovanni Anceschi witnessed this approach, having practiced in Herbert Lindinger’s classes, Itten’s own Gestural Fluency exercise: freehand spirals involving wrist movements in a sort of dance that would help relax the wrist, in a somatic and sensory gestural action that stimulated and produced body awareness.
Anceschi saw as a crucial ingredient to the originalities of the Basic design course, its ability to adapt to circumstances and to the development of new scenarios¹. This was confirmed by the fact it included a physical exercise which seemed to put into practice both the vitalist approach and Itten’s method, as befitting the will to expand and contaminate the discipline so that it would include the new areas of technology (particularly interactivity) and the critical presence of the computer.
In Corpo a corpo by Cristina Chiappini it is the body that sets the scene through a tale that translates into a sequence of actions. The brief is clear — a simulation in miniature of a design — forcing you to use what you have about you or to hand to create an interactive and modular board of images.
By using its parts, and reflecting on certain anomalies or qualities, the body unfolds, acts, gives, with humor or narcissism, or by pure yet unobtrusive erotic design, thereby shaping experiences and fields of events, alphabets, words or wave effects driven by an input device or a click. Appearing amid the hypnotic and entertaining game of scrolling and interaction on a square grid with elements that light up with surprises, wonders, pranks and visual and sound devices, is, among others found in the margins, the image of the “Munari man”, described over half a century ago by Umberto
Eco in the Almanacco Bompiani, who is “forced to have a thousand eyes, on the nose, the neck, shoulders, fingers, on his butt” and who “rises up, restless, in a world that drowns him in stimuli that assail him from all sides”, and “finds himself the restless inhabitant of an expanding universe”². It is perhaps hardly surprising Bruno Munari comes to mind because, in Italy, thanks to the lack of a university of Design, it is precisely in art, and more specifically in that intermediate area between design and art — that Munari mastered so well — that basic design came into being.
Starting from the epistemological mutation brought about by Cristina Chiappini’s interactive kinetic Basic design and trying to capture and describe some of the experiments that put the body at the center of teaching, and starting too to register an aptitude that appears to be taking shape in the current scenario (not only Italian) of design education, what is perhaps emerging is that everything is being played out on the boundaries and cross overs between the disciplines. And that body, space-time, and movement are the basic elements on which these programs should be founded.
Educate through/with design: stimulate creative learning in museums and classroom settings: Transposition in space of exercises from the Conditional Design Workbook.
Corrado Levi told the Architectural Design students at the Politecnico di Milano that the body is design and architecture starts from there. And Riccardo Blumer seems to be saying the same at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio. His first year course begins with exercises, because movement increases the ability to perceive ourselves in relation to space. Kinaesthesia turns our body into an active device, a basic cognitive tool for apperception of the world and for designing prototypes in scale 1:1 which will be suitable for the bodies who will use them. Every year a different object is taken into consideration: a minimal space that is worn and, in its articulation encompassing the body, it acquiesces to a gesture or a step; a large wave triggered by the student community to give shape to energy; an outline that multiplies and becomes the topological measure of the city; a point around which to dance and generate a place.
The course organized by Giorgio Camuffo, Emanuela De Cecco and Jonathan Pierini at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bolzano focused on the concept of place in its broader sense of culture, history, space and on designing the experience of it as a means of learning. In the various workshops and activities developed during the summer semester (2015), the discussion focused on the interaction between people’s bodies and their behavior, on the unpredictable and multiple uses and effects that experimenting a space involves, on the possibility of extending or forcing the limits of our perception. To fully understand, perhaps, that the world doesn’t exist unless there is someone who lives it, enjoys it and dances in it, in a dense and interconnected web of actions, nodes, grafts and reciprocity that greatly resembles what Tomás Saraceno installed at the 53rd Venice Biennale (Galaxy Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009).
The educational experiments of Susanna Stammbach operate in the spaces between notions and needs like sound and writing. Drawing is for Susanna Stammbach a daily exercise performed in her collection of notebooks in which she explores the immoderate and plural territory of a very original way of planning her writing and shaping her expression. She teaches the History of writing and typography, and does so through the tonal variations that her body can produce. She draws huge letters with chalk on the blackboard, and amplifies the distinctive aspects of each letter with her voice.
Students imitate the gestures on large sheets of paper laid out on their desks. It is the somatic and audible return that immediately and viscerally identifies the quality of a shape, or calligraphic sign, drawing, or typographic element, but the orchestration of the visual and verbal storytelling of a sequence of pages as well.
Susanna Stammbach, who learned a great deal from Wolfgang Weingart and Kurt Hauert at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel, but especially from Adrian Frutiger, transmits her practice through manual exercise and a methodology based on experience and observation, where the learning model, in the Basic design tradition, is underlying rather than declared; the student practices and makes it theirs, before formulating it (or hearing it formulated) using an epistemological re-founding and inductive approach. This is the only way you can assimilate, says Susanna Stammbach, the wesen of shapes, their being.
In a very different cultural landscape, Ko Sliggers, on the sun-bathed terrace at the Abadir Academy of Design and Visual Arts, carries out writing experiments, first on the floor with water and then with ink on large sheets of paper using large handmade brushes, and assembling found objects. These are abstract, gestural and ephemeral calligraphy exercises that start from the spontaneous handwriting of each student. Look and design of an alphabet are improvised, and among the most interesting letters, a series of three is chosen which is then repeated, increasing the size and accelerating the pace, using different techniques and tools, invented and manufactured there and then. The movement initially only involves the wrist and then the whole body.
When working at the Dumbar studio, and influenced by Polish graphic design — in particular the Warsaw school of Henryk Tomaszewski and Grzegorz Marszałek — Ko Sliggers returned to the calligraphy exercises he had learned as a student in Chris Brand’s classes at the Akademie St. Joost at Breda, actualizing them for new learning opportunities.
At the Bauhaus we were given the chance to witness the attempt to transform personal artistic poetics into shareable and transmittable knowledge. With Itten the exploration of the senses was indispensable if the student was to become competent and reach episteme. Maybe the same will happen to these early experiments of teaching design in a way that rediscovers the centrality of the body.
Lettering workshop, Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo, 2016.
- “Basic design is the central discipline of design. As a statute it is a very particular and original discipline, in that it intertwines preparatory notions (the practice of teaching skills) and disciplinary foundation (theoretical thought to which the activity is anchored). But there is another extraordinarily original feature in basic design, namely the inherent plasticity of the body of specific knowledge that composes it. It is understood that basic design wants to build the foundations of a “configuration” (Gestaltung), but while the foundations of mathematics tend to remain decidedly constant over time, in the case of design the foundations are, as a matter of principle, adaptive. In time basic design carries its own horizon along with it — so to speak –. In other words, some exercises (and therefore some focal disciplinary points) expire and new ones are born, adapting to circumstances and developments of the times. It is a rigorous discipline, but also a living and metamorphic one”.
G. Anceschi, Una favoletta per capire che cos’è il basic design, “Progetto grafico”, №12–13, September 2008, pp. 186–187. - Umberto Eco, La forma del disordine (The shape of disorder), “Almanacco Bompiani” 1962 (Milano: Bompiani, 1962) p. 187.
