Technological development of graphic, visual and audiovisual projects in alternative spaces of circulation and learning

Acosta, Paula (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

Buitrago, Silvia (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

Páez, Camilo (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

Priscila Farias (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil - in person)

Justification

Design as an academic discipline and its consequent level of professionalization in the academic environments has transformed historically and contextually with the establishment of theoretical and methodological frameworks that led to a gradual formalization and institutionalization of both practices and production processes emerging in the empirical and informal space. This highlighted the structural bases of the trade –as is the case of the graphic and visual arts– which were transformed over time together with the establishment of new media and technologies, which led to a curricular focus, although interdependent in form and content, on specialization, research and the creation of programs conducive to post-graduate training from a multidisciplinary contemporary and global vision.

This constant transformation receives from other areas of knowledge, incorporating in the curricular field academic legacies of disciplines such as the arts, architecture, visual cultures among others. Thus, the inherited curricular tradition (Goodson, 2000) has produced a series of curricula in which the original disciplines shifted with the change of programmatic contents endorsed by the academic institution.

Despite being a discipline linked to technological work, the vocational nature of design has been overlooked by the academic exercise, which in the desire to professionalize contents, has prioritized theoretical conceptualization, leaving aside the tradition of exercise and knowledge derived from the uses of techniques and technologies. From this perspective, we can see how the relationship between technology and society is not homogeneous, since in singular space-times the uses and appropriations of devices are far from the domain of prevailing technologies, even putting to the test concepts such as obsolescence and productivity from the discursive logics of political and economic sectors that characterize the views on the Global South.

This performative knowledge, consolidated in the historical time of experimentation and doing as a starting point of any analog or digital creative process, together with the expansion and access to information on technical-technological issues, and with an increasingly broad visual culture, allows this type of practice and off-center knowledge to be configured not only as alternative forms of production,  but as spaces of agency that challenge the normative and hegemonic, the methodological, and the institutionalization of a practice whose roots are anchored in the collective space of the common.

The reflection on this constant transformation and the learning that has been retrieved from the technological concern of the different learning communities, are key inputs to understand the designs of each environment and build collaboratively a historical narrative whose identity is defined from the practice of design and its participants.

Objectives

• Build a narrative located from technological appropriations as learning processes alternative to the academic institution, constructing new perspectives and experiences for a multiple history of design.
• Identify trends, behaviors and means related to the language of design processed from the use and appropriation of technologies, knowledge, practices and pedagogies decentered from institutional and regulatory structures.
• Establish relationships between the learning processes of the trade and the curricular structures that have been implemented in the design programs in academic institutions.
• Identify paradigmatic case studies where graphic, visual and/or audiovisual projects and practices converge, characterized by technical and/or technological experimentation and the production of knowledge from the productive perspective of these disciplines.