Design, Art and Science

Londoño, Felipe César (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

Gutiérrez, Alfredo (Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano)

Fedja Vukić (University of Zagreb, Croatia - online)

Presentation

The changes in design education in recent years have been evident, mainly due to the need to adapt academic programs to a changing society. The skills, principles and practices of Design have evolved, and Design is now conceived as an act of thinking the world, as a process that motivates active perception through deliberation and sharing. Design, under this approach, becomes an instrument of change, through the use of open and distributed knowledge, which makes it possible to improve social relations, collective learning, the expansion of the cognitive capacities of individuals, greater productivity of companies with human and environmental responsibility, and more innovation in processes, since its scale of action has expanded to relate to other disciplines, other knowledge and other fields of action of design for transitions. It is in this line that it is proposed to open a program of Design, Art and Science at the University of Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, which favors the creation of interdisciplinary network structures, as a way to face the complexities and the great challenges of the XXI century.

Justification

In line with the invitation made by the International Mission of Wise Men that will be formed in Colombia in 2019 and that is stated in the document: "Colombia towards a Knowledge Society" (Vol. 1 Page 42), "... knowledge, which includes science, humanities, arts and ancestral knowledge, is essential for the development of new and creative alternatives to this crisis". Further on it mentions that "the need for this type of articulations is felt in various scenarios and in recent years it is being proposed in some to move from an emphasis on STEM areas to STEAMD areas (adding art and design)."

In a broader context, it is possible to affirm that the processes of digitalization in society bring as a consequence the convergence of traditionally distant knowledge. Design, Art and Science are fields of knowledge that today are united, largely due to the possibilities of interaction and exchange of scientists and artists, engineers and designers, through interactive systems and knowledge networks. Digital systems recover the unification between art and science by promoting the integration of aesthetic and technological knowledge.

As Sommerer and Mignonneau state[1], the history of science is observed, first as a unitary system where the principles of the Christian church converged with ethics and the human soul. At the time of St. Thomas Aquino, scientific codes were established based on the combination of Aristotelian principles with religious precepts and all questions to understand the meaning and significance of the world and nature were related to God and the Christian church. During the Renaissance and into the nineteenth century, Kemp asserts, there were certain "special kinds of affinity between the major intellectual and observational concerns of the visual arts and sciences in Europe"[2]. The study of nature, through vision, was considered essential to understanding the rules of the structure of the world.

Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes questioned the unitary conceptual structure of the world, giving rise to the Scientific Revolution. During the 16th and 17th centuries, these thinkers were responsible for establishing that the world was not the center of the universe, that nature had a mathematical description and that the world could be predicted and controlled through science. According to Charles Snow[3], the Industrial Revolution was responsible for definitively separating art and science, art and humanities, or literature and science, but also for subdividing science into multiple fields of specialization.

However, note Sommerer and Mignonneau, recent movements in digital arts and especially in Interactive Art, which apply new methods, new technologies and new concepts about art and creativity, suggest a new approach between design, art and science, a new contact that emerges within interdisciplinary fields that, as a whole, generate projects that explore the behavior of human beings in front of machines, and the possibilities of interactivity as a new form of human communication.

Observation and analysis of recent developments in creation, interactive networking, research in artificial intelligence and artificial life, reveal a philosophy of breaking down the Cartesian division of mind and matter, and bringing design, art and science closer together. Recently developed technologies of digital image representation, Shaw asserts[4], offer new methods and new paradigms that extend the spatial idea of artwork, not only in terms of the structure of the image itself, but also in terms of the space of interaction between the image and the viewer. Specifically, the interrelation between Design, Art and Science is presented in the statements proposed by Rich Gold in the R.E.D matrix (The Experiments in the Future of Reading, 2006) where he places science, engineering, design and art in independent quadrants, which are interrelated by John Maeda in his "Quadrilateral Bermuda". Maeda, founder of the Computation and Aesthetics Group of the Medialab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, draws a rectangular plot with four quadrants, each dedicated to a different way of seeing the world: science, engineering, design and art[5].

According to Maeda, each plot is assigned a vision, as follows: to Science, exploration; to Engineering, invention; to Design, communication; to Art, expression. Maeda, at the opening of his course in 2006, warns his students of a certain animosity between engineers and scientists, just as between artists and designers. Each of them, he mentions, sees themselves as slightly more important than the others, and so he suggests a "Bermuda Quadrilateral," which would make it possible to navigate disciplinary divisions in the context of academia. In doing so, Maeda proposes to move away from the divisions to observe a systemic relationship between them that enable their interaction.

Later, in 2016, Neri Oxman, an Israeli-American architect, designer, and professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she leads the Mediated Matter research group, publishes "Age of Entanglement" in the MIT Press's Journal of Design and Science (JoDS), where she exposes how science, design, engineering, and art are intertwined with each other in contemporary society. Oxman takes up Maesda's postulates and seeks to map these four domains of creative exploration through the visualization of creative energy that she calls the Krebs Cycle of Creativity.

On the other hand, Wolfgang Schäffner in his text: "The Design Turn. A scientific revolution in the spirit of design”[6], states that the evolution of technologies has opened a new interdisciplinary order of knowledge, where design acquires an important role as an integrating force for the different scientific disciplines.

Based on the above, the Design, Art and Science Roundtable will present the actions that this program has carried out, in liaison with the Master in Interactive Design of the University of Buenos Aires, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile and the Master in Media Arts of the University of Chile, the Media Lab Network / Brazil (Universidade Federal de Goiás, Universidade de Brasília, Universidade Federal do Sul e Sudeste do Pará, Universidade Anhembi-Morumbi and Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas), and the Faculties of Natural Sciences and Engineering, and Arts and Design of the Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano. One of them is the Chair, proposed to UNESCO, in Design, Art and Science, a Chair in Art and Climate (in liaison with the international event Balance Unbalance and Maloka) and the PhD in Design, Art and Science that is now filed with the Ministry of National Education of Colombia, for its analysis and approval.

Objectives

To analyze, from the Design, Art and Science Roundtable, the integration of these fields of knowledge for the resolution of complex problems, and to debate the value that Design acquires today as an integrating nucleus of diverse knowledge. Design, Art and Science, in this line, are integrated through various strategies that today are fundamental to give a twist to design in relation to other fields of knowledge.

Bibliographic References

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Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005; for a free PDF, see www.nap.edu/catalog/11153/ facilitating-interdisciplinary-research)

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[1] Sommerer, Christa. Mignonneau, Laurent, ed. Art @ Science. Viena: Springer-Verlag, 1998, pag. 7.

[2] Kemper, Martín. La Ciencia del Arte. La Óptica en el Arte Occidental de Brunelleschi a Seurat. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, S. A., 2000, pág. 9. Edición original: The Science of Art. Yale University Press, 1990.

[3] Snow, Charles. The Two Cultures. Cambridge, MA. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

[4] Shaw, Jeffrey. “Convergence of Art, Science and Terchnology”. En Sommerer, Christa. Mignonneau, Laurent, ed.. Art @ Science. Viena: Springer-Verlag, 1998, pág. 163.

[5] https://maeda.pm/2017/11/14/the-bermuda-quadrilateral-2006/

[6] https://revistasojs.ucaldas.edu.co/index.php/kepes/article/view/479