Electricity and the Hybrid Imagination - Mixing Technology and Culture
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Transcript of Electricity and the Hybrid Imagination - Mixing Technology and Culture
Andrew Jamison Aalborg University
Electricity and the Hybrid Imagination -
Mixing Technology and Culture
Based on:
PROCEED (a Program of Research on Challenges and Opprtunities in Engineering Education in Denmark)
• improve the education of engineers, so that they might better be able to meet the challenges they can be expected to face in their working lives,
• compare the different ways in which the challenges have been responded to in Denmark as well as internationally, • identify examples of “best practice” in regard to reforming engineering education, and
• reach out to engineering educators in a series of interactive workshops and seminars
The aims of PROCEED are to:
The sustainability challenge – how to deal with environmental problems, energy and other resource exploitation and, not least, climate change
The societal challenge – how to deal with the permeation of our societies by technology with new design skills in socially responsible ways
The technoscientific challenge – how to combine scientific understanding and technical skills in new forms of competence
Challenges Facing Engineering
A market-oriented, or commercial strategy: emphasizing entrepreneurship and innovation
An academic-oriented, or professional strategy:
focusing on expertise and independence
A socially-oriented, or ”hybrid” strategy: combining technical training with cultural engagement
Contending Response Strategies
Product-driven, ”technical fixing” the designer as consultant or entrepreneur
Project-driven, ”design for design’s sake”
the designer as a skilled craftsman or artisan
Problem-driven, ”hybrid imagining” the designer as change agent, or activist
Different Conceptions of Design
Problem-driven, rather than disciplinary, or market-driven
A focus on processes of socio-cultural change
Reflective, rather than explanatory or commercial ambition
Participatory, interventionist methods
Personal engagement in what is studied
Hybrid Imagining, or Change-Oriented Research
Hybrid Imaginations in the Renaissance
Artists and engineers in combination
Connecting magic to humanist
movement
Leading to the scientific revolution
and the experimental method
For example: Leonardo da Vinci,the artist-engineer
Scholars and craftsmen in combination
Connecting science and romanticism
Creating engineering sciences
And engineering universities
Hybrid Imaginations in Industrialization
• mixed Naturphilosophie with experimentation
• to look for the ”spirit in nature”...
• discovered electromagnetism (1820)
• and founded DTU in 1829
A Hybrid Imagination:Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851)
connecting technology and society
mixing technical skills with social consciousness
creating, among other things, the professional
designer
and the use of wind energy for electricity production
Hybrid Imaginations in Industrialization, 2
A Hybrid Imagination:
William Morris (1834-1896)
A romantic poet turned designer
Combined artistry and socialism
Mixed tradition and innovation
A utopian who was also practical
A major influence on:…
Interior and industrial design
Architecture: Wright, Gehry, Utzon
Urban and regional planning
Socialist politics and culture
The ”education of desire”
From ”Useful Work versus Useless Toil”:
”Our epoch has invented machines which would have
appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of
those machines we have as yet made no use. They are
called ”labor-saving” machines – a commonly used
phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we
do not get what we expect. What they really do is to
reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the
unskilled.”
”
A Hybrid Imagination:Poul La Cour (1846-1908)
- a ”populist” scientist-engineer
- taught physics at Askov folk high school
- wrote Historisk Mathematik and Historisk Fysik
- built laboratory for wind energy experimentation
- founded Danish Wind Electricity Society in 1903
The Poul La Cour Museum, Askov
(re)combining artistic expression andengineering
focusing on the human and cultural dimensions of technology
creating professional schools and colleges for design
and bringing humanities into engineering education
Hybrid Imaginations in Modernization
A Hybrid Imagination: The Bauhaus (1919-1933)
"art and technology – a new unity”
A Hybrid Imagination:Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
American writer and social critic
one of the last ”public intellectuals”
one of the first ”human ecologists”
a cultural perspective on technology
active in regional planning
movements
”Today we begin to see that the improvement of cities is no
matter for one-sided reforms: the task of city design
involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization. We
must alter the parasitic and predatory modes of life that
now play so large a part, and we must create...an effective
symbiosis, or co-operative living together.”
From The Culture of Cities, 1938
combining the ”two cultures” (C.P. Snow)
connecting technology to the ”counter-culture”
”grass-roots” or community-oriented engineering
and a social movement for ”appropriate technology”
Hybrid Imaginings in the 1960s and 1970s
Hybrid Imaginations: Computer Liberation
outgrowth of 1960s counter-culture
based on the ”hacker ethic”
led to making of personal computers
idea to make information free and open
lives on in open source ”movement”
Stewart Brand, creator of Whole Earth Catalog
Steve Wozniak,Apple’s co-founder
Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib (1974)
Grass-roots engineering
Mobilization of traditions of popular education
People’s high schools, cooperative movement
Linking of universities and civil society
Organization for renewable energy (OVE)a key actor
Many local socio-technical experiments
Especially in wind energy as alternative to nuclear
Nordic Folkcenter for Renewable EnergyThe New Alchemy Institute Ark
”Appropriate technology” in the 1970s
A Hybrid Imagination Today:
At the discursive, or macro levelconnecting technical solutions explicitly to social and environmental problems
At the institutional, or meso levelorganizing spaces for collective learning across society
At the personal, or micro levelcombining scientific-technical competence with socio-cultural understanding: cultivating change agents
For example:Fritjof Capra
• physicist-turned-environmentalist• author of many popular books• founder of Center for Ecoliteracy
“Since the outstanding
characteristic of the biosphere is
its inherent ability to sustain life,
a sustainable human community
must be designed in such a
manner that its technologies and
social institutions honor,
support, and cooperate with
nature's inherent ability to
sustain life.”
The Alley Flat Initiative is a joint collaboration between the
University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development,
the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation,
and the Austin Community Design and Development
Center. The Alley Flat Initiative proposes a new sustainable,
green affordable housing alternative for Austin.
For example: The Alley Flat Initiative
The initial goal of the project was to build two prototype alley
flats (aka granny flats)- one for each of two families in East
Austin - that would showcase both the innovative design and
environmental sustainability features of the alley flat designs.
These prototypes will demonstrate how sustainable housing
can support growing communities by being affordable and
adaptable. The first of these prototypes celebrated its house
warming with the community in June of 2008, and the second
prototype is slated to begin construction in early 2009.
From the website:
Moving into the second alley flat...
Professor Steven Moore
The long-term objective of the Alley Flat Initiative is to create
an adaptive and self-perpetuating delivery system for
sustainable and affordable housing in Austin. The "delivery
system" would include not only efficient housing designs
constructed with sustainable technologies, but also
innovative methods of financing and home ownership that
benefit all neighborhoods in Austin.
http://www.thealleyflatinitiative.org/
Appropriating reality