Bauhaus Study Rooms: Habitat

COOP Design Research Studenten auf der Brüstung der Mensa-Terrasse um 2020.

Date: 3 – 5 Dec 2020
Format: Youtube Livestream

Bauhaus Study Rooms is an annual knowledge exchange where the Bauhaus alumni from Bauhaus Lab, Bauhaus Open Studios and the MSc COOP Design Research gather and engage with the annual theme of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation: “By inviting alumnx of each of these programmes to spend time together on site or online, the Foundation aims to transform the Bauhaus building back into a temporary learning place, which allows to explore and experience the conditions of collective knowledge production.” This year theme is  „Habitat“, and I am delighted to participate as a speaker in one of three round-table sessions – the panel „Inhabiting“.

The event will be live-streamed on the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s YouTube channel. Find out more about the Bauhaus Study Rooms here or see the event schedule here or send an e-mail to studyrooms [​at​] bauhaus-dessau.de for more information.

Eastbound: Vietnamese design through the lens of decoloniality

Master thesis submitted for the academic degree of MSc. COOP Design Research – The one-year MSc. program conducted by Anhalt University of Applied Sciences and Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in cooperation with Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Hanoi 1979–Tràng Tiền Street, Opera House (Source: Stokvis, 1979)

Abstract

Eastbound: Vietnamese Design through the Lens of Decoloniality explores the manifestations of coloniality of knowledge in design throughout the nation’s history of building, defence and formation. Even though Vietnam has a history of cultural richness and diversity that spans over 4,000 years, little has been written about Vietnamese design and its cultural ways of making. Within a global design discourse, it is effectively non-existent. Locally, Vietnamese design is known to have emerged as recent as the implementation of Đổi Mới, the country’s economic and political reform in 1986. This does not seem like a coincidence but rather as a feature of the ‘subjugated knowledge’–one that has characterised the condition of Vietnamese design better than the canon of design history and values dubbed as ‘universal’ and governed by the Western world. The history of Vietnamese design has been an untold story. Like many other kinds of knowledge(s) produced in the Far East or the Global South, it is often ruled out, deemed less significant. Decoloniality, however, has proven otherwise.

What they talk about when they talk about design ethics

.a literature review, 20th February 2020. 

Introduction

To paraphrase Haruki Murakami in his 2008 memoir What I talk about when I talk about running, most of what I know about design ethics I’ve learned through reading. This literature review paper is part endeavor of re-reading design’s past, part terminological study. In an effort to obtain a brief understanding of design ethics, the paper is essentially asking the question of what it means for design and their creators to be ethical. In order to answer this question, the paper will walk down the history of design through primary sources such as original literature and research papers. Ultimately, it aims to highlight different perceptions of ethics in the context of design while effectively providing a narrative to each ethical stance mentioned with regards to the cultural, political and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Diagnosis and Problematisation: If Michel Foucault was interested in Design Research

One of the most challenging and fundamental elements in any design research project or endeavour is this frequently overlooked component: the question. While one might expect to encounter the frustration of client relationship or the demands for fast turnarounds, one can easily forget that the undertaking of those processes is often in response to the question itself. As much as how the rationale behind each question can vary from being rhetorical to theoretical and practical, the definitions and functions of design research are still changing and constantly being reshaped along with the evolution of the design discourse. 

Michel Foucault in his study. Source: Unknown.

Taking the role of a design researcher, I am not only interested in approaching the design discourse as an object of study, but also questioning the building blocks that contribute to the knowledge of design discourse we know today as well as the subjects whose power decides where and how each block was installed. In his paper titled ‘What is a “history of the present”? On Foucault’s genealogies and their critical preconditions’, David Garland, a professor of Law and Sociology at New York University, revealed that ‘[…] historical record yields up its secrets only to those who know precisely how to ask’ (2014, p. 379). Being new to the works of Michel Foucault, I set out to explore his method of historization: first to achieve a basic understanding of Foucauldian approach and secondly, to identify the possibilities in which it can be beneficial to the study of design.

Ultimately, the paper will ask if Foucauldian way of historical inquiry can provide an alternative framework for a design research student to contribute and furthermore, start questioning the design discourse regarding its fundamental theories and practices.

Going through all of the textual works of Michel Foucault is a daunting task, being able to comprehend them is even a more challenging one. In order to prove Foucauldian method relevant to the study of design, this paper will first specify the categorizations of design research as identified in Trygve Faste and Haakon Faste’s paper titled ‘Demystifying “Design Research”: Design is not research, research is design’ (2012). Then, it will elaborate on Michel Foucault’s approach to discourse analysis and lastly, it will make an effort to synthesize the framework of historization that Foucault used to address his object of study by focusing on his ‘diagnosis’ and ‘problematisation’ (Garland, 2014).

Design as Education: Pedagogy for the ‘Real World’

During his time served as the second director of the Bauhaus from 1928 to 1930, Hannes Meyer was confronted with a dilemma: ‘As director of the Bauhaus, I fought against the Bauhaus style…’ (Meyer, as cited in Weltge-Wortmann, 1993). Instead of embracing the Bauhaus’s manifesto – the unity of art and technology, Meyer upheld only the latter by advocating for an entirely functional and practical program while orienting all design activity at the Bauhaus toward mass production (ibid.). His ideology and favor for pragmatism reflected greatly in a socially-oriented approach to design and teaching, especially during the undertaking of the ADGB Trade Union School where spatial design played an important role in initiating interactions and a close-knit relationship between faculty and students (Schnaidt, 1965). In a collaborative effort, Meyer assigned his students with a diversity of tasks ranging from background analysis and looking at natural surrounding environment to conducting user research, planning and construction all the way to the handover of the building (Original Bauhaus, 2019). This kind of practical experience was unique to architectural education at the time. It motivated students to think in economic terms, investigate social situation and prioritize the people’s concerns over political agenda (ibid.).

Hannes Meyer surveying the building site of the school of the Federation of German Trade Unions in Bernau by Berlin, 1928. Photo: Erich Consemüller, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, © Stephan Consemüller

As the second director of this renowned school of design, Hannes Meyer is still overshadowed by the world-famous Bauhaus directors Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Historically, this is chiefly due to his involvement in explicitly left wing politics. For him, art, design and architecture were not independent disciplines. In interaction with the sciences, he saw them as components integral to a comprehensive restructuring of society under the maxim “Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf” (The needs of the people instead of the need for luxury). He no longer awarded them an elitist special status, but saw them as a serving part of society. – BMIAA

Much like the teaching approach of the Bauhaus in general and in Hannes Meyer’s era in particular, Black College Mountain’s pedagogical strategy was built upon a foundation of ‘a better understanding of social relation’ and a strong sense of community (Blume and Felix, 2015). At Black Mountain College, students were encouraged to take full responsibility of their own learning module and actively engage with the world through creative process and everyday life tasks from growing their own food to administrative duties (Fully Awake: Black Mountain College, 2008). The college’s interdisciplinary strategy aimed to facilitate practical responsibilities and the creative arts as equally important components to intellectual growth: ‘We are finally on our own grounds…what we should carry on, I think, is our belief that behaviour and social adjustment are as interesting and important as knowledge’ (Blume and Felix, 2015). This enabled students not only to cultivate creativity, self-discipline and independence but also to obtain a set of practical skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking that remain relevant and applicable in today world (Fully Awake: Black Mountain College, 2008).

A photography class in a cabbage patch at Black Mountain College. Photo: Barbara Morgan / Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

Both pedagogical approaches at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College are widely considered as exemplary, albeit being short-lived. Without taking the core purpose of their teaching into consideration, it still remains arguable whether the students of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College were fully prepared for the ‘real world’ or not, for their reality were different from that of ours today. As a design student, I often find myself questioning the role of my chosen practice and study among other noble professions. My first encounter with the ‘real world’ in an academic setting was in between the pages of ‘Real World Research’, a book written by Collin Robson, an Emeritus Professor in the School of Human & Health Sciences at the University of Huddersfield. The book aims to furnish students with the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct research outside of the laboratory and in a ‘complex and multifaceted’ setting that figures of the real world (Robson, 2002). As an undergraduate student at the time, real world to me means all that is happening beyond the walls of the classroom – it is intriguing, full of uncertainty and excitement.

Silhouette Reflection

Here we are, one winter afternoon at the Bauhaus studio. The sunbeams filled a corner with golden ethereal air, separating it from the vast remaining spaces.

We stood where the light was, letting the sun embrace our body, trace the outline of our shape, and project it onto a sheet of paper taped to the wall.

There, in front of our eyes, our shadows.

Some called it our identities, our portraits, our representations. Some found the activity of tracing exciting. Frankly, our hands holding the pencil and tracing the shadows were merely a medium. While some were in awe at the way the sun portrayed us – some questioned the nature of our beings.

Our ability to identify which silhouettes belong to whom is both comforting and enslaving at the same time. What we familiarise with is now what traps us in the confine of the knowns. We were so certain of who we are and what create us that we are walled by own physical existences. As humans, we are extremely fragile and unquestionably limited.

Seeing the silhouette reminds me of that. We were locatable, categorical, identifiable scalable, measurable. We were reduced to one single sheet of black and white paper. From being to nothingness.

#mythesisismybestfriend vol.2

Chapter 1.

I can’t say that I know a lot, but I certainly know more than I did three years ago when I wrote my first thesis.

And so it begins:

I know I’m in the middle of a beautiful mess.

solar photography

       

An object biography & the Bauhaus weaving workshop.

Sound-absorbing reversible curtain fabric by Margarete Leischner, 1927 (Bauhaus Foundation)

The object is a ‘sound-absorbing reversible curtain fabric’ designed and manufactured by Margaret Leischner in 1927. It is located within the ‘Factory as Horizon’ display that runs across the spine of the ‘Versuchsstätte Bauhaus’ exhibition at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau (Bauhaus-dessau.de, 2019). Despite being produced over 90 years ago, the fabric appears to be in good condition. It has a multicoloured striped pattern and according to the museum catalogue ‘Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, The Collections’, is made from wool, cotton, chenille yarn and linen weave (Bernhard et al., 2019, p.188).

Being exhibited under a glass box, the fabric expresses itself in several shades of blue and amber, alternating with each other. Upon close inspection, the intersections between blue and amber strands form several rectangle blocks. The pattern of the fabric can be divided into four parts according to the different shades of colours that each block presents. They are light blue, dark blue, light amber and dark amber. Placing next to each other, they create a diversity within the unity of the pattern as well as a gradient effect that is observable from afar. The fabric is 307 cm long and 163 cm wide (Bernhard et al., 2019, p.188). However, only a part of it is visibly displayed at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau using a wall-mounted roll-up system. Compared to its neighbor exhibits, the fabric is ostensibly thicker, allowing it to appropriately serve as a sound-absorbing material and become functional.

The fabric was created by Margaret Leischner, titled Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), a German-British textile designer and a former student at the Bauhaus (Otto and Rössler, 2019, p.109). Leischner attended the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop in Dessau from winter semester 1927 to winter semester 1930-1931 (Bernhard et al., 2019), therefore ostensibly produced the fabric during her first few months at the school. During her exile in England, Leischner contributed to advancing the Bauhaus theory and was one of the few who succeeded in pursuing textile design as a career (Weltge-Wortmann, 1993, p.12).

Leischner arrived in Dessau shortly after the Bauhaus’s struggle for a status that was more ‘than an arts and crafts school’ and ‘another school for the applied arts’ (Weltge- Wortmann, 1993, p.53). Meanwhile, at the same time, the students at the Weaving Workshop were confronted with different kinds of hardship: the gender issue and a lack of attention as well as financial support. When it first opened the door to students, the Bauhaus promised an ‘equality in the choice of a profession’ and use of spaces for ‘…any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex, whose previous education is deemed adequate by the Council of Masters’ (Weltge-Wortmann, 1993, p.41). However, it quickly revealed that female students were only allowed in, or rather, ‘directed’ into the three workshops of Weaving, Pottery and Bookbinding with the latter two eventually removed from the curriculum due to a lack of interest (ibid). As well as in the social norm, the hierarchy of art and design placed textiles and women at an equally low position (Weltge- Wortmann, 1993, p.9).

‘…Their role within the institution was defined and formulated by their teachers. Only then did it become apparent that they were assigned talents and capacities viewed as innately female, of which a special predilection for textiles was only one.’ (Weltge-Wortmann, 1993, p.52)

After Walter Gropius’s early withdrawal from his position as the director of Bauhaus in October 1927, the school expeditiously shifted its focus from a unity of art and technology to a ‘socially oriented pragmatism’ under the new direction of Hannes Meyer (Weltge- Wortmann, 1993, p.108). Meyer’s vision for the Bauhaus was manifested through ‘functionalism’ and his goal to ‘orient all design activity toward mass production’ (Weltge- Wortmann, 1993, p.109). He addressed it clearly during a meeting with the students:

‘…Do we want to be guided by the world around us, do we want to help in the shaping of new forms of life, or do we want to be an island?’ – (Meyer, 1928, as cited in Weltge-Wortmann, 1993, p.109).

Meyer’s agenda put emphasis on mechanical equipment as an instrument to experiment new techniques and designs for industrial production. This led to a recurring debate centered around the use of hand-weaving versus industrial machine-weaving at the Bauhaus, especially among the students of the Weaving Workshop (Weltge-Wortmann, 1993, p.97). Apparently, an increase in the employment of technology didn’t mean the students would gain access to a more diverse resource of materials. Most students, including Annie Albers, had difficulties in working with what was considered as a ‘not very subtle’ option of colours, or ‘without a personal choice’ (Weltge-Wortmann,, p.94).

Design As Research: On Asking the Right Questions

In his early days as the new director of the Bauhaus, Hannes Mayer asked his students: “Do we want to be guided by the world around us, do we want to help in the shaping of new forms of life, or do we want to be an island?” (Meyer, 1928, as cited in Weltge-Wortmann, 1993). Meyer’s directorship led Bauhaus through the most productive period it ever witnessed in 14 years of operation, albeit going against other renowned teachers’ ideology at the time such as Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Peterhans, who perceived function and production as a ‘threat’ to arts and their ‘inner need’ (ibid.). With his questions, Meyer advocated for an alternative approach to design, one that was more pragmatic and socially oriented.

Much in the same way, Victor Papanek called for designers to be world citizens and advocated meaningful collaboration that responded to the needs and desires of ordinary people. The myriad of question marks used in Papanek’s iconic literature ‘Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change’ (1971) reifies his passionate cri de Coeur towards the practice of irresponsible design. According to Papanek, in his original words, ‘design can and must become a way in which young people can participate in changing society’ (Papanek, 1971). He considered ecological and social responsibility as the twin pillars of design practice. Starting with the enticing ‘What is Design?’, Papanek begun to raise his concerns regarding several issues in the field of product design, architecture and city planning, which he considered as wasteful, useless, bad for the environment and neglected from the humane factors. He then continued with a more condemnatory tone in ‘Where has our spirit of innovation gone?’ and straightforward ‘Are we still designing for minorities?’ (ibid.). These questions, taken out of context, still echo with the challenges we often face in today world – the world which we founded on a naive assumption that our resources are indeed infinite and inexhaustible.

Papanek originally published his work in 1971 and revised it in 1985. Hence, some of the examples in the book might become impertinent to our digital age. However, his vision for integrated design and cross-functional team as a problem-solving method has reached far beyond the boundary of literature. As Papanek’s advocacy for a better way of design, his philosophy formed the basis for many contemporary design approaches and principles such as those of Social Design, Humanitarian Design and Human-centered Design. An up-to-date equivalent to Papanek’s text, I reckon, would be ‘Change by Design’ written by Tim Brown in 2009. In his book, Brown introduced the concept of Design Thinking as a versatile approach to creative problem-solving. By asking ‘How might we?’ instead of the conventional questioning method and applying the iterative design process in their practice, design thinkers are set to discover not only meaningful insights of the social, cultural and historical aspect of the challenge, but also a deeper understanding of the people whom they design for (Brown, 2009). In this sense, asking questions is of the essence to the Design Research process. Asking the right ones then, becomes a critical part of the designers’ job, for there the ability to cultivate stronger arguments, clarify goals, observe the inconspicuous and ultimately make design better.

we seek to achieve the wildest possible survey of the people’s life,

the deepest possible insight into the people’s soul,

the broadest possible knowledge of this community.

as creative designer,

we are the servants of this community.

our work is service to the people.

– Hannes Meyer, as cited in Claude Schnaidt, 1965.

Being present at the Bauhaus building in Dessau as a design research student and a creative practitioner working in the humanitarian sphere, I’m learning to foster my professional approach around the question of ‘How might we employ design as a catalyst for positive changes?’. Framing today’s wicked problems is already a daunting task. Solving them, requires more than just a refined solution. Design Research, thus, when embracing an ethical axis like such mindset of Meyer and Papanek, initiating multidisciplinary effort and exercising iterative hypotheses, then, and only then, should it be able to bring about social impact. My question, whether appropriately proposed or not, will remain unresolved in the meantime, for I still have more to learn, to explore and to observe.

___

Brown, T. (2009). Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. USA: HarperCollins.

Schnaidt, C. (1965). Hannes Meyer: Buildings, Projects and Writings. Teufen: Niggli AG.

Papanek, V. (1985). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. 2^nd ed. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

Weltge-Wortmann, S. (1993). Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop. 1^st ed. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.