Spatializing Knowledge for 21st Century Art & Design

Workshop

Art and design teaching in the 21st Century must reach beyond re-presentation of the known to open space for the unknown. Spatial cognition, or learning to think with and through materials (aka: material learning), invites unforeseen possibilities for discovering and shaping ideas and innovations. In the age of the internet, learning to spatialize knowledge is our next horizon.

In this workshop-presentation, participants explore the concept of spatial cognition as a response to (post-)modernist discourses that focus on image, surface, and functionalism — a form of stasis that we believe is an unintended edge effect of contemporary art and design curricula. To address that stasis, our collaborative teaching and research rely on knowing as doing, and position art and design education as action in and with the world.

The workshop starts with a paper construction activity (derived from origami and cartography) that invites participants to explore the conceptual frameworks of spatial cognition and material learning. We then survey contemporary research that positions art and design as an entanglement of tools, materials, model-making, and collaborative reflection. In the conversation that follows we focus on the skillsets and mindsets that young artists and designers need, and explore teaching and learning strategies that can inform today's art and design curricula.

Understanding, manipulating and transforming two- and three-dimensional objects requires spatial intelligence. Research links spatial intelligence and material learning to success in multiple 21st century professions, including the STEM disciplines as well as in the field of art and design. Drawn from neuroscience, new materialisms, and extended cognition, the frameworks of spatial cognition and material learning position practice as ecological entanglement, shared agency, and distributed intentionality — each of which overlaps with the others in art and design education. In our research and teaching, the goal is to (re-)introduce ways of learning that inform professional practice, but which have perhaps been overlooked in teaching and curriculum design.

The root of our workshop is a proposition about an effect of art and design practice that we think is critical for faculty to understand — namely, its recursivity. That is, as artists and designers we draw and construct, and in doing so we learn to draw and construct. This world-makes-world positionality casts art and design as perpetual motion and re-motion — not as a stasis that can be represented, but as an assemblage of relationships that must be encountered and engaged. This paradox drives our impatience with binaries, and with the stubborn edges between them. In this hands-on, minds-in presentation, participants engage with spatial and material learning as a way of blurring those edges and crossing the thresholds between them.

Timetable

Introduction to activity and distribution of materials (5 min).
Hands-on activity, paper construction (15 min).
Guided analysis/critique (collaborative) (5 min).
Introduction to learning frameworks (10 min).
Conversation and conclusion(10 min).

Interaction

The hands-on paper construction activity at the center of this workshop is highly collaborative and deeply engaging. In previous iterations (e.g., at other conferences, as visiting artists, and in our own classrooms), participants find the materials and the prompts both challenging and invigorating, which sparks robust conversation about concepts and practices of art and design, both as a profession and as a teaching vocation. Direct lecture is kept to an absolute minimum because we prefer (and understand the efficacy of) engaged conversation with participants.

Takeaway

Participants will engage in a hands-on thinking and making activity that invigorates spatial and material learning. This drawing-and-folding paper construction activity emphasizes collaboration and spatial materiality as a critique of conventional design thinking strategies that foreground functionalism and re-presentation. These concepts are sometimes familiar to participants, but the immediacy and vibrancy of their enactment in this activity is often felt as brand-new. The collaborative-reflective critique of the activity highlights applications of these and similar activities in our own teaching practices, and introduces research that suggests how these skillsets and mindsets can strengthen art and design learning in studio-centered ecologies. Takeaways include art and design activities that expand on the workshop activity, and a set of curricular resources that participants can explore further.

Outcomes

We are each active as researchers, teachers, and artists. Individually we blog, write about, and present our work at national and international conferences. Also, we frequently work together as research partners and co-authors on journal articles and book chapters. This workshop at DEL would be incorporated into this work, across all of these platforms. More immediately, and perhaps more viscerally, we are committed to better understanding the opportunities that 21st century tools and teaching methods make available to art and design teaching and learning. Over the past several years our work in spatial cognition and material learning has become front-of-mind for us, both individually and as a partnership. In addition to formal research projects, we continue to learn from all participants who engage with us in our exploration of these ideas. We have no doubt that participants at DEL will be similarly engaged, nor that we will from that engagement.

Abstract

Art and design teaching in the 21st Century must reach beyond re-presentation of the known and open space for the unknown. Learning to think with and through materials, which relies on spatial cognition, opens to unforeseen possibilities for discovering and shaping ideas.

This workshop starts with a paper construction activity derived from origami and cartography. It then surveys learning frameworks that position art and design as an entanglement of tools, materials, model-making, and collaborative reflection. The workshop highlights the skillsets and mindsets that today's young artists and designers need to learn, and suggests teaching and learning strategies that can re-invigorate art and design education.

For instance, understanding, manipulating and transforming two- and three-dimensional objects in the world and in our minds, requires spatial intelligence. However, spatial thinking is not explicitly taught in studio art and design programs. Similarly, material learning, drawn from new materialisms and theories of extended cognition, frames art and design practice as ecological entanglement and shared agency — critical mindsets for today's artists and designers.

In the age of the internet, learning to spatialize knowledge is our next horizon. In this workshop, we explore spatial cognition as a response to (post-)modernist discourses that focus on image, surface, and functionalism — a form of stasis that we believe is an unintended edge effect of contemporary art and design curricula.

What opportunities does the spatialization of knowledge offer studio art and design faculty? In this workshop, we (re-)cognize space and materiality as a choreography of world-makes-world recursivity. Our aim is to call attention to an edge effect of (post-)modernism that has not been adequately critiqued in 21st century learning ecologies, and to offer participants explicit strategies for expanding and reinvigorating their teaching practices.