Scroll down to watch video footage of the sessions
The Internet has an insatiable capacity to disseminate new knowledge far beyond the realms of traditional academia, making a previously unimaginable wealth of expertise readily available to all. Group-based learning, making through physical interaction and practical collaboration play fundamental roles within design development, but such activity is threatened within a formal education sector affected by social, technological, geographic, economic and cultural changes impacting its future. Pilots seeks to identify the questions that are to be addressed in order to adapt and respond to this radically changing environment and to provide the next models of design education.
How can we re-evaluate the processes by which we seek to disseminate knowledge, and analyse how this expertise is applied in an evolving digital world?
How can we creatively exploit the possibilities that online content makes available, and how will this impact the design curriculum?
How can we ensure that collaborative group-based learning continues to play an active role in design education?
How does location affect learning and, if being ‘at’ university is to be re-evaluated, what is to be gained (and lost) by the proliferation of web-based learning?
How can we redefine learning as the production, rather than the consumption, of knowledge?
Pilots identifies three variable parameters constituting the educational experience, that can be applied to analyse, adapt and develop models of practice across a diversity of disciplines:
CONTENT: Subject Expertise
CONTEXT: Physical Scenario
CONTROL: Practical Guidance
Pilots employs the parameters of CONTENT/CONTEXT/CONTROL as the principal variables in a series of experimental live-sessions in the artificial confines of a gallery environment, each week led by an invited “Pilot” from design education. A web-based lecture or demonstration provides the starting point for each session with Pilots Participants developing a collective response that may take the form of a graphic, an object, an action and a text. Gallery visitors are invited to witness the live scenarios, as they evolve, from the Pilots Observatory, with a round up of the previous sessions’ activities available to view both onsite and here below.
Pilot Week 1: Daniel Charny is an independent curator and co-founder of consultancy From Now On. His exhibition “Power of Making” at the Victoria and Albert Museum was a critical and popular success, he works closely with the Design Museum London as Content and Interpretation consultant, and he most recently co-founded Fixperts a creative social design education project. Charny has 20 years international teaching experience including Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art. In 2013 he was appointed Professor of Design at Kingston University.
Pilot Week 2: Ronen Kadushin is an Israeli designer and educator based in Berlin since 2005. Kadushin has taught Open Design, furniture design and design creativity courses at some of the leading Israeli and European academies. In 2004 Ronen developed the Open Design concept in which the designs of his products can be downloaded, copied, modified and produced. Based on this concept, he founded Open Design a design and production company for furniture, lighting and accessories sold in Europe and USA. Open Design products are regularly exhibited worldwide and featured in academic literature. He is the author of the Open Design Manifesto.
Pilot Week 3: Matt Ward is an educator, designer and obsessive amateur photographer. He runs the undergraduate design programme at Goldsmiths University of London and is part of the post-disciplinary semi-fictional design syndicate DWFE, whose work searches for meaning in the construction of the extraordinary. Matt holds three international patents on his work at NCR’s Advanced Research and Development Department on emerging contexts of the Internet of Things and Urban Computing. Matt has been a research affiliate to MIT Media Lab and Interaction Design at the RCA. He consults for a range of organisations including Nokia, BERG, Dentsu and the Design Council.
Pilot Week 4: El Ultimo Grito are a post-disciplinary studio who use design to explore the social, political and philosophical and as educators and designers are focused on what the possibilities of design are. Committed to education Rosario Hurtado and Roberto Feo have taught at the RCA, Goldsmiths and Kingston Universities, and in 2012 were appointed to lead the Space & Communication Masters Programme at HEAD-Geneva. El Ultimo Grito work across media and for a range of international commercial clients and institutions, their work exhibited widely including the Victoria & Albert Museum, MoMA (USA) and the Stedelijk Museum (NL). The first Stanley Picker Design Fellows in 2004, Feo is now a Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University. They were awarded the London Design Medal 2012 for their significant contribution to design and London.