bau2: divergent thinking, side of crits

‘I’m pay­ing 80 thou­sand dol­lars, cri­tique the hell out­ta me.’

This week I in­tro­duce to the class how cri­tiques work.

I men­tion that Project Run­way made it pos­si­ble for me to give real cri­tiques. Be­fore we jump in, we dis­cuss how the crit will go and what to ex­pect.

I ask what they al­ready know about crits: ‘You in­sult us and we have to put up with it’ and ‘well, there is the sand­wich method – which says nice stuff with the tough stuff in the mid­dle.’

I re­fer to the sand­wich thing as re­al­ly nice bull­shit with a con­nect­ing word – such as ‘but’ or ‘how­ev­er’ – and then the blunt stuff.

Things like you did this wrong and I don’t know what I’m do­ing come up. These are not con­cepts that I see as part of my cri­tiques. Neg­a­tiv­i­ty con­nect­ed to cri­tiques, I men­tion, sort of mess­es with the whole process. Cri­tiques are about tak­ing what you did – and mak­ing it bet­ter. Not ru­in­ing someone’s life. (Though I have had past stu­dents who would dis­agree with this)

And barom­e­ter for crits: Per­fec­tion. If your work isn’t per­fect, I’m gun­na say some­thing. And since per­fec­tion typ­i­cal­ly isn’t at­tain­able – I’m prob­a­bly go­ing to have some­thing to say most of the time.

The idea is to con­stant­ly im­prove your­self. And my ap­proach to teach­ing: I give stu­dents a prob­lem and ma­te­ri­als to help with com­ing up with a so­lu­tion, then they solve it. No in­put from me, they have the tools and the brains. And we cri­tique the re­sult.

Also: I men­tion my ban on the con­cept of ‘I like it’ as a ra­tio­nale for stu­dent work – in all my class­es, ‘If you’re go­ing to ever get your work ap­proved, craft­ing a well-thought out ar­gu­ment (premise with sup­ports) works a lot bet­ter than your per­son­al likes and dis­likes.’

Then we jump in to the crit and the re­sults are a bit typ­i­cal for this course. The home­work was: Build TEN­SION us­ing points, with the ex­tra caveat that stu­dents can use oth­er el­e­ments that aren’t points.

can­dy coat­ing
Hu­mans do love to rebel, so we end­ed up with a bunch of pieces where the stu­dents fo­cused on oth­er el­e­ments that aren’t the ac­tu­al points.

I re­fer to the one (above) as can­dy coat­ing. The points are there and re­sem­ble what was shown in my slides (from the Hof­mann book) then the stu­dent con­cen­trat­ed on build­ing TEN­SION with ad­di­tion­al form. Not points (and we then talked about us­ing some­thing else when one’s con­cept isn’t sound).

An­oth­er stu­dent OCD’d her piece and the re­sult was very or­ga­nized: The an­the­sis of TEN­SION though.

Even­tu­al­ly I set­tled on one box that was the clos­est to TEN­SION:

And the one that had the MOST TEN­SION was LINE-based, the point seems calm in com­par­i­son.

Turned out this piece was done while a fam­i­ly ar­gu­ment was tak­ing place. And that’s where the scrib­ble came from. Anger, frus­tra­tion.

We talked about how this be­came an hon­est piece. And how good art is hon­est. And how we can re­late to this, which makes it real.

con­for­mi­ty
An­oth­er el­e­ment to dis­cuss is how many stu­dents came up with some­thing ex­pect­ed. And how our ed­u­ca­tion sets us up for this. We talk a bit about Hen­ry Ford and his stub­born­ness (as ref­er­enced in Ge­nius of De­sign).

I men­tion how what I’m re­al­ly teach­ing is not con­for­mi­ty but di­ver­gent think­ing. And this leads into Sir Ken Robinson’s Chang­ing Ed­u­ca­tion RSA An­i­mate:

Oh. There’s this too:

 

 

 

Bauhaus by Frank Whit­ford
Thames & Hud­son, ©1984, ISBN 978–0500201930

in­tro­duc­ing the bauhaus
I bring in my his­to­ry lec­ture on the Bauhaus – and for a quick overview, check out the first sec­tion of the Frank Whit­ford book (above, a quick read).

I work my way through the post-WWI po­lit­i­cal and so­cial el­e­ments that brought Wal­ter Gropius (1883–1969) to Weimar – and how he set up a new ed­u­ca­tion­al sys­tem (ref­er­enc­ing Wal­dorf; and it turns out I have a for­mer Wal­dorf stu­dent in class):

At the Bauhaus, mas­ters re­place pro­fes­sors (based on the me­dieval Eu­ro­pean guild sys­tem) (sort of ex­per­i­men­tal, like Zap­pos, but to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent), stu­dents work at their own pace, through be­gin­ning stud­ies – even­tu­al­ly find­ing their fit af­ter try­ing a bit of every­thing. This sets up what and why of our own class.

I then make my way to The Vokurs (pre­lim­i­nary course) and per­son­al­i­ty of its mas­ter, Jo­hannes It­ten (1888–1967).

This is fol­lowed up with more slides from my Point Line and Plane talk (fo­cus­ing on Line).

This leads to (home­work):

It­ten LINE AS­SIGN­MENT
Re­search the work of Jo­hannes It­ten (1888–1967) – col­or the­o­ry and be­yond.
Cre­ate five 5x5 inch squares.
With in­spi­ra­tion from Itten’s work, show IM­BAL­ANCE and EN­ER­GY.

Plus, READ De­sign Ba­sics Chap­ter 2, pages 28–39

Find on­line and watch
Ge­nius of De­sign Episode 2: De­sign for Liv­ing [BBC]

We con­tin­ue on Fri­day.

—steve mehal­lo

Last year, FLOMM founder Steve Mehal­lo re­built a de­sign fun­da­men­tals course into a five week study of the­o­ries and work done at The Bauhaus (1919–33). This BAU blog se­ries will doc­u­ment the lat­est teach­ing of the course – with les­son plan – Sum­mer 2015 to a group of 8 col­lege stu­dents. What’ll hap­pen, who’ll shine, who’ll drop. Names (and some sit­u­a­tions) have been changed to pro­tect the in­no­cent as well as the guilty.

 
co
nti
nue
read
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