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