Happy Halloween!
By Aaron Knochel
I wanted to close out my October month of blogging for the NAEA Mentor Blog by showing a little bit of the work that I do. Most of the month I have been trying to talk through conceptions of curricula and disciplinarity in art education, so it seems appropriate to close out the month looking at how I put this into practice.
My work at the ADRI focuses on assistive technologies and digital fabrication. I use fabrication techniques, such as 3-D printing, to explore boundaries of digital and creative practice. I’ve written about crowdsourcing assistive technologies for children with disabilities in Art Education. These boundary shifting fabrication techniques pursue design solutions that enable, empower, and destabilize notions of “normal” in built environments, including but not limited to the exploration of prosthetics that enable art making and expanding art education curricula.
Research has shown that the majority of entry-level digital fabrication occurs within makerspaces. However, the same research discusses that, while the spectacle of the 3D printing process often lures users to the various systems, users may maintain only a superficial or passing interest in the technology if not encouraged to experiment. While makerspaces have been shown to excite communities of makers, there are few studies that assess whether or not such makerspaces sustain user’s initial spectacle-driven fascination into learning and engagement with STEAM disciplines. To explore this curricular spectacle of makerspaces and 3D printing, I’ve been working on developing a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) creating mobile makerspaces or what we call M.A.K.E. 3D (Mobile Atelier for Kinesthetic Education, 3D). See more info at https://sites.psu.edu/mobilemakerspace/
A recent project that I have been working on pushes further the role of digital fabrication, iterative methodologies such as design thinking, and critical practices in art education to explore pubic space and the role of speculative design. Similar to projects like the Monument Lab, we’ve been exploring what role the novice architect can play in speculative design practices that are driven by social justice and community engaged values. The action research project is broadly called SpaceMakers and has had several iterations working with youth and college students.
Just last week I gave a short workshop in the Borland Project Space as a part of the larger Art Education faculty and student exhibition and schedule of talks and workshops called Art at the Center: Transdisciplinary Creativity. After a brief slideshow, I asked a group of art education graduate student to propose designs for the rebuilding of Notre Dame. After the tragic fire this past summer and the ensuing conversation around what should be the new life of Notre Dame, we engaged in a simple sketching exercise to explore ideas of what matters now for Notre Dame. How should the billion+ euros be spent to resurrect it as a tourist attraction? a symbol of French culture? a relic of religious community? How might the destruction of a building that will never be finished allow for a re-visioning of its cultural and social values? To challenge the students and myself, I asked them to consider how we might suggest a speculative design that synthesizes UNESCO’s sustainable development goals to guide rebuilding goals. See more educator resources about these goals at https://en.unesco.org/themes/education/sdgs/material
These are just some threads and I look forward to hearing more from you and what you are doing to build our discipline. Or take it apart.
Happy Halloween and thanks to NAEA for allowing me to share this work with you.
- AK