Disciplination – Design as Practice between the Disciplines

Disciplination – Design as Practice between the Disciplines

Tido von Oppelna, Christoph Schindlerb a,b

Lucerne School of Art and Design christoph.schindler@hslu.ch

Abstract: Four Bachelor’s programmes at the Lucerne School of Art and Design – Interior Architecture, Object Design, Textile Design and Material Design – joined forces in a joint project during the autumn semester of 2010. The joint module has been this term for the seventh time with the same participating programmes, but with different interpretations of interdisciplinary. We want to take this as an opportunity to look back and compare our approaches of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinarity.

Keywords: Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinariy, transdisciplinarity

1. Introduction Since all the aforementioned disciplines were involved to the same extent, the autumn semester was deemed interdisciplinary from the outset. An intense period of preparation was needed to coordinate four different programmes with four different curricula. We lecturers soon realised that the Lucerne School of Art and Design on the one hand, and students on the other, harboured relatively unconsidered and vague expectations and hopes in respect of the outcomes.

What both sides were expecting was everything that arises (in some kind of shape or form) from interdisciplinary work, which was completely (or at least in some way) different from monodisciplinary work. The interdisciplinary autumn semester continues to this day and has become a very successful and popular fixture in the curriculum. Recent years have found lecturers and students making wide-ranging and interesting discoveries, with both sides learning a great deal. The object of this paper is to reassess some of the ideas we harboured about interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary working and, by reflecting on our own practice in the classroom, help improve them or at least achieve set objectives in the training of designers.

The paper also looks at the vague expectations for interdisciplinary work by examining more closely the opportunities and limitations of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.

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2. Between the Disciplines First, though, some of the concepts require definition, namely the now immensely popular terms monodisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity: Monodisciplinarity, perhaps less prevalent as a concept than the other three, describes the straightforward realisation of a project using the methods and tools of one discipline. This kind of disciplinary monoculture is usually considered the most appropriate for the world of work. It is used for tackling a standard task in as time-efficient and cost-effective a way as possible. In most cases, this makes it the most apposite approach.

Interdisciplinarity, by contrast, occurs when more than one discipline is involved in cooperative activities: in an interdisciplinary project, the individual participants contribute their own particular disciplines. The outcome of the project, however, is so complex that it is achievable only through the collaboration of the various disciplines. Like monodisciplinarity, this approach is prevalent in the real world and often leads to tension between the disciplines obliged to work together.

Professionals from all trades as well as architects and engineers know only too well the absurd problems that can arise from projects of this nature. The worlds of mechanical engineering and architecture are constantly grappling with the pros and cons of interdisciplinary working: the various trades have to cooperate when, for instance, building a house, and the interfaces between them can be a source of discussion as well as disharmony. The parties have to be clear and negotiate the point at which one discipline ends and the next begins. Although the desired outcome is impossible without input from the various disciplines, the disciplines themselves do not change.

Multidisciplinarity describes more-or-less the same process. The term is often used in the world of research, where different disciplines research the same object, each employing their particular methodical approach.

It is only under transdisciplinary conditions that the borders between the disciplines in a project become permeable. This occurs when disciplines adopt or appropriate the methods and strategies or modus operandi of other disciplines, i.e. where a discipline opens itself up, as it were, to having its borders transgressed. In essence, transdisciplinary working is also, by definition, a form of experimentation and a questioning of one’s own discipline. Under transdisciplinary conditions, the point at which the various disciplines combine gives rise to an opportunity for innovation and specialisation. Incorporating a new practice into a discipline has the effect of changing and extending that discipline’s foundations. It is a strategy that is educative but not, as you might expect, always successful, a fact which makes transdisciplinary working inefficient in terms of the outcome achieved: in the act of negotiating the borders of one’s own discipline, the focus – unlike with monodisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity – shifts from the goal to the process. Accordingly, the most important “output” of this approach is a change in the way one works, not necessarily a particular result or more efficient way of achieving that result. On the contrary, Ronald Jones, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, is keen to emphasise in the talks he delivers that transdisciplinary working produces more errors and leads to more impasses than it delivers excellent results (Jones, 2012). The evidence suggests that working at the limits of a discipline does not raise productivity.

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Why, then, is this approach so interesting? Why is it, despite all the disadvantages, of appeal to students and of interest to the work of designers and architects?

Professor Jones likes to explain this using a diagram from Lee Fleming (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Lee Fleming’s diagram illustrating the benefit of interdisciplinarity (Fleming 2004)

Transdisciplinarity is a way of visualising one’s own practice and its encounter with other, different methods. Here, the intersections exhibited by the cooperative disciplines are a key determinant. The less they have to do with each other, the greater the potential for collaboration, but also the greater the chance of failure.

The relationship essentially takes the form of a risk diagram. The greater the distance between the disciplines, the higher the frequency of unsuccessful developments and the less likely the occurrence of a useful result. If, however, the work does lead to a result, there is a chance of some innovative potential and possibly even a conceptual or technological breakthrough.

3. Case Studies In the interdisciplinary autumn semester project at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, the disciplines involved – Interior Architecture, Object Design, Textile Design and Material Design – are not far from each other. Even though, unlike design, the focus in Interior Architecture is very much on issues surrounding space, and the relevance of the action in Object Design is possibly more pronounced than in Textile Design, they are all disciplines that make a designrelated contribution to daily life. According to Lee Fleming's diagram, the risk of failure would be deemed correspondingly low. Nevertheless, we are confronted with the mechanisms as described. Even in our work, it is apparent that interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity lead to a reflective practice and that there is a need for students and lecturers to communicate and to be flexible. In our work, the process, i.e. the path to a design, is an important, if not central, outcome of the semester. By confronting the students with disciplinary borders, we increase considerably the complexity of what we teach. Through its self-reflecting character, the training serves to strengthen the identity of the up-and-coming designers. By having to consider, in a host of individual design steps, their attitude to their discipline, our students consciously adopt positions in their practice. An anthology of design research has appeared in the context of the work conducted by the Swiss Design Network, an association of designers and design enthusiasts advocating a culture of design and the academisation of design in Switzerland.

Even if the question of research in design is not necessarily related to transdisciplinary work in the narrow sense, one of the articles in the anthology is

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of relevance. Using the expression "the disciplination of design", sociologist Franz Schultheis discusses changes in the discipline of design which have come about through the influence of scientific methods. He speaks of a structuring force that differentiates between permissible and impermissible working methods to create a canon of methods: The "disciplination of design" is, at this level of individual manifestations, first and foremost a "disciplination of actors" who practise design, and the enforcement of a disciplined, that is to say, scientised, habitus. The latter acts initially like a system of borders: borders of the conceivable, of the sayable, of the doable. On its way to becoming a discipline, the practice is becoming ever more comprehensive and more deeply codified and regulated, spontaneity is being relegated to ever-narrower limits, rooms for manoeuvre are being defined and constrained, practitioners regulated, etc. Figuratively speaking, not only is "voluntariness", heretofore predominant, being displaced by "compulsoriness", but "voluntariness" is itself perfecting the art of self-restraint through a process of in-depth incarnation or assimilation of socially produced and standardised techniques (Schultheis, 2005).

The process that Schultheis observes and describes here is work in progress.

Design is undisciplined and thus predestined for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice.

4. Conclusion In our interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary autumn semester, we saw just how productive the effect of reflecting on one’s own design practice can be on the outcome of design processes. What we have learned is that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice is a resource and as with every source one has to invest time and effort into it, to be able to work with it. Transdisciplinary practice is not easy-going with a giant output but it can be a self-reflexive method that enables designers to work critically in their field. We would conclude that for a school of art and design, like the one in Luzern, it is an important goal to make designers to think about their aims and practice. Not only because they become through this more sensitive and open to questions beyond their own discipline regarding ethic and sustainability Moreover, it builds a foundation of what we would call Design as an undisciplined discipline.

Figure 2. Mulitdisciplinary team “Cirqu’eau”, multidisciplinary project 2013/14: two interior architects, one textile designer, material designer and object designer design an object each

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Figure 3. Interdisciplinary team “Die Gute Stube 2.0”, interdisciplinary project 2015/16: three interior architects, one textile designer and one object designer design a non-textile carpet that is printed on the floor with large MDF panels

Figure 4.Transdisciplinary approach, project 2016/17: A class of interior architects develops furniture objects at the workshops of the School of Art and Design

References Fleming, L. (2004). Perfecting Cross-Pollination. Harvard Business Review, 09/2004 Jones, R. (2012). UK/CoD Lecture at University of Kentucky Schultheis, F. (2005). Diszipinierung des Designs. In Swiss Design Network (Ed.), Forschungslandschaften im Umfeld des Designs (p. 79). Zurich.

About the Authors: Tido von Oppeln studied culturual sciences and philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He works as curator, author and lecturer.

Tido teaches design theory at the Zurich University of the Arts and Lucerne School of Art and Design.

Christoph Schindler studied architecture at TU Kaiserslautern and earned a PhD at ETH Zurich. Since 2005 he is partner at schindlersalmerón, a Zurich label focused on contract furniture. In 2014 Christoph became head of the Object Design BA programme at Lucerne School of Art and Design.

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