First Session: How Does the Community Affect the Practice of Art and Design?
Second Session: How Does the Practice of Art and Design Affect the Community?
This conference will focus on the relationship between artists, designers and the community they work in. The context and opportunity to discuss this question are provided by works of students at the Interior Design Dept., Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), currently exhibited at the Israeli Center for Digital Art. The exhibited works have been made as part of a community design studio, and include small public buildings designed for real-life communities at Holon’s Jesse Cohen Neighborhood, as part of an ongoing DAL project in the neighborhood.
First Session: How Does the Community Affect the Practice of Art and Design?
It often seems as though the second half of the 20th century was preoccupied with critiquing the first. One of the most important objects of artistic critique was the international architectural style and its offshoot, public housing. The criticism focused on how modern housing tended to ignore contextual and cultural differences, on the planners’ patronizing attitude and the resulting detachment between organic community life and uniform, modernistic space.
Beginning in the 1960s, the various design disciplines began acknowledging this post-modern criticism and adopting different practices. Disciplines such as city planning, architecture and architectural theory, and lately also interior and industrial design began searching for methodologies that empower the user as an inimitable and specific subject, rely on him for information and even inspiration, and seek a unique user-, context- and culture-dependent outcome.
These approaches have led to the development of a variety of methodologies aimed at products informed by user data and content, and in the case of public projects – by the community. The designer is required to be knowledgeable is such diverse disciplines as sociology, anthropology, geography and psychology in order to analyze, understand and represent the community, thereby producing products that have concrete cultural relevance to the user community.
This first session will explore several examples of such methodology, including sociological research and public involvement.
Second Session: How Does the Practice of Art and Design Affect the Community?
Recently, we have been increasingly exposed to concepts of social responsibility and involvement in the art and design fields. DAL and HIT have been active at Jesse Cohen Neighborhood in the last few years. This involvement includes a series of artistic projects, academic design projects, projects aiming at small-scale involvement in neighborhood space, and projects that promote community involvement in artistic design endeavors. All share an emphasis on the process and interaction with the community, rather than the final product. In the case of design, the final product is not financed, and therefore does not exist. What the budgeting allocated to these projects demonstrate, however, is that community involvement by artists and designers is perceived by funders as valuable in itself and may therefore generate positive change, hence the formal support provided for such efforts. At the same time, many argue that budgets allocated to artistic design projects in the community should be reallocated to activities assumed to have a more direct impact on the inhabitants’ lives.
The second session will introduce several such projects and explore the various strategies employed with the community, internal success and failure indicators – from both the community and artistic perspectives – as well as relationships between the establishment, the project and the community.
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