Uncertainties of reason : pragmatist plurality in basic design education

Abstract

(cont.) interest in variance and uncertainty. Reasoning plays into creativity in much more flexible ways than those usually attributed in technology. This dissertation argues to encourage creativity in the formative years of design education, and as a personal reasoning process that allows for uncertainty.

Creativity, in the sense that it emerges from differences in reasoning, can be fostered in an education system where personal experiences are an integral part of the curriculum. The basic design course is an attempt to pursue this understanding in architectural education. The Bauhaus in Weimar and the VKhUTEMAS in Moscow are two schools renowned for starting the tradition of basic design education in early 1920s. However, the ideology of modernist universalism dominant at these schools and their followers in Europe and America avert the pursuit for plurality. An interest in basic design education existed earlier in America through the educational practices of Denman W. Ross in Architecture and Fine Arts Departments of Harvard University between 1899-1935, and Arthur W. Dow, first at Ipswich, MA, later in Teachers College at Columbia University in New York between 1908-1922. Ross and Dow's methods were partially affected by their involvement in the Arts and Crafts and the Orientalist movements. At the same time, their ideas coincided with those of the philosophers, psychologists and scientists of the intellectual community around them, such as William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, and Hugo Munsterberg who altogether emphasized the continuity of experience and the role of sensory experience in learning. Whereas the modernist basic design education falls short in sustaining the plurality, Ross and Dow's pedagogical theories, despite their dated style, acknowledge that people's differences make design a worthwhile creative enterprise. The ideas that arise in Ross and Dow's approaches to basic design are relevant from a contemporary viewpoint. Today, the inflexibility in the ways that design processes integrate technology contrasts the designer's