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Industrial Design education and South African imperatives
Get PDFThe first tertiary programme in industrial design in South Africa was offered at the School of Art, Johannesburg (SAJ) at the start of 1963 (Wood 1963:88). The SAJ then became the Technikon Witwatersrand (TWR) in 1979 (Brink 2006:119) and finally the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in 2005 when it was merged with the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU). This was the only programme in industrial design in South Africa for 25 years, until the establishment of a second one at the Cape Technikon1 in 1988 (Verveckken 2007) and a third in 2008 at Tswane University of Technology (TUT). Since the curriculum for any technikon programme was controlled by the convener technikon, which in the case of industrial design was the TWR, the two technikon programmes have maintained many similarities particularly in terms of the curriculum (Verveckken 2007) and the TUT programme has been started by an industrial designer educated at the TWR. Both UJ and CPUT have been required to cater for the growing demand for designers in industry and have only as recently as five years ago been increasingly pressurised to expand areas of design study from vocational training into research at post-graduate level. In keeping with all tertiary offerings in the country, the unique political and economic challenges facing South Africa have demanded a reconsideration of what is taught and how it is taught
Making space for identity, diversity and voice in a transcultural visual arts community of practice
Get PDFThe call has gone out from government for educational transformation. At institutional level there are laudable activities: units have been established, policies are emerging, and colloquiums are held. Academics are required to play an active role in transforming educational practices within their disciplines, but in my experience, there is a dearth of explicitness as to what is actually expected.
My reading is that two things are entailed: firstly, that academic curricula and approaches to teaching and learning should be interrogated, in order to establish the relevance and appropriateness of these in relation to a changing dispensation, where the traditional deference to western models of thinking and to what Paulo Freire (1972:71; 1998:32) refers to as banking methodologies of teaching are being challenged. Secondly, that we should set out to critically examine our discourse communities of practice, in order to establish how these are adapting to meet the needs of our diversifying body of students
Creative industries, creative solutions: developments in a work- integrated learning project in Durban
Get PDFThe ‘Creative Industries, Creative Solutions’ Research Project is a collaboration between the Graphic Design Programme in the Department of Visual Communication Design (DVCD) at the Durban University of Technology (DUT), South Africa; and the ‘Continuum’ unit of the University of East London (UEL), United Kingdom, which focuses on access and widening participation in tertiary education. The British Council has funded the project through their Educational Partnerships in Africa (EPA) programme. The Project aims to set up a working graphic design studio within the Graphic Design Programme as a means of widening participation and developing work-integrated learning (WIL) elements in the courses offered by DVCD. In this studio, students will experience the commercial process from briefing to production, including financial processes, in a protected and mentored environment
Design thinking – crossing disciplinary borders
Get PDFDesign is known to be an interdisciplinary field, and design activities and outcomes are developed in conjunction with (as well as used in) many other disciplines, including management, marketing and entertainment. Moving the concept of design beyond the design discipline itself creates exciting new challenges and opportunities, not only for the various other disciplines involved, but also for design education. The idea for this paper was incubated in a post-graduate classroom environment during an interdisciplinary design elective. Within the current academic environment, it is not strange to have students from diverse disciplines such as management, theology, engineering and publishing studying the same subject matter (and sitting in the same class). This paper therefore finds it fitting to explore conceptually the potential of design thinking in the (seemingly) unrelated discipline of Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS).
Editorial
Get PDFIn their introduction to the special edition of Cultural Studies in which authors explore the interconnected relations between private lives and public cultures in contemporary South African society, editors Kerry Bystrom and Sarah Nuttall (2013:310) use the term ‘intimate exposures’ to describe ‘a set of diverse acts that involve revealing inner aspects and places of the self and self-making’ that were previously suppressed under apartheid
Libidinal economies of Black hair: Subverting the governance of strands, subjectivities and politics
Get PDFBeginning with an auto-ethnographic account of my experiences of hair, I draw on newspaper coverage of school exclusions and the banning of Black girls’ Afros and boys’ cornrows in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. I do so in order to analyse the racialised ‘libidinal economy’ (Wilderson 2010) of Black natural hair as a transnational surfacing linking the African continent and its diaspora. In the twenty-first century, these hairstyles are objects of commodity capitalism and can adorn heads transracially. However, I contend that they remain troubling for schools when they become forms of surfacings for Black bodies. The symbolic, political, material and affective connections made between hair, “race”, and racism – that is, hair’s racialised libidinal economy – is the frame through which the analysis of contemporary readings of Black natural hair as “dangerous” and negatively affective in terms of fear, disgust, contempt and shame, is pursued. The examples cited show that Black natural hair is vulnerable to political, aesthetic, psychic, social and affective attack by the ideology, politics and practice of the white/whitened state as it operates through school policies. Thus, I contend that Black natural hair, as it surfaces the Black African descent body, is connected to anti-Black institutional racism. Reading “hair stories” as texts on surfacings illustrates the affective entanglements of an anti-Black world shown through attacks on Black natural hair’s “unruly” strands, textures and styles. Hair’s affective entanglements, normalising aesthetics and anti-Black institutional racism contained within school “rules of conduct” on “acceptable appearance”, drag colonial ideology on “race”, respectability and aesthetics into contemporary negro-phobia. However, Black natural hair as surfacing also signifies Black transnational affiliation in its (re)turn to twentieth-century Black anti-racist aesthetics within contemporary Black decolonial hair politics focused on “naturalness”. This focus illustrates that there is Black political, social and psychic vulnerability alongside agency, which refuses to be silenced within the relational life of Black natural hair as it comes up against white/whitened power.
Remains to be said: the “um” in art and other disfluencies
Get PDFTaking as my starting point an artwork of “fillers” – a 2010 sound piece by Fine Art student Romie Sciscio foregrounding the disfluent speech of various visiting academics to the Department of Fine Art, Rhodes University – I propose that speech disfluencies such as “um”, “kind of” and “I suppose” should not simply be derided as white noise or verbal graffiti. Rather, filled pauses – understood both literally and metaphorically – may be seen to function critically, precisely because they are located neither inside nor outside the “message” of speech. They hover between presence and absence, seemingly content-less and yet dimly portentous: they do and do not matter to meaning. As such, they require (or provoke and demand) a different kind of listening – the acoustic equivalent of reading between the lines.
An artwork of filled pauses is the lens, then, through which I consider the possibilities of “liminal” speech (itself a lens through which I consider a particularly South African fascination with silence and verbalisation). Pivotal to post-apartheid “healing” has been the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): a ‘public rehearsal of memory’ (Nuttall 1998:75) intended to “give voice” to the experiences of those silenced by and within South Africa’s repressive past. Sanctioned by the TRC, verbalisation has been figured as public catharsis. As many have argued, however, there can be no straightforward “telling it like it is”, especially when trauma inhibits speech. Instead, the false fluency that usurps and tidies the work of memory may be perniciously counterproductive, turning tentative stories into totalising narratives.
In response, I investigate a “manner of speaking” between the extremes of muteness and glibness: one which voices the fraught terrain of memory self-reflexively. Such liminal speech has the potential to approximate truth not by ‘excavating silence’ (Brink 1998:33), but by tripping itself up with filled pauses and declaring its own disfluency in the process
A new monumentalism? From public art to Freedom Park
Get PDFThe paper uses the Gautrain as a device to link several works of public art and the new memorial at Freedom Park, interrogating their authorship, kinship, functions and aesthetic impact. The gigantic size of these works, their attempts to make portentous statements and to hail a defined public, suggest that they might belong to a new ‘monumentalism’. The paper advances an argument for why there may be a return to monumentalism, noting the several Herculean labours works of public art are required to perform in the context of urban regeneration and the summoning of a history that is free of conflict and troubling suggestions of heterogeneity. The principal artist whose works are examined in the paper, Marco Cianfanelli, is part of a network that has explicitly committed itself to emancipating ‘public’ places from their exclusive and coercive apartheid past. Cianfanelli himself has expressed the hope that his works in the public sphere will encourage spectators to think critically about their environments. But, since some of his works appear bogged down in a blatantly mercenary project for so-called urban regeneration and his Freedom Park work contributes to what is described in this paper as a highly romanticised version of African history, his optimism may be unwarranted.
At the crossroads of history: Street names as monuments in the South African cityscape
Get PDFPlace name changes are an ongoing process and a contentious and politicised issue in twenty-first-century South Africa, where the changes are often implemented as a form of redress and/or nation-building. This paper examines the practice of name-changing as it relates to street names in South Africa, with a special focus on Pretoria (Tshwane). Whereas street name changes may be used as a political statement, I offer an alternative pathway inspired by Karen Till’s (2012) concept of the ‘wounded city.’ In particular, I address the question of whether or not the heritage value of street names is taken sufficiently into account when changes are implemented considering that street names act as containers of meaning; monuments to the intangible; and as visible reminders of a contested history that should not necessarily be obliterated from our townscapes.
The Cold Storage Club
Get PDFOnly amateurs collect books in order to read them. The professionals wrap their investments in archival plastic and put them away in the safe. Idea: a syndicate of pros, old friends and rivals, buy a defunct meat-processing plant and use its refrigeration rooms to store their books. Reconstruct the minutes of the Cold Storage Club (2005).
On 10 May 1933, the day of the book-burning in Berlin, it poured with rain. It is tempting to read this chance event as divine disapproval, but worse conflagrations have passed without the heavens shedding a tear. In any event, the wood that stood ready to fuel the fire on Opernplatz was damp and had to be doused with petrol before it would catch