Hi Ursula,
Thank you for your posts.
I've been searching without success for details and publications on the mathematical and scientific research of the Ulm Design School. I welcome pointers to that research undertaken at Ulm to compare with other institutions of the era teaching and practicing design. I know well the work of Norbert Weiner and Horst Rittel, but my understanding is that their scientific work was mostly done elsewhere?
Is there a list of research and research publications from staff while they were at Ulm?
I read the notes in https://duepublico.uni-duisburg-essen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-11608/HFGeng.pdf that indicate teaching at Ulm included 'mathematical analysis of operations: group theory, statistics, standardisation, scientific theories, mechanics: kinematic, dynamic and static"
These topics can be taught simplistically or at a high level: from 11 year old primary school simple to post-PhD complex. It would be good to know at what level they were taught in Ulm. Do you know if there are records of original teaching materials in these areas?
Best wishes,
Terry
==
Dr Terence Love,
School of Design and Built Environment, Curtin University, Western Australia
CEO, Design Out Crime and CPTED Centre
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030
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+61 (0)4 3497 5848
ORCID 0000-0002-2436-7566
==
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Ursula Tischner
Sent: Thursday, 14 February 2019 10:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: PHD-DESIGN Digest - 12 Feb 2019 to 13 Feb 2019 (#2019-38)
Dear Francois,
thanks for your questions about Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, HfG Ulm, Ulm School of Design….
In addition to what Tiphaine wrote. Here a couple of more facts and thoughts about Ulm (a short summary):
I had the pleasure of giving a presentation and meeting many of the former teachers and students of Ulm school just a couple of weeks ago at this event: Bauhaus, HfG Ulm - and tomorrow? https://www.apb-tutzing.de/programm/tagung/3-4-19
There were many stories told about the official and the unofficial versions of the history, closing and legacy of Ulm school of design. And there was a fundamental question asked that no one could really answer: Where is the school today that has a similar role as Bauhaus and Ulm had back then? And if it does not exist, how would a school look like that could take that role?
There will be more meetings about this theme in Germany rather soon…. if you have any ideas/ answers about this question, I would be excited to read them.
I think the Wikipedia Article (here in a much nicer format) describes the official version pretty well:
https://duepublico.uni-duisburg-essen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-11608/HFGeng.pdf
As an expert I can recommend Rene Spitz, who has done extensive research and publications on Bauhaus and Ulm and their approaches to design and design education: https://renespitz.de/category/vortraege-und-moderationen/
Obviously you have to understand Ulm in its historic context: Germany shortly after world war II, Germany and many other countries in deep shock about what had happened. Germany seeking to get rid of the dark forces, but they were hiding (and are still) in many institutions. It needed a new approach also in education, where people should be educated as critical thinkers so that they would never again blindly follow a leader.
In this situation Inge Aicher Scholl, sibling of Hans and Sophie Scholl (die Weiße Rose), who organized resistance against the Nazis and were killed for that, together with Otl Aicher, her husband, and Max Bill former Bauhaus student founded the Ulm School of Design. Bill became the first rector from 1953 to 1956, and he designed the famous Ulmer Hocker (which is a multifunctional object serves as stool, table, stand, shelve etc..).
@ Terence: it is important to understand that Ulm was NOT still an arts and crafts school.
It started with a strong influence from Bauhaus under Max Bill as rector, but soon many of the Ulm teachers and students wanted to go beyond the Bauhaus way of doing and thinking and after quite some internal struggles Max Bill resigned and Tomas Maldonado took over as rector.
Then the "Ulmer Modell“ was created: "The HfG quickly gained international recognition by emphasizing the holistic, multidisciplinary context of design beyond the Bauhaus approach of integrating art, craft and technology. The subjects of sociology, psychology, politics, economics, philosophy and systems-thinking were integrated with aesthetics and technology. During HfG operations from 1953–1968, progressive approaches to the design process were implemented within the departments of Product Design, Visual Communication, Industrialized Building, Information and Filmmaking.
Under the leadership of Maldonado, the school dropped the "artist" focus of Max Bill and proposed a new philosophy of education as an "operational science", a systems-thinking approach which embodied both art and science.“
Beforehand many Bauhaus teachers and students had been teaching at Ulm (and still were), but in the new era, new and other disciplines entered as teachers such as mathematician Norbert Wiener, or Horst Rittel (wicked problems), sociologist Hanno Kesting, philosophers and others.
As you certainly well know, Tomas Maldonado https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Tom%25C3%25A1s_Maldonado/
stood for a critical design discipline, design theory and systems thinking, here a quote from designboom magazine:
"maldonado became the director of that institution (HfG Ulm). during its brief existence from 1955 to 1968, the HfG Ulm exerted an influence that no one could have predicted from its small size, improbable location, or short lifespan. originally conceived as a successor to the bauhaus, the school quickly abandoned that model and set out to explore the uncharted territory of designing for mass production. the school became an extraordinary laboratory of design and center of talent. more than twenty years after its closing, ulm is still considered the most important european school of design since the bauhaus.
maldonado strongly articulated his position in a seminal, 1970 book la speranza progettuale which was translated into english two years later as design, nature and revolution: toward a critical ecology. as a core theme, maldonado focused on the human environment, which he characterized as “one of the many subsystems that compose the vast ecological system of nature.” following a systems theory model, he claimed that among subsystems, “only ours possesses today the virtual and real capacity of provoking substantial – that is irreversible – disturbances in the equilibrium of other subsystems.” designers are complicit in this process, but maldonado raised the question of how their role could change. the impetus for his book was the urgency he felt to counter the rapid degradation of the environment and, although he recognized that autonomous design action is difficult in any social system, he urged a substantial effort on the designer’s part to play a role in a process of social change. maldonado emphasized autonomy, recognizing it as a difficult state to achieve. nevertheless, he made the sartrean argument that “however things are, the designer must act, he must definitely abandon the ‘waiting room’ in which he has been forced to remain until now. and he must act even if he does not know whether in the end autonomy will not prove to be an illusion.”
There were many actors emerging from Ulm that are famous for new developments in design and science, such as
Student and teacher of Ulm school Gui Bonsiepe http://www.guibonsiepe.com who was studying design theory with Maldonado and also taught at the Ulm school. He is a leading thinker in design theory and interface / digital media design.
The HfG was also a pioneer in the studies of semiotics so lets not forget Klaus Krippendorf, http://web.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/
who graduated as Diplom Designer from Ulm school in 1961 and is famous for his work and publications in cybernetics and systems theory, methodology in the social sciences, human communication, conversation, and discours and product semantics. And I think he is member of this list, so he can speak for himself…. :)
And then there was Otl Aicher, quite a character, http://www.otlaicher.de co-founder an teacher of visual communication at Ulm, he ran his own design practice in Rotis and designed the Typeface with the same name. He never did what companies wanted him to do as a designer, but questioned everything. He first entered in an extensive research process with each company he worked with that could last as long as three years before he even started thinking about design. Famous examples are e.g. FSB Brakel https://www.fsb.de/en/company/about-us/ and ERCO https://www.erco.com/service/press-release/company-3/pictograms-quickly-comprehended_2403/de/ t.o German SMEs, He would first research their DNA with them, what they stand for and what they contribute to the world, maybe make a book about that and only then he would start maybe designing something. If the companies were to impatient to do that, he would not work with them… He can be seen as one of the creators of the Corporate Design discipline and the inventor of the term „visual communication“. https://www.piktogramm.de/en/
There are many more, like Herbert Lindinger http://www.lindingerdesign.de who also formulated the rules of the „good form“ , good read: Die Moral der Gegenstände, Ulm: Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, 1987 (The Moral of the Things) and others…
Why did the school close?
From what I understood, it has mainly two reasons: internal struggles and external enemies.
The school was always depending on external funding, at a later stage especially from the state of Baden-Württemberg. The politicians were rather conservative, right wing and less and less in favor of the left and radical views and experimental approaches of the Ulm school, so first they cut the funding and then they completely stopped it, when Ulm school refused to become a subsidiary of the Technical University of Ulm. That had been a proposal from the regional parliament.
Second reason was, as is understandable from the history of HfG Ulm, that evolved through innovation and change, in line with their own self-image of the school as an experimental institution, that there were many internal struggles and discussions about the right approach to designing and design education. So it was easy to discredit and criticize the school from the outside, what press happily did, as it seemed to be an organization with many difficult and unresolved internal conflicts, and probably it was.
But still: Although the school ceased operation after fifteen years, the ′Ulm Model′ continues to have a major influence on international design education. And as I stated before, many of the former teachers and students, went to other schools and developed their careers at other places all over the world. So the influence of the short period of Ulm school of design is still remarkable.
To summarize: its achievements are commonly described as: Until the founding of the Ulm HfG in 1953, there was no systematic approach of design education. HfG pioneered the integration of science and art, thereby creating a teaching of design based on a structured problem-solving approach: reflections on the problems of use by people, knowledge of materials and production processes, methods of analysis and synthesis, choice and founded projective alternatives, the emphasis on scientific and technical disciplines, the consideration of ergonomics, the integration of aesthetics, the understanding of semiotics and a close academic relationship with industry. In concept, the "Ulm Model" represented early foundation principles of the design management discipline.
Some more links:
Women in Ulm: http://www.frauen-hfg-ulm.de/englisch/frameset_1024.html
HfG Archives: https://hfg-archiv.museumulm.de Club off Ulm (club of former teachers and students): http://www.club-off-ulm.de
I hope that was inspiration for some of you to dive a little more into the subject in case you did not know all of this already… For the others who knew it, maybe a nice little summary.
And for those who had more intimate connections with Ulm, please speak out and tell us your stories…. thank you.
Best regards
Ursula Tischner
CEO
econcept, Agentur für nachhaltiges Design Albatrosweg 11, 50259 Pulheim
Tel.: +49-(0)151-22650776
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Master Eco-innovative Design
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> Am 14.02.2019 um 01:00 schrieb PHD-DESIGN automatic digest system <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2019 07:09:22 +0000
> From: KAZI-TANI Tiphaine <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> Subject: Re: On Design Research - The Legacy of ULM HfG
>
> Hello François,
>
> If you happen to read french, you should be very interested in Tony Côme’s work on L’Institut de l’Environnement in Paris, which is one of the educational project that raised (1968-1973) from the dismantling of HfG Ulm.
> https://editions-b42.com/produit/linstitut-de-lenvironnement-une-ecole
> -decloisonnee/
> <https://editions-b42.com/produit/linstitut-de-lenvironnement-une-ecol
> e-decloisonnee/>
>
> In a lesser extent, the Grapus collective also originated from l’Institut, and the same Institut was an influential model for Patrick Bouchain’s report on artistic and technical eduation in France (1978-1981) that lead to the fundation of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (ENSCI).
> http://strabic.fr/Avant-l-ENSCI-Les-Ateliers-Bouchain
> <http://strabic.fr/Avant-l-ENSCI-Les-Ateliers-Bouchain>
>
> Ernesto Oroza is by now running a fascinating research on Ulm which results should be published by 2020. We discussed a lot with Ernesto on how systems theory influnced for better and for worse the later Ulm, and I personally suggest the involvment of Bonsieppe in Cybersyn gives insights on the path Ulm was following in its final years.
>
> Bonne lecture,
>
> Tiphaine
> ________________________________
> De : PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
> related research in <[log in to unmask]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> de la part de François Nsenga
> <[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Envoyé : mercredi 13
> février 2019 07:15:52 À : [log in to unmask]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> Objet : On Design Research - The Legacy of ULM HfG
>
> Dear Ursula and all
>
> Still reflecting on the question you raised a few days ago, asking "why - the English speaking members in this List - do not acknowledge and pursue the - legacy of the - Ulm School of Design". And I am hereby kindly inviting those interested to actively join in and pursue this interesting reflection.
>
> In my view point, two more specific questions wait for answers to the question why we don't hear much more of the legacy of the ULM HfG approach to Design Research:
>
> 1. As a start, which were the specific reasons the ULM school was denied funding by local German institutions, thus leading to its closing in 1968?
>
> 2. Ursula, you say: "...when the school has been closed many of the teachers went to other countries and continued with the design research activities. So their influence was certainly global". In addition to David Sless's testimony yesterday, on the inspiration he drew from the research approach developed at the ULM GfH, that led to the actual success of his Communication Org. in Australia, are there elsewhere in the world other similar 'success stories' that might have been directly led, or just inspired like in David's case, by teachers from ULM ? Or even, are there recalls of failed trials that have been experienced while trying to apply and continue elsewhere the ULM Design Research approach? Failed cases of attempts that would be worth to constructively analyse and eventually get inspiration from, like the one I reported a few years ago at the Centre de Création Industrielle, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris?
>
> Many thanks in advance to those who will join in contributing to this forward going reflection!
>
> François
>> From Northern Rwanda
>
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