Dr. Thomas Pearce Appointed Junior Professor of »Emerging Technologies and Design«
A new subject area was launched on 1 September in the Produktdesign (Product Design) degree programme at the Faculty of Art and Design: »Emerging Technologies and Design«. Dr. Thomas Pearce was appointed to the newly created tenure track junior professor position. What does this title mean and how does this >newbie< intend to shape the field in the Produktdesign (Product Design) degree programme?
Before reading, we recommend listening to the song »Emerge« by Fischerspooner (link to Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTetvhDqfqY
»Hi, Huh-i…«
What is »Emerging Technologies«?
»Hyper, Hyper-media-ocrity…«
The subject of hyper-media-presence sung about by artist collective »Fischerspooner« in the early 2000s has now reached entirely new levels. Breakneck development and ever evolving methods and technologies all promising to make everything easier, faster, smarter, more efficient and automated:
»Feels good, Looks good, Sounds good…«
But does »good« really mean good? This is a key question for Thomas Pearce and one that he would like to take into long-term consideration. Born to a Canadian-born Belgian and a Canadian, Pearce began his academic career at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, graduating with a degree in Cultural History. Even then, he was already focussing on topics of architecture and design. After completing his Master’s degree in Cultural History, Pearce moved to Germany to study architecture at the TU Berlin where he completed a Bachelor of Science. Following that, he completed both a Master’s degree in Architecture and a PhD in Architectural Design at the renowned Bartlett School of Architecture in London. This was where Pearce encountered and was shaped by unconventional teaching methods, for example designing problems instead of solutions. Once he completed his Master’s degree, Pearce began working with various experimental architecture and design studios as an expert in the technologies of digital capture, design and fabrication. He also moved into teaching at UCL and the Architectural Association where he taught design fundamentals, led his own design class for a number of years and, more recently, worked on the »Design for Manufacture« digital fabrication programme.
»One credo that I took away from there was to try, experiment, fail, fail again, and eventually fail better. This is the only way to make progress as a designer. You can’t state something without first building it«, says Pearce. »This extends beyond teaching at many universities; it’s important to me to continuously explore disciplinary boundaries through experimental technologies founded in theory, craft and history.«
»Feels good, Looks good, Sounds good…«
But are new technologies such as 3D printing truly the saviours of do-gooders? »You might imagine that I am a technopositivist. But I am actually much more concerned with other issues — the question of which new worlds can emerge from new technology, for example. Or whether we can use new technologies as speculative, creative tools. If we look at 3D scanning, for instance, on the one hand, it provides us with the possibility of capturing physical reality with extreme precision.
On the other hand, however, it creates a completely new way of understanding the world as semi-transparent clouds made up of millions of data points. This is not only an issue of aesthetics; if we consider how these measurements come to be, we also become aware of their susceptibility to error, for example when we can reflective, tiny or moving objects. We could also say: too bad, we have to filter out these errors or forego scanning these objects at all. Or we could instead ask ourselves: how can we use these erroneous, non-real measurements in a speculative way, dealing with them playfully? Perhaps we can learn to understand these technical errors, plan and actively design them as »chimeras«.
Such speculative approaches are not simply playful ends in themselves — they absolutely have a broader social relevance when we realise, for example, that 3D scanning can be used not only in manufacturing, but also in areas such as autonomous driving, surveillance or even warfare. And so I always aim to ask the question: How can we, with the knowledge from this technology, think critically and speculatively? And how does this knowledge insert itself into social and artistic discourses?
The crucial term in the title of the professorship is »Emerge«; the German Duden dictionary refers to the »the occurrence of new, unpredictable qualities when several factors interact.« Wikipedia refers to the concept as something that: »occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole«.
Pearce elaborates: »This >next new thing< promises the potential for change, unpredictable possibilities. But it is also something that must be questioned. After all, the only constant in life is inconsistency, that is, what is new. This is why I see developing a sustainable attitude towards the constant emergence of new technologies as the challenge for us as designers in teaching, practice and research. Change, however, is inextricable linked with uncertainty. In my understanding and teaching, I connect this uncertainty with curiosity and an openness to the outcomes, with the joy of experimentation and inevitably the courage to fail.«
Throwing his students into the deep end of prehistory and early history is Jr. Prof. Pearce’s first project and is titled »Prähistorisch – Postdigital«. Pearce will confront his students with historical artefacts that have both special material properties as well as a concrete function, but are at the same time oracles and therefore cultic objects. »I ask myself what we can learn from the past. For me, context is critical. When I have an object in front of me, I ask how the knowledge of its cultural significance influences our current practices. To answer this, we have to rely on theory, history and craft, as well as cultural, social and sociological aspects.«
He compares this prehistoric element of the project to the latest technologies. Pearce plans, for example, to visit a well-known industrial group in Jena to witness the latest surveying technology. Photogrammetry and CNC milling are also in the curriculum. »The most important aspect is that students are able to directly experience technological work. Normally I have a 3D model. I go to a workshop and have it milled. But when I’ve done the guesswork myself — and preferably also failed productively — I can design using the planned tool. Just as important to me is that the students develop what I call »post-digital fluidity«; they should learn to navigate fluidly between measurement, analysis, simulation, design, visualisation, digital fabrication and traditional craft. The best case scenario is that students use the translations between these steps productively and are possibly even able to speculate on them. We are perhaps establishing an unsettling factor. Designers, who are typically masters of the process, should be unsettled by, for instance, bringing in artificial intelligence as a digital, new-age oracle.«
Interested students can expect their minds to be blown through uncertain project results instead of brainstorming — uncertainty is certain.
Back to Fisherspoon, who loudly shout:
»You don’t need to emerge from nothing, you don’t need to tear away…«
This should encourage you to get involved in emergence: Nothing comes from nothing, and then there is always context.
The Faculty of Art and Design is looking forward to a future together with Jr. Prof. Dr. Thomas Pearce — both concrete and uncertain. Welcome!
Further information on Thomas Pearce’s work and projects can be found on his website at thomaspearce.xyz.
Information on Tenure Track Professorships
Academics and artists undergo a two-stage evaluation as part of their tenure track professorship position. Upon a successful evaluation, they will be promoted to a W3 tenured professorship position without a call for new applications. Until the end of the tenure, the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar offers women in its tenure track programme targeted support for their further qualification through the newly developed BauhausTrack programme, which includes workshops, counselling and mentoring.
In 2016, the federal government and the state governments established the »Programm zur Förderung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses«. The key aim of the programme is to strengthen the tenure track professorship model. The programme offers an immediate promotion to a tenured professorship position following a successful probationary period. The federal government is providing up to one billion euros to finance 1,000 new tenure track professorship positions. The respective state governments for the funded universities provide the overall funding, which will allow for the tenure track professorship positions achieved with this programme to be maintained after the programme ends. 75 universities with a total of 1,000 professorship positions (eight of which are at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) will benefit from this programme.
Further information on tenure track professorships at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar can be found here:
https://www.uni-weimar.de/de/universitaet/forschung-und-kunst/wissenschaftlicher-nachwuchs/nach-der-promotion/tenure-track-professur/
Kontakt
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
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Tel.: +49(0)3643/58 11 73
Luise Ziegler
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