Conference continues (first day)

Carrying on about the conference. The Keynote on ethics in the fashion industry was interesting particularly because it illustrated an aspect of the underlining discussion across the conference about information and knowledge, (and their shifting relationship in education). In this case the charity that worked for ethical methods in the fashion industry realised it had information that could be given to teachers that would inform the practise and could change the way people approached teaching some areas of the curriculum. You could argue that when they just had the information themselves it was just information but the act of sharing it and using it for something made it be come knowledge. At BAPP we are sort of saying this that knowledge is how you validate, use, authentise and apply information. Particularly, with my own research I am starting to from an argument that knowledge has something to do with action. This Keynote also spoke about Empathy, and showed a web-site / blog called Social Alterations by a student in Canada.

I then went to another session this was only one paper and it was about the importance of look for problems rather than solving them. It was the presenters first time presenting a paper and he was quite nervous but he did ok. Because this session was short I went into another one to catch the second half. I caught a paper about the artists Studio (fine art). It was talking about the importance of the Studio space. These are white boxes like the spaces near the canteen at Cat Hill. I wondered if our blogs were like Studio spaces – places to explore, listen, reflect and see each others work. This speaker also talked about the importance to her of play, chance and ignorance in the artists creative process.

Finally the last session for that day I went a session where the first paper was about where there was a quote by J. Gill “Knowledge is not a thing to be processed but an activity to be engaged in” . This really reminded me of a number of quotes by J. Dewey who I am following to form the theoretical framework of the research I am doing. I realised in this part of the session how theory in design could be drawn on to explore the experience of creating work in dance. It seems obvious if you look at my work because a lot of the dances I create like site specific ones are created using the same questions about space, function and aesthetic that a designer would use. But whereas dance could be called knowledge in action, a lot of people cannot see it because dance is too hard for them to analyse through watching, (they just think it is amazing or awful) but the crafting of design seems easier for people to be able to analyse where the person making the artwork is making decisions of aesthetic &/or function etc…in the artwork and therefore the written theory in design seemed to bridge just was well for dance to philosophy as it does for design. The second paper presented in this session was about the shared language that could be created between designers and sociologists and how this could inform design / art works and social understanding. This paper talked about design as being – ‘how could we do this?’ and sociology being ‘how do we do this?’. I wondered if it was more ‘how do we do this?’ for design and ‘why do we do this’ for sociology. But there were three words that joined across the two practises ‘meaning, experience and behaviour’ which was thought provoking for me. Again I find this really interesting because of my interest in experience as knowledge. The discussion about these two papers went over time and I had just enough time to quickly meet with Peter and Alan before we had to go to a conference dinner, which was very nice.