The New Education by Cathy N. Davidson

Author:Cathy N. Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

IF PROFESSOR ORTIZ IS SUCCESSFUL IN STARTING HER NEW UNIVERSITY, it will be the first institution of higher education founded in Massachusetts since Olin College in 1997. Olin is where Sara Hendren teaches. She is an artist. She is an engineer. Her projects are frequently for people who are labeled, by the able-bodied world, as “disabled.” Like many of the professors at Olin, she refuses to see boundaries. She considers that strategic disciplinary transgression as her charge, her mission, her art, her design, her science.

As a designer, she works with clients—not for them, with them. She extends that same participatory goal to pedagogy. She does not teach students; she learns with them. She often poses specific problems for them to solve, and, in turn, they reach out to their clients to include them in the process of problem solving too. “Cocreation” of solutions, she insists, needs to be part of the design process.

Hendren builds these design principles into her teaching, research, and design projects in “assistive technology.” For example, in collaborating with Chris Hinojosa, an engineer born with one arm, Hendren’s students spent a week with him to understand his abilities and his limitations. They learned that he already could use his body, one arm, and two feet dexterously. And they learned that the last thing he wanted was the unwieldy, sci-fi-like million-dollar bionic arm contraption NASA was designing for him. Why would he want to lug around that heavy mechanical thing? However, this athletic young man longed to do what he could not do with his body or with the cumbersome bionic arm: he wanted to scale a climbing wall and, maybe someday, a cliff. He couldn’t do that on his own.

So, instead of a multifunctional mechanical arm, he worked with Hendren’s Olin students and, together, they fabricated a simple, lightweight device, a modular socket that allows him to switch out different, lightweight, single-use extensions, such as one that allows him to climb a wall and another that enables him to ride a bicycle. He worked with the student artists because he found their actual and visual vocabulary more imaginative and flexible than the technical jargon, blueprints, and fabrication software that seemed to limit the ingenuity of the engineers. The artists could see possible solutions that the engineers could not. At the same time, the skills of the engineers were crucial for turning artistic prototypes into strong, functional, serviceable devices. Together, everyone, including Chris Hinojosa, studied plants with tendrils to consider ways of grasping that do not require hands. They studied animals. They read and looked at art together. And they designed and built exactly the right device to do the job, one that was simple, portable, with attachments designed specifically for a particular function. The device met Hinojosa’s needs perfectly.

If the students had not been trained to listen first before cocreating with a client, they never would have come up with something that was suitable. If they hadn’t read widely and gone with their client to art museums,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.