Making problems

This paper was presented at CLTAD 5th International Conference in Berlin, during the year of 2010. It examines the general design used in curriculums, within the arts, to propose a set of principles by which academic practice can be re-defined and improved. It argues that its present logic, based on an industrial model, fragmentary and hierarchic, is no longer fully operative and that in order to have an updated correspondence with the contemporary state of affairs, it should be reassessed and replaced by an organic model, integral and negotiable. Drawing on the possibility of art and design Higher Education to inform change, and on the verge of the social demand for both equality and difference, the paper explores the notion of a criteria of interests based on need, by hypothetically replacing –problem solving- for –problem making- as first priority in education. It argues that the quality of academic results, or the ability to raise relevant questions, depends on methodologies that correlate to responsibility and to the promotion of individual agency, for which art and design Higher Education offers a privilege research field. The paper explores the relation of the arts with the emergent and argues that the possibility of the new, depends on how structural the notion of knowledge in use can be. Taking the example of practice-lead research, the paper supports self-reflexibility as useful method for improving art and design curriculums, and crucially from there, to a wider cultural field. Donald Schön´s notion of the ‘reflective practitioner’ will be analyse in relation with ‘selfproduction’ and ‘the sociology of action’, as developed by Alain Tourraine, as well as, with Richard Rorty´s concept of ‘truth as use value’ and Bruno Latour´s key term ‘matters of concern’. As outcome, the paper offers reasons why the re-skill of learning facilitates a critical and sustainable investment of interests, crucial for education at large, and specific to the field, why it constitutes an influential strategy for art and design Higher Education