Over my years of creative study (many) and creative pedagogy (fewer) I’ve often found myself mulling over how the ‘object’ is centred in arts education.
This can mean the object of creation, i.e. the inherent ‘materiality’ of our practice as creatives.
“The work and its development in art and design is present and central to an exchange of views. The material dimension carries the significance of the work and its meaning to be apprehended by the viewer and/ or the user. This dimension is significant because everything in our manufactured and commercialised world is designed and accessed through experience.”
P.94 Orr, S. (2019) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. 1st edition. New York: Routledge.
This can also mean artificially inserted objects — provocations supplied by the educator, or objects sourced by students at the promptings of their tutor, all of which aim to support, facilitate and focus discussion.
So it was pleasing to me that the subject of ‘object oriented learning’ arose several times during our first workshop on the PG Cert course.
First of all, in our opening round of ‘hellos’, we undertook an activity which I plan to steal for my own students — in our small groups we were supplied with a pile of ‘art postcards’, maybe as many as 10 per person in the group, so that there were plenty to choose from. Each person was prompted to introduce themselves, their pronouns, and where they work, but crucially also to pick a postcard and talk about why they chose it.
This was a great conversation starter and prompted some fascinating discussions spanning our tastes, art history, personal history and personal experience that really warmed us up, and felt surprisingly effortless, when these forced ice breakers can so often be otherwise. I suppose that, as a group of people who all presumably have an interest in visual culture, it was a certainty that we would engage with this exercise, but I like to think that even for those who aren’t, this activity would still work well.
It reminded me of when, around a decade ago, I lived in a particularly idiosyncratic shared house with lots of weird little traditions. Whenever a guest was welcomed into the house they would be pointed to a tattered pin up of a torn out page of a newspaper depicting 16 close up photographs of the faces of different insects, and the visitor would be asked ‘which one are you today’? Even in social situations amongst friends, an ice breaker can often be welcome, and the insects with their beguiling, enigmatic faces, offered a wonderful way in. (I still have it somewhere, and occasionally think about how I should dig it out and frame it).
For the exercise in our PG cert groups, I chose a postcard of “Refractor” by Alex Hanna.
This oil painting depicts an upturned plastic piece of packaging, probably a strawberry punnet, which is simply but realistically depicted. I have always been drawn to paintings that manage to accurately depict transparent manmade objects (mostly because it seems SO HARD in my experience), and was particularly drawn to this postcard from the selection due to the banality of its subject matter.
When I was an undergrad, I remember one of my first big ‘wow’ moments was realising the sheer extent to which design is everywhere. I’d long known this of course — packaging design from my childhood was one of the early prompts which made me want a career in graphic design. But realising that graphic design was even more widespread than I thought, and that wider fields of design like architecture, product design, experience design, and beyond, truly are everywhere (apart from maybe deepest nature, but frankly I am not interested in being there either) — it excited me, and it still does excite me, and learning to appreciate and analyse even the most banal, seemingly mundane designs in our day to day lives is hugely important to me, and something I want to impart to our students. Not least because:
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Graeber, D. (2016) The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Reprint edition. Brooklyn, NY London: Melville House Publishing.
I have also centred the banal, mundane of day to day life in my own practice, with my long-running daily visual diary project often reflecting on the ordinary, and on truly seeing the world around you.
I try and encourage this act of ‘seeing’ and reflecting in my students. As I teach predominantly on User Experience Design, this is particularly important, as it is so easy to overlook just what is an ‘experience’ and what has been ‘designed’ — by centring an object (and reflecting on its history, the systems it works with and which bought it into being, its use and its future), it is possible to invite students to a deeper understanding of what kinds of work might fall within their remit, and what kind of changes they might be able to make to the world and its systems in future.
This thinking also ended up tying in with what I learned from fellow Pg Cert-er Campbell Muir, and his assigned reading, which focussed on object-based learning activities. (Willcocks, J. and Mahon, K. (2023) ‘The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 22, pp. 187–207. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00074_1.)
He shared how the authors of the article got around 250 students from across a number of creative disciplines. During the pandemic, they were teaching online, and aimed to use ‘object based learning’, to educate students about the ‘intersectional environmentalism’ mentioned in the title of the article. They used a series of 18th and 19th century botanical paintings as their ‘objects’. They used these to start a discussion about how colonialism has affected the environment and contribute to climate change. The white/cream background of botanical prints is devoid of context — these paintings show things like tea, cotton, rubber — colonial products. The public just see the plant, but they don’t see the surrounding context — exploitation of indigenous populations, environmental degradation, etc.
The authors of the report reflected that centring these online sessions around a visual point of focus (aka the ‘object’) worked so well. Sometimes having an object is a good way of pulling quiet people into the conversation, and a good way more generally of getting people to actually respond and participate. By using an object, you are getting them to actively think about various facets of the object like how it was created and in what context, what it represents, and what hidden meanings might lie beneath its obvious surface form.
They also discussed the challenges of screen fatigue, and how effective it was to get students to go out find their own object in their own local area that related to the theme — a tangible, non screen based, real world experience, and a great opportunity for participation and sharing.
Overall it felt very connected to the thoughts I’d been having earlier about objects, and related to my own reading (Orr and Shreeve) around materiality, and also reminded me that an object, in an online learning context, need not necessarily be physical. (Our postcards at the start of the session were physical but they need not have been!)
During my MA in Graphic Media Design at UAL I experienced a couple of very clearly object oriented learning sessions, and both were hugely enjoyable in their own way.
In the first, which was delivered online during the pandemic, we were asked to identify a small object on our desk, and write on it in great detail — describe its physical form, how it feels to hold, how it may have been made, what it symbolises and so on. The goal of the exercise, if I remember correctly, was to warm up our writing skills and foster greater reflection on design in day to day life (which as mentioned, I love).
The second session was delivered by an Associate Lecturer on my MA, and it was made clear that it was a test session for his own research (it may even have been part of his PG Cert!) He bought in an unusual object which we could not identify (and I still don’t know what it was!) – once again, we reflected on the object’s potential purpose, meaning, construction as a group, taking it in turns to handle the object and share our thoughts. Once again, this was a really rewarding experience, based on a provided object rather than one of our own choosing.
I am excited to reflect further on how I can bring more object focus and materiality into my pedagogy. I now learn that our first micro-teaching session should be focussed on object based learning, so I look forwards to thinking more about this soon!