From Product-orientation to process-orientation
Every generation needs to relive, recreate and reinvent certain aspects of its cultural sensibilities by engaging with the reality around them. The student needs to be PRESENT to the local contexts totally psychologically, emotionally, and sensually and the teachers should play an effective role to ensure all.
The design process which is 'process-oriented' exploration is destroyed when this process is taught as a method which is what is happening in most institutions of design and architecture. This has now been universalized by the new avatar called design thinking.
This is primarily due to the very paradigm of modern education which is made on the ontological reversal of knowledge preceding the knowing which means the product preceding the process.
All living beings learn as learning is what sustains life and it is the 'learning' process that not only ends up in the creation of knowledge but is also responsible for forming the knower. A process is a two-way tool. As the knower is creating knowledge the knowledge is also creating the knower.
If we consider knowledge to be a biological response to sustain life, then the present level of estrangement between man and nature is unimaginable. How could knowledge and destruction go hand in hand to the extent that the very survival of the earth now edges on the brink of cessation? This is a cognitive crisis and needs to ask what is wrong with our knowledge.
I think the far deeper question is, what is learning, how does knowledge gets created, etc?
But by externalizing knowledge, mechanizing the learning process, and institutionalizing the learning space modernity has created havoc to the consciousness of human beings who in turn has created havoc on earth. The ontological reversal of knowledge preceding the knowing process has alienated man from the very process of life and misunderstood the purpose of living itself.
Knowing is the process by the human beings transform themselves. Life gives the opportunity to man for his refinement of all qualities of what is the real potential of being human.
This course requires a totally different approach where our natural ability to observe, explore and create knowledge is brought back