THWS | Fakultät Gestaltung Würzburg

4000 Miles is an interdisciplinary research project linking two disciplines, bilingual, on two continents and in two time zones. The aim is to demonstrate how a sustainable practice of intercultural thinking and global cooperation can be realized through a blended learning approach. 4000 Miles aims to explore digital and material practices within asynchronous co-creation processes, using the example of higher education in design and art. To this end, the lecturers form an international partnership and conduct art and design studio courses, which are developed within the curriculum. higher education institutions.

Target

4000 Miles will focus on the needs of students and teachers alike. Students will be able to build intercultural communication skills, organise themselves and gain trust, move between analog and digital (design) practices. Teachers will be supported to focus on building functional teams, maintain a sense of presence in asynchronous learning processes, and publish hybrid outcomes. In order to develop the desired hybrid learning environment, methodological and technical explorations in the teaching practice of several iterations of studio classes will be tested and evaluated.

The study with the working title »Universal Mediation. On the Critical Theory of Digital Media Capitalism« attempts 1. a historical reconstruction of the media-theoretical contents of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, in order to 2. make a systematic contribution to a dialectical theory of media technology and finally 3. to obtain a diagnosis of the times that brings to mind the tendencies of a contemporary media capitalism.

Three hypotheses are under discussion:
1. Media communication can be concretized in social history with Critical Theory, because it materializes the central horizons of interests and laws of development of capitalist society.
2. The structure of social communication solidifies dynamics of atomization and congestion, which were brought to the fore in the Frankfurt School as authoritarian latencies of late-bourgeois society. These dynamics remain virulent even in algorithmically determined media communication.
3. Mediation – in the context of the tension between the public sphere and privatization, the commons and copyright – is also a democratically substantive promise. The dialectic of data oscillates between data positivism and platform capitalism on the one hand and the utopias of universal communication and cybernetic communism on the other.

The concept of »mediation« points to the central methodological context: in dialectical theory, »mediation« stands for the simultaneity of contradictory tendencies that are expressed in developmental processes (such as tendencies towards universalization and particularization). In particular, using the value process as an example, mediation is also described as a supra-individual process that generates universalization as a practical reality (e.g. as digitally mediated communication).

Compared to the dominant attempts at embedding digital communication in general social theory (system theory, cultural studies) and often eclectic or essayistic approaches of Marxist media theory, the present manuscript represents a radical innovation, because with the multidimensional concept of mediation it brings to bear a substantive media-theoretical guide to critical social theory.

SPONTECH VERTAPLAN
New standards in spinal surgery

Studies, concept and research series in the context of digital, preoperative planning of intervertebral disc replacement bodies. The primary objective of spinal surgery is to ensure that the patient is able to move permanently without pain into old age. In order to best treat the diseased segment, the surgeon must restore the individual geometry of the spine as much as possible.
The Vertaplan program allows software-based planning of the operation, precisely adjusting the spinal column geometry and thus restoring the patient’s individual motion profile.
The solution is optimally planned surgery and precisely set spinal column geometry.

The structurally and structurally optimized software interface was developed for Spontech Spine Intelligence AG.

This book presents the results of the research project Kommunikationsdesign und Ethik – Ethik des Kommunikationsdesigns. It was carried out – largely funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation – by the authors together with Professor Gertrud Nolte at the Faculty of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg. Arts-and-Crafts, Werkbund and Bauhaus began the debate on design, morals and ethics. After the break of civilisation in Germany in the mid-20th century, the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm wanted to contribute to human dignity through scientifically based, aesthetic design of democratic everyday life. Since the end of the 20th century, product designers have been advocating design that is sustainable, ecological, intergenerational and socially acceptable. Communication design, which has shaped visual culture for more than 100 years, is still marginal in the ethical debate, and voices from this area are barely heard. But again, it is not just about function and aesthetics. Communication design is not just about advertising and aesthetics, it is about education and information. Orientation systems, visual appearances, multimedia applications, user manuals and teaching aids; books and magazines, scientific illustrations and non-fiction photography; films, videos and interactive audiovisual media – an evaluation of the communicative purposes and means used must always be carried out in the design process. All these normative issues are relevant, but there has been no systematic examination of the ethical aspects of communication design based on philosophical criteria. What can and should communication design achieve? Where are the boundaries that regulate what should not be said, shown, hinted at and achieved in communication design?

The study discusses the foundations of these questions in the horizons of philosophy, applied ethics, design, and cultural studies.
The Authors Gerhard Schweppenhäuser is Professor of Design, Communication and Media Theory at the Faculty of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg. He has taught at the University of Bozen-Bolzano, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden and the University of Kassel. Christian Bauer is a research associate at the Faculty of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Würzburg and a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Design in Karlsruhe.

2016

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Prof. Dr. Christian Bauer

Layout: Prof. Gertrud Nolte

https://verlag.koenigshausen-neumann.de/product/9783826060380-ethik-im-kommunikationsdesign/

In cooperation with the Brazilian project partner, the research project examined intercultural ethical aspects that are relevant to changed media structures of working and living environments in a global information and network society.
The German and Brazilian media landscape has a number of specific similarities and differences that are promising for an intercultural investigation in the field of applied ethics. Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Duarte, the project manager from the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences (FAFICH) at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, is well acquainted with German Philosophy and Culture. Last but not least, the common reference to the German-speaking Brazilian design philosopher Vilém Flusser provided a common basis for research. Social media and their communities are hardly subject to government regulation and self-control. The concomitant expansions and limitations of freedom create new types of insecurity of action. With regard to forms of communication and information design, the foundations of a modern information ethic must and must be explored. Can it be conceived as a global Internet ethic that takes account of the changes in how information is handled in electronic spaces and the social norms of behavior that are emerging in them?

The interpretation of the notion of communication according to Vilém Flusser was conveyed against this backdrop with concepts of practical and political philosophy on the subject of “the public”. In particular, possible connections with a critical theory of modern media were investigated. The relationship between individual gains in autonomy and social heteronomy was reconstructed as a contradictory process whose universalistic normative potential must be strengthened against particularistic appropriation. In view of the increasing mixing of information, advertising and entertainment, the framework conditions of media use and the creative handling of the uncertainties of expectations and actions of professional actors in this field were discussed. It examines the relationship between moral philosophy, law, and aesthetic productivity in terms of implicit and explicit norms and regulations. In 2014, Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Duarte was in Würzburg for a coordination meeting at the Faculty of Design at THWS. Subsequently, Prof. Duarte held BAYLAT talks on Strategic Partnerships in the field of postgraduate studies at Bavarian universities. In 2015, Dr. Christian Bauer, a resident of Dr. Bauer, gave a lecture at the Aesthetics Congress at the (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte and led a workshop with Prof. Duarte and other colleagues from FAFICH.