An essay
Joachim Borner
Strangely without resistance, the term “Gestaltungskompetenz” has been able to take hold in education for sustainable development as well as in lifelong learning. The term comes up frequently in educational discourses; a wide variety of competence profiles list it prominently. And it has also arrived in the “transformative literacy” approach.
The term “Gestaltungskompetenz” refers to the ability to describe alternatives in the future and then to enter into the process of “producing” one of these alternatives. This is where the ethics of responsibility plays the music. This is helpful in the search for orientation – in the sense of giving direction and meaning to action and ultimately to one’s own life. Here, the “everyday culture” approaches the person willing to change and asks him about the meaning and benefits of the change.
The other consideration, resulting from the logic of lifelong learning, means the ability to design one’s own life plan and to implement it in a reflexive, self-directed, and iterative-communicative process. This biographical design and its implementation relies on the ability to situate oneself with one’s resources, dispositions and values as well as interests and motivations in a socio-economic, -cultural and -ecological environment.
If one follows the conferences, seminars and publications in which “Gestaltungskompetenz” plays a role, then the argumentation logic usually goes like this: If one learns lifelong and for a sustainable development, Gestaltungskompetenz comes all by itself – one only has to make it a topic. The good purpose directs it and some orientation frameworks are added helpfully and in no time one learns and is able not only to solve the latest complex and dynamic problems promptly and capable of error, but even to model development alternatives for the future, to evaluate them, to select the most evidenced alternative and to design it. This is also what I have been telling “my” students and listeners for years – from a normative point of view, pretending that it is almost true.
At some point, however, I was surprised: design literacy – I noticed – both under the umbrella brand of ESD and under that of lifelong learning – is always written and talked about without context. (By context is meant, e.g., the habitual culture of learning, or the function of education (and its degrees) as status procurers, or the effect of styles of thinking (Fleck), or that of systems of writing down (Kittler), and others).
E.g. design competence has something to do with learning and social recognition cultures, in which designers are socially valued. The normative appreciation derived from sustainable development means such categories as.
– their originality, that is, the ability to look at problems historically, in their causation and the process of their creation;
– their creativity, which combines uniqueness, innovation and genuineness with problem solving or shaping the future;
– their genuineness, which represents a fit between problem and solution (while imitation only pretends to be);
– their idiosyncrasy, which makes the design distinctive and helps us to better distinguish and decide;
– their controversial habitus, which helps us to see and evaluate the lines of conflict between different stakeholders.
These cultures – where can they be found?
From my own experience, I can only say: competent, independent, controversial, self-confident designers irritate my environment – be it that of science, that of education, that of politics. Because the designers are peculiar, naive, funny – somehow sly, in any case unsettling. They disrupt the fixed patterns, routines, and rituals in institutions, disrupt the stability and success of Operation Development – that is, the capitalist growth paradigm (under which it does not work).
The mandate given by the UN Decade, by the Rio follow-up conferences, by the programs of the BMBF and BMU etc. to develop design competence in favor of a climate culture and sustainable development reads today – in praxi – like a call for a defect that upsets development processes and tried and tested procedures. As we know, industrial society’s management of mass production needs the standardization of methods, processes, procedures. Management optimizes these methods.
Divergent thinking, on the other hand, breaks this norm. Design competence is a factor of “divergent thinking” which involves activating the sense of possibility – in other words, working heuristically. This competence recognizes the world and its things in future contexts, which can also obey other rules than the usual ones – this is the subject of G-competence.
But what is allowed? Do the curricula and educational concepts for sustainable development really mean “the revolutionary in the design process” with a sense of consequence?
If we see the many “creatives” and “sustainability leaders” of our days, they are reliable in one “proven- way” : namely in their ability to copy, to reanimate, to repeat, to dodge risks. Or do I see badly? We have climate change, the growth and welfare problem, the energy transition, demographic change, the problem of declining biodiversity and deteriorating water supplies, etc. – where are the heuristic solutions to problems, the designs of appropriate futures? Where are the countless good answers that should be raining down on the problems with the flood of innovative, original, sustainable, creative ideas in the media, politics, business and science? Where does the whole-school-approach come in to question the habitus of early adapted pupils and – this also applies to adults – to break free from the old thinking and motivational milieu?
Problematic
It is now “unfortunately” only the original and the innovative that opens up new perspectives and points of view as well as rules of the game and modes and thus enables design and development in transformation processes of climate and demographic change. If you look at the final reports of the many programs on energy transition, climate culture… – shouldn’t the lack of “transformative literacy”, the lack of individual as well as institutional competence for transformation and its shaping be conspicuous?
Climate culture currency
Design competence, creativity and originality is the currency of climate culture and sustainable development. But when we look at how these terms are defined by management in business, academia, and government, we are amazed at the rapid devaluation of this currency. In other words, in the big talk about climate change and the energy transition, the terms creativity, innovation and design competence are constantly repeated, but in the process emptied of their meaning and significance: creation and originality in the search for and description of future alternatives and in the roadmapping to design the alternative are de facto tolerated only in the rules of predictability and efficiency. The credo of modernity is the perfection of the predictability of innovations. Where this does not seem possible, new things are out. A development paradigm that includes equal opportunities for the next generations, that recognizes reproductive limits of ecosystems and natural sources and sinks, and that recognizes the socio-cultural goal of a “good life”, among other things, resists predictability – via GDP or rate of return.
Here is a first barrier.
The second barrier hides behind the popular understanding of reason, thought, creativity. Since almost two centuries researches and searches are done how these abilities work, if and how they can be generated, reproduced and thus – as well as their carriers – steered and controlled! A modern mask is the IQ. With this the intelligence should be able to be measured unambiguously. But does it say something about whether a person thinks independently – can mean critically, originally – can mean outside of epistemic thought patterns and problem-adequately – can mean life-worldly and in alternatives perceive? The test strips do not give the decisive answer. (The same is true for EQ – the subtle measure of so-called emotional intelligence).
Since “creativity” is about to become the new intelligence (mode) (Joachim Müller-Jung, FAZ), a unit of measurement is needed there as well. This is now available in the CQ (creative qootient).
But does it tell us anything about designers for the climate culture, about the competence requirements for designers of the transformation? Can all those who are original in the sense of sustainable development and the great transformation identify themselves with the CQ? This creativity! – or this design competence describes the individual (and institutional) ability to act in upheavals (or transformations), i.e. in unclear and uncertain, complex and dynamic situations, to solve new problems and to design future living spaces and ways of life. Am I capable of acting? Am I motivated and able to motivate others? Am I in social networks and frameworks that are interested in and allow the implementation of climate-cultural rules of the game, technical systems and social innovations?
In the ESD projects of the UN Decade, the CQ has not yet been negotiated. One would like to breathe a sigh of relief. But in dealing with the notion of design competence, the essence of CQ is often managed, is traded as with a gold currency. But unlike gold, the view of the “design content” of competence is not substantive but normative – sharpened in future 1. It is only a promise – only a banknote, sometimes even counterfeit money.
Accordingly, the tragicomic offer of seminars, workshops and literature on design competence is more and more pronounced. For into these new seminars now go rational and routine people, experts of management and standards, and make creativity their own as a weekend additional qualification. Into this now go the stubbornly trained as routiniers teachers, forest educators, school gardeners, principals, etc. – Routiniers who have fixed modes for their teaching practice and yet suspect that something is up. Isn’t that kind of tragicomic? The whole school approach gets a new normative segment: “You must act creatively.”
What’s not funny at all is that pseudo-creativity is flooding the sustainability discussion. (Much of it is somehow casting shows and the results are “gadgets.”)
The suspicion expressed in many discourses with colleagues from developing countries does not diminish in this context, namely that under the name of sustainability and other dissolved terms emptied of meaning, the culture of capitalism is perpetuated. Solving problems is “out” – managing them is better.
This is the spirit of a stolen future. Pseudo-creatives moderate the aestheticized mainstream. They themselves, as decals, offer no resistance. (Resistance is part of design competence) They don’t fight for their cause – they don’t have one. The designs and creations that come along are borrowed.
Strange: You can’t get rid of the feeling of stagnation with the many blueprints that are declared to be sustainability designs and through which you can no longer see the originals and their creators; thieves and copiers bite the really creative ones.
Third barrier
ESD is very often the ecologically based attempt to restore past success stories. They bring to mind the story about Samoa after WW2. There, logically, with the withdrawal of the us military, deliveries of goods by plane stopped. But the Samoans had become accustomed to them. They now did something very strange for us (? Really?): They laid out runways for airplanes, use wood fires as guidance signals, in a wooden hut sat an “employee” with wooden headphones, radar towers were made of wood – because they hoped to attract the planes that would bring them the beautiful things they used to bring as a matter of course. They did everything right. The form was flawless!
But the innovation didn’t work; not a single plane landed!
And with us? Do we care why the airplanes came once? Do we care about the reason, the context? What is the context, why once things bring food and why the other time – despite artesan care and design of all details of an air traffic – effects fail?
In many ESD discourses and projects, it seems that it doesn’t matter if it brings anything. Wood fires and wooden radar towers abound – both in the perspective of “education about sustainable development” (thematic action and design challenges) and in “education for sustainable development” (sustainable and transformative literacy)!
There is a lack of coherence between challenges, learning content and outcome goals. But there are paradoxical interventions and, as in the case of coal energy policy, cynical atavism. Overwhelmed, the individual stands there with his figures: Before the last IPCC report, when the action mark was still at +2 degrees Celcius, the essential line of argument explained that the 2 degrees represented the limit beyond which socio-ecological and socio-cultural conditions could be expected, which we do not yet know, but which we would never wish for. But now it is after the IPCC report – and it is “after +2 degrees” (in the chronology of climate natives). What now? What is the guardrail now to guide the transformation of societal metabolisms? Where to? And what configurations of competence and “self-organizing dispositions” are now called for? Wooden radar is everywhere in the answers.
The log
Whenever it became dicey in human development, the world seemed too dynamic and too complex (crisis) the material was sought, put on emergency program. While knowledge must first be grasped and brought into the world through work of abstraction and communication, consent to the material does not require much – except the longing for a time when technology had not yet made everything so complicated. One can also put it this way: homo faber (or the hobbit?) reshapes his world into objects. In it he finds his way better, no more unstrained. Geoengineering is the modern appearance of these objects – compared to a term like climate culture – for example.
Abstraction makes for discomfort, the object, on the other hand, reassures. It becomes a winged word: head workers go more and more into the garden – “there you feel yourself again”, you can see what you have accomplished. The message in the proverb is simply wrong: life is in the garden (of a big city? even in urban gardening? even in urban agriculture), is in the craft. – Of course, the garden is not wrong and the craft just as little. But what is wrong is the promise that especially in individual gardening and handicrafts there is sustainable development, which feeds 10 billion people.
Well – this is called sustainable education. Unfortunately only the folkloristic substitute of a loss is offered!
More problematic, on the other hand, is the implicit message to degrade head work; what the head can’t fix, muscles are supposed to do and symbols are supposed to initiate. But no: the old world of things does not return! We already have to develop cultural techniques of foresighted perception and the negotiation of transformation steps that will make us fit for the future. Because our biological instruments for recognizing dangers (i.e. smelling, tasting, seeing dangers) are overridden for hazards such as CO2, UV exposure (in Europe, for example, the hazard level is 8; now in June 2014 a level of 40 has been fixed for areas of the Andes).
How – without crop risk systems – are we going to pack it? And the market, the stock exchange, the NSA – can these and do they want to say something about the future? Pretty stupid is this situation, which is not able to say anything about a transformative world society.
A grave suspicion is added: Is it perhaps really as Baudrillard suspected that the crisis strategy, the state of emergency, the shock are today for the power and its elites the only possible instruments with which they can tackle the individuals head-on in order to keep them in the system of social control and at the same time make them responsible for the crisis? In this way, climate change would acquire a new, “sustainable” function! “The consciousness that it could soon be the end with our civilization – only pregnant women and politicians can really suppress this consciousness. To all others one hears it,…the creeping consciousness however that everything could be soon to end, affects: Future beyond oneself is hardly a binding category for most.” Max Frisch, Drafts for a Third Diary, Suhrcamp Verlag Berlin 2010, p. 15
Creativity and self-effective creative competence that take root and spread in society could add to this cynical function. Perhaps after the decade is also before the decade. Because they exist, the design-competent activists and scientists. For the “nothing””Nada” “nothingness” cannot be stolen. The engravers need the original, the cheeky lateral thinkers, the bitter doubters, the questioners with their creations and designs, with their competence for self-efficacy, for self-confidence, for resilience and self-control – in cooperative social structures. Aesthetics of resistance, aesthetics of controversy, aesthetics of change are categories of design competence.