Professor Pelle Ehn, högskolan i Malmö: Manifesto for a Digital Bauhaus?

In the history of the modern society several grand projects have been launched in an attempt to unite the two sides of Enlightenment project: the hard (technology and natural sciences) with the soft (values, democracy, art and ethics). One remarkable such project was the Bauhaus. Today, in the digital age at the turn of the century, we can witness new attempts to creative and socially useful meetings between "art" and "technology". This emerging "third culture" of nerds and digirati is promising, but stil most immature.

What is needed in design and use of the most post-modern of medias and technologies - the information and communication technology - is not a modernism caught in a solidified objectivity in the design of modern objects in steel, glass and concrete, but a comprehensive sensuality in the design of meaningful interactive and virtual stories and environments.

What is needed is not the modern praise of new technology, but a critical and creative aesthetic-technical production orientation that unites modern information and communication technology with design, art, culture and society, and at the same time places the development of the new mediating technologies in their real every day context of changes in lifestyle, work and leisure.

What is needed is a Scandinavian design that unites a democratic perspective emphasising open dialogue and active user participation with the development of edifying cultural experiences and the production of useful, interesting, functional and maybe even beautiful and amusing every day things for ordinary people.

Could a Digital Bauhaus - a new unity of art and technology - be a relevant answer to this design challenge? Would it be proper to think in terms of a manifesto for an anxious act of political love in the era of the computer?

Välkommna
John Cumberbatch