The London underground system is a point in question. The London underground delivers a strange type of time travel? Or a possible social and economic transformation, facilitating fluidity in population and social change, the London underground in the post war periods 1st and 2nd world wars. Think of network of tunnels, the tube (the web) delivering you from one existent reality to another, the suburbs to the glamour of the westend, or the eastend to the westend. Disappearing down a hole in the ground in what looks like a spaceship to arrive minutes later in Piccadilly or Mayfair. What relation have we here with the web/internet? The underground was re-designed at the hight of modernism, tube stations that looked like spaceships, posters created that painted the tube and its mobility in totally transformational light.

Can we juxtaposition this early 20th century time travel with our virtual time travel today? It does seem similar! Are virtual environments in need of navigable control beyond hypertext, what could be defined as (Harry Beck’s) original London tube map in combination with publicity defining/designing choices of arrival destination? This in my opinion has strong relation to education, we drop into the tunnel of education and arrive at destinations, qualifications, careers, further education possibilities etc. This thought must also have relation to possible learning destinations, can we design learning ‘destinations’ and associated possibilities?

This concept has relation to a small project I’m working on at that the moment, curriculum mapping in the digital university. I wrote a paper/essay on the subject in a previous MSCDE ED module ‘Info Literacies’.

These thoughts seem to segway nicely into #ededc 3rd study block - Katherine Hayles and posthuman etc.

Digital education (and education in general) increasingly require design of process, simply because (in my opinion) education via the digital domain is essentially a visual experience, so requires visual language to interpret delivery of information (as I’ve talked about in previous posts). If I accept that notion, then (logically) the design process is key the success of education.

Critical design as a process challenges existent knowledge, assumptions and process. Design outcomes (or process) facilite our existence, and helps us to make choices through interpretation of what is possible, or what is existent, but that’s not enough! So what role does (critical) design have in social interaction and (generally) methods of communication in the digital domain? Is there a design process within the dynamic of socail and business interaction? Design of behaviour?

Design is at present mostly reactive, it is a consequence of something else. What if design became the product? And what if the different interactions between institutions and individuals with relation to technology results in a different type of product or experience? These interactions (are always) or often can be invisible to us, this is where design is so important, it can visualise these open spaces (or interactions), make experiences or products tangible. Or is ( as I have discussed here) design the product or the experience?

So where do I start? The ethnography I created is a beginning (I think).

Click here to view the embedded video.