Aesthetics and Ecology in Technological Education

Aesthetics and Ecology in Technological Education

Aesthetics & Ecology in Technological Education graphic logo

AesThiCo is a 36 month Erasmus+ Ka220 HED cooperation partnership in higher education. The project originated in the European Culture and Technology Lab (ECT Lab+), a research institute of the European University of Technology, and funded under the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

The project begins with the understanding that radical new transdisciplinary approaches are needed if technological education is to meet the challenges of the 21st century, with its entangled problems of climate crisis and complex relation to technology and innovation.

We believe that teaching an Aesthetics of Care has the potential to provide students with the transformative set of skills and competencies necessary to redefine aspects of sustainable technological development.

An aesthetics of care in this sense means that concrete ways of caring for each other, for human societies, and for the environment are encoded in how we design, build, interact with, employ, or aestheticise technology, so that future technologists have concrete ethical frameworks to work with. Aesthetics of care in this context is understood as a form of praxis, an individual practice that has collective implications, permeating all social, economic and technical relationships in the anthropocene.

The project’s objective is to develop an aesthetico-ethical framework and to make it available to educators as a modular toolkit that can be deployed in a variety of pedagogical settings.

Click here to learn more about the project and Consortium

Project Results

The intellectual work of AesThiCo was structured into four project results (PRs), each PR’s team worked to produce a number of discrete intellectual and practical outcomes; seminars, workshops, exhibitions, hackathons, conferences,and academic texts which collectively contributed to the project goals. The process and outcomes of each of the PR are detailed on the following page links.

mapping out keywords for an aesthetics of care at a workshop at a consortium meeting at TU Dublin

Mapping Aesthetics in Technological Education (Leader TU Dublin)

Project Result 1

seated audience listening to a standing speaker in front of a window overlooking the street in UPCT Cartegena

PR2 Circular Economies of Design ( Leader TU Sofia)

Project Result 2

Students participating in the repairathon as part of the Teacher Programme

PR3 Teacher Training Module (Leader Cyprus University of Technology)

Project Result 3

students and staff listening to a speaker introducing the Student module workshop

PR4 Student Module (Leader Technical University Cluj-Napoca

Project Result 4

Resources

In addition to the Multiplier Exhibition and AesThiCo Conference, the work of the consortium was presented and disseminated throughout the project’s duration: as conference participation, in public seminars, through exhibitions, as open access academic publications, and as knowledge resources for deepening understanding of and teaching Aesthetics of Care in a range of contexts. These as open resources can be accessed below.