New technologies, educational expansion of the arts and design

Abstract

This is a dissertation on the metaphors between technology, teaching, the arts, and design. Man, homo faber, in his ability to transform nature, has evolved thanks to his ability to apply experience and knowledge about living systems to plastic or designed systems. The only testimony of many of these cognitive transferences remains in the multiple objects bequeathed through the centuries.

The best-known example recorded in writing is that of Leonardo da Vinci, who in his notes expressed great interest in bats as models for flying machines, especially for the way their membranous skin reinforces and coats the skeleton, which is essential for wings and flight.

I will begin, first of all, by making certain experiences, because I want above all to begin with experience [...] I will show why bodies are obliged to behave in this or that way. It is the method which we must observe in the investigation of natural phenomena [...] it is true that Nature begins with reasoning and ends with experience, but it is necessary for us to proceed in a different way and to begin with experience in order to discover the law. (Da Vinci, 2004, p. 23)

The systematization of the functioning of objects taken from living systems or from technologies that present the characteristics of such systems is contemplated in the science called Bionics. In the various branches of this discipline, such as Genesa, we identify an infinite number of graphic reproductions of nature. However, the most controversial and revolutionary are those that have been aroused by the analogy with man himself, and of them the one that has undoubtedly become transcendental in the last decades of this century is the one that has given rise to the invention and development of computers.

The crux of this controversy centers on the fact that the analogy of computers is given in the first instance with the human brain, in the second with the nervous system, and finally with our main sensory capacities, namely, sight, hearing, and touch, and their consequent extensions in the visual arts and communication. When motor possibilities are added to them, we enter the field of robotics and when perceptions and data of time and space are evoked, the reference is to virtual reality.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.56238/sevened2024.002-017