a Table. Close Encounters of Some Kind

‘a Table. Close Encounters of Some Kind’ is a research project for harvesting insights into contemporary discourses in the arts & design practices and pedagogies. This research is practice based, where the pedagogic activities are considered as artistic activity, a way of being a practicing designer. The focus has therefore been directed back to the teaching and to understand it as art and design itself, rather than teaching of art and design (Lupton 2013). Following the argument that design’s disciplinary field is in a state of ambiguity that is both an inherent quality and reflection of contemporary conditions (Tafuri 1980, Cousins 1998, Kauppila 2019), and furthermore where the teaching and learning of those fields in the higher education of art, design and architecture has a dialogical relationship with the subject area that is constantly to be reconfigured to extrapolate the unknown futures (Kauppila 2020). The learning within those frameworks will seek for multiple relationships, especially the ones that are non-linear and emerging (Rancière1991, Biesta 2017). ‘a Table. Close Encounters of Some Kind’ strives to explore these conditions. Most of our meetings related to our teaching and learning take their place by a table, whether this is a desk, a meeting table, a workbench, a coffee table or even a digital desktop. The table is the common ground for the dialogue to take place, the interstitial space for risk (Barnett 2007), where various roles are framed, the works are processed with reflection (Schön 1983,1987) and the potential of encountering ‘us’ is explored (Buber 1923/1958). In this project ‘a Table’ is explored as a physical artefact as one of the core typologies of furniture design within the disciplinary discourse. Yet ‘a Table’ is furthermore explored as space staging encountering within the referred pedagogical framework that exceeds the predefined functional properties related to the object typology. And even further ‘a Table’ is explored as materialised reflection where the earlier findings and theoretical frameworks surface. ‘a Table’ was set up as a spatial configuration in Black Box, in KHiO to host a series of live-events and happenings: ‘Close Encounters of Some Kind’. The objective was both to explore the installation as mock-up of learning environment for discussion about design and pedagogy within the referred framework, and as space for investigating the concept peripatetic encountering, the diversity of dialogical ponderings within disciplinary discourses, that explored the parallels between pedagogy, architecture and performing arts, as a way to broaden the scopes of operating in a dynamic, socio-spatial conditions.