Workshop for tutors at BAU design college of Barcelona. With Gijs de Heij and Eric Schrijver (OSP).

This workshop starts from our experience with using Free, Libre and Open Source software in our (graphic) design practice. We would like to share what this means for our own work, and more particularly how it has an effect on our ideas about design education. Free culture challenges traditional art-education paradigms because it invites participants to move between roles (teacher, student, developer, user) and because it necessitates a fundamental questioning of the political and cultural heritage embedded in the technologies that we employ.

Art and design students are typically expected to create their work using proprietary tools for research, prototypes, (re)presentation and production. Sometimes, they are taught particular packages but more often the impact of software and hardware choices will be ignored. How to engage with the growing importance of digital processes in a way that relates to the intellectual and aesthetic paradigms of design-education? How to consider soft- and hardware as an integral part of design practice, and develop more intimate and experimental relations with digital tools? And what is the importance of using Free, Libre and Open Source software for all this?