7.1. Introduction

This chapter questions the relationship between technical culture and innovation culture to return to the central role of design activity in the training context.

Gilbert Simondon’s [SIM 89/08] observation about culture excluding technology also points to this fascination with technical objects in everyday life, because they exclude from a culture with a universal purpose assumed by the status of sacred objects [SIM 89/08]. Technical culture, misunderstood and excluded, leaves room for a deficiency that manifests itself in an absence of its teaching in our training systems [LEQ 15].

Innovation culture, for its part, returns us to our industrial and post-industrial cultures, which lead us to an obstinate search for novelty that pushes us to obsolescence to provide a better guarantee of the advent of the new [BOU 12]. This search for novelty thus takes two characteristic forms: radical innovation (older) and incremental innovation, which is more recent, more widespread, more ephemeral, easier to handle, more attractive in the short term and characterizes a trend of late modernity [BOU 12].

To overcome this double impasse of a technical culture in the absence of training and an innovation culture reduced to incremental innovation characterized by a frenzy of short-term change, we propose the implementation of a didactic design [DID 11, DID 15, DID 16]. Thus, this chapter focuses on the effects of design activity in the production of technical objects in the contexts of training and education. In this logic, the learner assumes the role of a designer capable of understanding and acting on the world by producing and building upon innovative ideas to improve it [DID 15].

7.2. Technical culture

Culture must describe the set of existential traits, i.e. concrete, features of whole peoples; it includes lifestyles and the creation of value systems, questions, and beliefs [DEF 93].

In this perspective, culture also acts as a carrier of techniques. However, Gilbert Simondon’s postulate in the 1960s refers to a culture of defense against technology. The loss of cultural universality and its compartmentalization as a genre with its fixed rules and norms tends to institute culture as a discipline [SIM 89/08]. In addition, our approach questions the opposition between culture and the technical object by following a philosophical, pedagogical and didactic path.

The opposition between culture and technology returns us to the confrontation between human and machine [SIM 89/08]. The mistrust ascribed to the machine or to the technical object is based on the refusal to accept the strange reality contained within it:

Now, this strange being is still human, and the complete culture is what makes it possible to discover the strangeness as human. Likewise, the machine is the stranger; it is the stranger in whom the human is enclosed, the unknown, the materialized, the enslaved, yet remaining the human [SIM 89/08].

The omnipresence of the machine in our daily life carries with it a part of humanity. It is conceived as a track of human activity, imagination and production. The technical object functions like a prosthesis of the real, like a machine that has become irreplaceable, reaching the status of a sacred object without reaching the status of a cultural object [SIM 89/08]. Gilbert Simondon’s [SIM 89/08] observation made in the 1960s of this lack of knowledge of technical culture seems to be growing stronger today. How can we overcome this lack of knowledge of the technical object and the cultural choices associated with it?

7.3. The culture contained in the technical object

The specificity of the technical object defined by Gilbert Simondon [SIM 89/08] is characterized by its singularity as a function of the scientific object defined as an analytical object. The technical object is located at the point of competition between a multitude of scientific data and effects. Technical objects integrate different, apparently heterogeneous knowledge, which cannot be intellectually coordinated as they are practically coordinated according to their function [SIM 89/08]. The object’s structure refers to complexity, which can be understood from a practical point of view. This art of compromise takes us back to a pragmatic history specific to technology. The object is synthetic because it is based on its own history; it is the fruit of evolution and various technical advances. The technical object is characterized as an anthropological fragment, the debris of human events. Limited to its function of use, the technical object cannot restore the genesis that precedes its appearance. The desire to access the technical object, approached only by its function of use, reinforces the opposition between culture and technical object.

The teaching of technical and technological disciplines essentially addresses the production of a technical object in a fragmented and isolated manner from the production context [LEQ 15]. This type of teaching gives a relation to the object with its genesis separate from its future. This relationship to teaching contributes to nourishing this condition of the object without culture, an object thrown there that has become sealed from the knowledge it carries within.

In the absence of tools to understand the object’s genesis and future, current teaching contributes to reinforcing a feeling of incomprehension surrounding the object. A lack of knowledge surrounds the understanding of the object’s mode of existence, which places it in a relationship on a par with the sacred object surrounded by incomprehension and the unknown [SIM 89/08]. This being said, a form of rejection of knowledge relating to the object precedes the phase of discovery of the technical object, which becomes alien because it cannot be understood in its history and in its humanity. In this logic, the user maintains a relationship with the technical object tinged with both fascination and incomprehension. Unable to trace the historical path of the technical object, an “alienated” relationship to the object is constructed and prevents the person from thinking of a new relationship to the object tinged with deep and lasting progress.

7.4. Innovation culture

By investigating the technical object, we note the design phase, this moment of emergence and evaluation of innovative and adapted ideas that are concretized and materialized by technical innovations.

Innovation is characterized as a historical and irreversible change in the way things are done [SCH 83]. It is defined as follows:

A new product is manufactured, a new production method is introduced, a new outlet is opened, a new source of raw materials or semi-finished products is conquered, a new organization is created [SCH 83].

In order to better understand the relationship between technical culture and innovation culture, we propose to focus on the distinction between incremental innovation intended to correct routine and repetition, and radical innovation, which aims to produce something new, new by simple contrast with the existing.

Radical innovation manifests itself as sustainable and has:

The characteristics of the invention specific to the creative project, through the highlighting of a technical novelty for technical or social or for social innovation. The second, incremental innovation is only the reorganization of the existing under one or the other variant, which does not include any singularity [BOU 12].

Jean Pierre Boutinet’s view of innovation [BOU 12] shows a specificity of our industrial and post-industrial cultures to propose essentially incremental innovations based on the short term. This type of innovation generates exhaustion and weariness leading to the infernal cycle of a civilization of wear and tear, rejection and exhaustion [BOU 12]. Thus, innovation culture, in turn, generates mistrust through its inability to propose real improvements and changes over the long term.

Incremental innovation embodies this change in technology that must be replaced by a new solution without being sustainable. Incremental innovation and change combine without leading to long-term improvement. Gilbert Simondon [SIM 89/08] posits that change is too rapid and contrary to technical progress, in the sense that this change prevents the transmission of knowledge acquired to the next generation. Many technical objects from our daily lives are designed in a perspective of rapid and blind change. The example used by Yves Deforge [DEF 90] about disposable objects gives substance to this dynamic of incremental innovation, to these rapid and short-term changes that do not allow us to enter into a logic of sustainable and equitable progress. Incremental innovation reinforces a representation of the technical object associated with a culture based on a short-term change. Thus, perceiving the technical object in a logic of replacement and simple reorganization of the existing contributes to reinforcing an understanding of technical culture limited to incremental innovation.

To design a disposable lighter is to participate in the squandering of human labor and the earth’s energy capital. This may seem minimal when it comes to a lighter, washing machines or cars, but if we add up what is represented in noble materials thrown away each day, it takes the dimensions of an ecological disaster [DEF 90].

Beyond the obvious ecological dimension and the relationship to consumption, the technical object carrying this defect of individuation crystallizes a poorly considered design because it is incapable of taking into account the phenomena of long-term causes and effects. The technical object conceived in a dynamic of incremental innovation reminds us that it is by definition a “total social reality” [DAG 89].

The object is a “total social reality”: the philosopher-semiologist must learn to read and decipher it, on its shell or in its lines only, the cultural aspects that are housed there. We must learn to translate morphologies [DAG 89].

Ambassador of a society too often oriented towards the short-term and precarious change, he reminds us that the object is a system in itself [BAU 68], endowed in a way with an autonomy that is capable of reflecting back to us the image of what we have become. Incremental innovation reinforces a relationship with technical culture that moves the person away from a genuine questioning of its meaning and its role as a lever for generating sustainable technical and social innovations. In this relationship, the technical culture is no longer irrigated by values linked to progress, the improvement of society and the user’s needs. Removing meaning from knowledge allows us to associate useless values with progress and thus with the awareness of user’s needs. Technical culture no longer carries meaning and interest for the individual. This helps to explain its disappearance and the lack of interest and attraction within our training institution.

To go beyond an understanding of technical culture limited to incremental innovation, it is necessary to learn to think about the technical object in a dynamic of anticipation and prospecting for progress aimed at improving the collective. In addition, we postulate a change in the way we relate to the technical culture in order to activate the improvement possibilities and transformation of the society contained within it. To enter into this logic, it is necessary to learn to think about innovation in the long term, in a sustainable and equitable way; no longer in a logic of change biased towards short-term change [DID 17a]. At this point, the knowledge contained in the technical object can become instrumental for improving society via the design of objects or systems carrying technical and social innovation. Favoring a relationship over knowledge, orientation towards improving society therefore consisted of learning to design and redesign everyday technical objects that integrate the values of sustainability and equity by taking into account the user’s needs [DID 17a]. To do so, it is necessary to emphasize the act of knowledge transmission stored by one era to the next at the time of the technical object’s design. The design must reflect on the meaning, role and use of innovation. It must be able to contain a message of technical and social innovation designed for the long term. In this, we leave a tradition of learning by repetition and mimicry in favor of design activity as the central element of an individual’s training [DID 17b]. Thinking about improving users’ needs comprises learning to design and redesign technical objects and systems from an early age [DID 17b]. The design activity is characterized by the capacity to mobilize different transversal knowledge [DID 17c], and also research and questioning phases conducive to learning ethical and civic debates [QUI 17]. This learning will facilitate the training of technical professionals, who will position themselves in a democracy capable of putting technical and social innovation back into a more centralized role of technological design [DID 17a].

In this perspective, it is our responsibility to train enlightened and wise technical professionals, capable of intervening on the assembly line of the technical object through its cultural layers. From a training perspective, we propose to involve the individual in the project of creating the technical object. To do this, we propose, within the training, to create designers capable of identifying, understanding and designing technical objects that are sustainable; designed with intelligibility in a sustainable and equitable dynamic.

7.4.1. Training designers to generate technical and social innovation

To understand the genesis of the technical object, it is necessary to take into account the object’s design and, more precisely, this phase of emergence and evaluation of ideas preceded by a phase of representation then of crystallization in matter. The project is defined as the prerogative of creativity and inventiveness [BOU 12]. To quote Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthes [CAL 01], the development of science and technology has created more uncertainty than certainty. This relationship to uncertainty makes it difficult to make appropriate decisions based on complex situations [CAL 01]. To counter this uncertainty and overcome the fact that our knowledge is limited to what we know, the learning of anticipation and prospective thinking appear as one of the tools to overcome this crisis of uncertainty. Thinking about technical and social innovation from a sustainable and equitable perspective requires mobilizing creative and prospective thinking while being able to manage constraints in complex situations without pre-established procedures. Training in compulsory education is based on learning techniques in which innovation is absent. Putting innovation back at the center of compulsory school education requires learning to design objects and technical systems [DID 17c].

Learning sustainable and equitable innovation requires the introduction of citizenship values [DID 17a] and ethical questioning in the investigation and research phases at the beginning stages of designing technical objects and systems [QUI 17].

Training citizens in the making, the decision makers and the designers of today and tomorrow, in order to overcome a society entangled in the uncertainty of risk and generalized distrust, requires the development of a thought process capable of analyzing complex situations [CAL 01]. Rehabilitating technical innovation in a dynamic of sustainable and equitable innovation thus induces capacities for discernment, analysis and emancipation that must be developed in everyone from the earliest age [DID 17b]. In the context of teaching, learning to solve problems without pre-established procedures requires the production of innovative ideas which are adapted to the situation, in other words, the mobilization of creativity. Like intelligence, it is not possible to teach creativity, but it is possible to develop it.

In the context of teaching creative and manual activities in compulsory schools in French-speaking Switzerland [DID 15b], we have introduced creative design activities in teacher training with a view to developing applied and contextualized creativity in students practicing their design skills [DID 17b]. The discipline of creative and manual activities, stemming from the trades and work style of the artisan, has kept this proximity with artisanal industries. The purpose of introducing the creative design activity is to meet the requirements of the study plan for French-speaking Switzerland by encouraging students to develop their creative thinking [PLA 10].

The introduction of the theoretical model “Design–Realization–Socialization” [DID 11] mobilizes the design activity as a research space for the student in order to teach him or her to solve complex situations. Our goal is to democratize the designer position for the student throughout all compulsory schooling during the design and production of objects and technical systems (see Figure 7.1).

7.5. The training and transmission of a technical culture

The Design–Realization–Socialization model leaves an age-old tradition linked to the realization of objects to deploy the potential of knowledge, crystallized in the object [DID 12], to make it a learning project for the individual. This didactic model encourages the collection and analysis of data involved in the production and learning process. This theoretical model encourages a rationalized and production-oriented research approach by inviting the teacher to support both didactic and disciplinary choices. In addition, it leads the teacher and the student to discover and understand the sense and meaning of a phenomenon and to describe it. The Design–Realization–Socialization model introduces research into the production of objects or object projects, carried out in the school context. The teacher is accustomed to reinforcing the articulation between professional and teaching practice through the analysis of the design and implementation activity.

The proposed theoretical model induces an analysis of the production phases of an object or project in order to make its complexity accessible. By using professional approaches (engineering, design, styling), artistic approaches and scientific approaches, it allows the individual to quantify the steps needed to produce an object. Moreover, it invites the individual to appropriate creative approaches in relation to the industrial and professional context. The cognitive operations induced by the design activity [BON 06] lead the student to enter into a contextualized creative process. Design requires identifying and analyzing the problem, and finding innovative and appropriate situations for implementation [PER 01]. Design activity mobilizes creative thinking by exploiting divergent thinking. This appears as a key element of the design phase where the author/designer must leave everyday life to explore the world of ideas in order to propose innovative solutions. Divergent thinking, which is hardly developed in the school context [LUB 03], constitutes one of the key phases of the design activity. The selection of the chosen idea must then be confronted with all the needs and constraints of the object. This operation requires convergent thinking that takes into account the different parameters related to the object. In this design phase, we observe the intervention of several transversal competences used in the other disciplinary fields. The work of innovation, in connection with the constraints linked to the materials, the execution and the use of the object, stimulates and leads in a systematic way the anticipation in the student. Thus, he or she is accustomed to using a research method adapted to the situation encountered, allowing him or her to respond to the production context. In this way, the student becomes able to position themselves as an individual making choices, ways of acting and thinking according to fields of constraints.

7.6. Technical culture and knowledge creation

Technical culture embedded in student training would naturally seem to favor a path through the accumulation of technical knowledge that would gradually give rise to an expert position. Here, the approach that we propose is different because it favors an experiential entry based on an investigative approach to technical culture [DID 17c]. Traditionally, the teacher transmits knowledge to the student, who learns through a mechanism of reproduction and repetition giving rise to different learning processes. The activity of design induces another way of mobilizing knowledge for the learner, knowledge that is essentially transversal and that will allow the learner to enter into a project logic by learning to anticipate and decide. To do this, it is first necessary to put aside the understanding of culture as a sum of knowledge that gives rise to an understanding of technical culture perceived in terms of the accumulation of knowledge to be learned by heart and mobilized in an automated manner. On the contrary, the design of technical objects or systems in a project logic invites the learner to perceive technical culture as an ability to create and structure knowledge in its layers:

Culture resides in a mixed state, it is knowledge plus an ability to structure knowledge. Knowledge is not only made of the present, it also encompasses the past and even, in part, the future. Culture is therefore an ability to create, in the layers of knowledge, lines of force, currents that connect facts and extend them beyond the present [DEF 93].

The activity of design leads the learner to enter into an investigative logic [FAU 13], like any researcher, while associating and articulating a designer logic. Let us take the example of the design of a bag made by a student in compulsory school (secondary school) within the framework of the teaching of Creative Activities on Textiles. A traditional approach to teaching would favor the introduction of a teacher-imposed procedure essentially oriented towards the prescription of tasks of reproduction and imitation in relation to an imposed model. In this logic, the manufacturing techniques of the object appear as the predominant elements in this type of sequence.

By preferring a pedagogy of project and, more precisely, a logic of micro-project by relying on the model Design–Realization–Socialization [DID 11], we introduce a lesson of technical culture, which is introduced during the activity of design of the technical object approached as complex system. Indeed, culture is perceived in this approach as a capacity [DEF 93] that allows the learner to learn to put into resonance their own knowledge with knowledge in construction. As a result, when the technical object is conceived, the identification of a research space necessary for the emergence of creative, innovative and adaptive ideas becomes the place where a technical culture is linked to an active, even interactive, approach between the individual, the project and the object [DID 15c]. During the design activity, the research and analysis of innovative solutions adapted to the project [BON 06] will facilitate the resonance of the individual’s knowledge while allowing them to access an active understanding of knowledge. To design is to learn how to conduct an investigation with regard to constraints while contextualizing the choices made by mobilizing the analysis and linking of knowledge. This also helps to reinforce the learner’s investment by putting him in the role of creator of their project [DID 15c]. Teaching the apprentice designer how to enter into a logic of relationship, of resonance with their own knowledge, is to allow them to enter into a project logic in order to learn how to design and produce a product intended for a user.

As part of the design and production of a bag by a 13-year-old student, this object project is approached as a technical system that responds to a user’s context and needs. Indeed, to design the bag, the student is encouraged to carry out an investigation on this object by investigating its functions of use and symbolism [DEF 89]. From this starting point, the investigation and search for ideas phase will make it possible to orient and set the various decisions of the designer. In what context will it be used, to meet what needs, what will it express, mean and symbolize by the choice of shape, colors and materials? How should it be made and with what techniques? All these decisions will make it possible to seek information and carry out investigations in a pragmatic manner in order to resolve these various concrete situations. Connecting to culture within the framework of a project consists of seeing culture as a stock of knowledge that allows the designer to expand their space for ideas and decisions. Culture is approached in this project context as an active approach of linking knowledge with a confrontation with reality [POL 93]:

A culture is a work of art, an “artificial” creation and like all works born of human freedom, each culture has a historical originality that makes it a unique historical reality. It is created by people who constitute a whole sufficiently interdependent so that its members are in relations, in reciprocal reactions under somewhere in a contingent geometric space, and in the duration of a long series of generations [POL 93].

If the bag is intended for an adult, according to the needs of this user, a bundle of decisions will direct the various investigations, as much about the symbolic function of the object (what it represents, means, symbolizes, communicates) as about the function of utility (related to its purpose, use, the needs it answers and the context of use) with regard to this user. The different design problems occurring throughout the process will allow the student to resonate with other objects or technical systems [DID 17a]. This will gradually teach them to mobilize and reinvest their knowledge in order to capitalize a sum of knowledge linked to practical experience. This induces another understanding of technical culture that is approached as a sum of knowledge related to a project. This way of approaching the construction of new knowledge for the learner generates the creation of knowledge that will have meaning in their eyes.

In the context of this bag project, students were able to orient their search for ideas regarding materials and by investigating different economic, social and historical uses associated with materials. Following their research, the student favored the use of tarpaulin, the material of choice of the Swiss brand Freitag¹. The technical objects made with tarpaulin are emblematic of this Swiss company and are characterized by the use of a specific material from the recycling of truck tarpaulins. Because of the low initial cost of this recycled raw material, but also because of its functional and symbolic properties (resistance, impermeability, color and texture, which are quickly identifiable, direct reference to a symbol of recycling in a logic of sustainability), it appears representative and reflective of the state of mind of an era concerned with recycling and by allowing the user to stand out from what already exists. The material of the tarpaulin, this technical object, allows access to an understanding of the system of use, consumption and also production of the object. In this context, the investigation of tarpaulin intervenes as a vector element allowing the student to assume a role of designer/researcher. This material is asserting itself as a carrier material of its reflection and its path on issues important to it, related to recycling and sustainability in our consumer society. In this way, this learning situation allows the student to confront himself or herself with the design of an everyday object carrying a reflected use but also symbolic by the images to which he or she sends us. Beyond the relatively simple technical object, this object project brings us back to the design process that participates in the student’s training. This project testifies to this student’s research not only on issues of sustainability and recycling but also on the imagination conveyed by its star shape (see Figure 7.2). Indeed, the bag intended for the personal use of the student activates a positive image for them in a logic of construction and reinforcement of the self-esteem. So many details that participate in the training of a technical creator brought to position himself with regard to the choices and decisions related to the technical and social innovations of today and tomorrow. During this pedagogical sequence, the technical culture was not artificially tackled in this project. The technical culture was used for the student as a tool to understand, get involved, go beyond his known universe to allow him to learn to invest himself, question himself, understand, analyze, choose and ultimately decide. Like a designer, the student positioned as an apprentice designer investigates by linking their own knowledge to a sum of technical knowledge regarding a project. Culture that is understood only in its passive sense [POL 93] activates representations of a sum of knowledge to be capitalized by imitation and restitution, learning dynamics not conducive to the search for ideas and the linking of needs and uses with existing technical objects. By reactivating the active sense of culture [POL 93], it becomes an engine for learning to structure and create in the layers of knowledge [DEF 93]. Thus, the design activity, through the mobilization of different transversal knowledge (anticipating, managing constraints, creating hypotheses, mobilizing creative thinking, communicating, working at an abstract level) [BON 16] will give rise to a design process that mobilizes the autonomy, creativity and skills of the student, making him/her the author/designer of his/her own project with an emancipatory dynamic of knowledge creation [DID 17b].

7.7. Conclusion

Putting aside an incremental innovation logic based on the short term requires relying on the concept of radical innovation to put technical and social innovation back into the center of a sustainable and equitable perspective. In this logic, it becomes necessary to train designers to take into account technical and social progress that integrates the needs of users. Through the design/re-design of technical objects and systems, the learner positioned in the designer’s position mobilizes transversal knowledge such as creative thinking, anticipation, prospecting, constraint management and management of complex situations [DID 17a]. During the design activity, the integration of ethical and civic values makes it possible to mobilize a technical culture that generates meaning and progress for the designer and the user [DID 17b]. We therefore propose to use design as a tool for change and learning in order to develop an innovation culture that is reasoned, thoughtful and adapted to the needs of the user and society. Learning to think of innovation in a sustainable and equitable way consists of mobilizing cognitive, technical and ethical tools to enable everyone to become a designer. This change in teaching and training begins with simple, ordinary, everyday projects. This allows the apprentice designer to appropriate the mechanisms of analysis of complex situations and problem-solving [FOR 05]. The introduction of design from a very early age into compulsory schooling makes it possible to awaken and develop a designer in every future citizen. In this logic, this leads the designer to understand and participate in the choices and technical decisions, the only means to give rise to thoughtful and sustainable innovations. In this way, it is possible to build another connection between technical culture and innovation culture.