Pixel International Conferences

Arts and Design education in countries with moderate educational level often follows traditional methods of teaching, similar to and partially adopted from programs in the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, these teaching paths often pay no great attention to the specific preconditions that preliminary education in these parts of the world entails, but that define the intellectual capabilities and mechanical skills of the local student body. Whilst students in the Western world are usually equipped with a good level of craftsmanship, students in these countries often fundamentally lack these skills. Using the example of the United Arab Emirates the paper discusses the missing life experiences through which others gained the mechanical skills necessary to design or craft models, prototypes or products of their respective arts or design discipline. Many of these students have never renovated an apartment, repaired a bicycle, fixed a broken toy, or even felt an absolute necessity to develop these skills. Our research addresses the educational challenges and opportunities that arise from the use of innovative fabrication technologies, especially robotics, in an environment with suchlike limitations. We research the impact of these technologies onto the quality of the students´ work and derive answers from these works to adjust or maintain the direction of current and future curricula. Even though the target group that we address consists of local students only, we expect the results to be conferrable to other homogeneous groups with similar deficits. Our initial research projects showed astonishing results that might suggest necessary changes in areas of Arts and Design Education that have been taken for granted and indispensable for decades. The paper discusses these changes and suggests alternative methods of instruction.

Keywords: Digital Fabrication, Robotic Machining, Craftsmanship;