Research activity at Orléans School of Art and Design is carried out in Research in Art and Design programmes (RAD), devised by the ECOLAB researchers according to a varied periodicity (bi-annual or more). These programmes are at the heart of the pedagogy in the second and third courses. The articulation of the artistic project of the school, is destined to tackling the world.
They lean on stable teams composed not only of Orléans School of Art and Design teachers in design, art or theory, and workshop supervisors, but also with external researchers from different disciplines and scientific fields. Each programme can call upon participants. They can be invited to follow the programme to the end, with an outside look. As it is difficult to do research alone, a programme associates several partners to its research (universities, laboratories, art and design schools, engineers or tradesmen, museums, art centres, etc.). Some RAD programmes are subsidised by the French ministry of Culture.
A moment of shared manufacturing, a RAD does not differentiate between practice and theory. Everything is action. Thus, a RAD is a moment of crossed apprenticeships of practical, theoretical and technical knowledge, a moment of shared reflection (study days, symposiums, conferences), a time of collaborative or collective production (in the form of work sessions or workshops) and moments of demonstration. These three moments must be articulated, to the extent that, as McLuhan wrote, the medium is the message. Work sessions can occur outside Orléans School of Art and Design in the districts and municipalities of the conurbation or elsewhere in France or abroad.
Students are directly involved in the logic of a collaborative creation, shared or collective of the RAD. In other words, the RAD teaches students to raise the question of internal governance, include themselves in a project, share resources, overcome being observed, subdue failure, improvise and contradict, and finally transform trial into exhibition. It is important to highlight that the RAD is destined to initiate students to research activities by associating them to those of researchers.
Nevertheless, the work realised at the end of the RAD is exhibited, disseminated and placed under the collective responsability, and ideally on equal terms with the researchers and research students of the RAD.
The four research in art and design programmes
- Blockchain in Media
- Edition, media, design : Expanded publishing, when data become form
- Liga – Cohabiting with the river
- Objects, Crafts and Computation
Download the brochure of the four research in art and design programmes (only in French).