Aesthetics and Ecology in Technological Education

AesThiCo was a 36 month Erasmus+ Ka220 HED cooperation partnership in higher education. The project originated in the European Culture and Technology Lab (ECT Lab+), a research institute of the European University of Technology, and funded under the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

The project began with the understanding that radical new transdisciplinary approaches were needed if technological education is to meet the challenges of the 21st century, with its entangled problems of climate crisis and complex relation to technology and innovation.

The project believed that that teaching an Aesthetics of Care had the potential to provide students with the transformative set of skills and competencies necessary to redefine aspects of sustainable technological development.

An aesthetics of care in this sense means that concrete ways of caring for each other, for human societies, and for the environment are encoded in how we design, build, interact with, employ, or aestheticise technology, so that future technologists have concrete ethical frameworks to work with. Aesthetics of care in this context is understood as a form of praxis, an individual practice that has collective implications, permeating all social, economic and technical relationships in the anthropocene.

The project developed an aesthetic-ethical framework which was made available to educators as a modular toolkit that can be deployed in a variety of pedagogical settings.

The project's finding and process are outlined at https://aesthico.eu