Aesthetico departs from the idea that teaching an Aesthetics of Care with Ecology has 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.

The project understands 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 overall objective is to develop an aesthetico-ethical framework and to make it available to educators as a modular toolkit that can be deployed in a variety of pedagogical settings.

Partnerships:

Technical University of Sofia

Cyprus University of Technology

University of Technology of Troyes

Hochschule Darmstadt, University of Applied Sciences

Technological University Dublin

Riga Technical University

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Polytechnic University of Cartagena

Aesthico is structured into four project results

PR1 Mapping Aesthetics in Technological Education (Leader TU Dublin)

PR1 will produce a systematic mapping and inventory of the role of aesthetics in technological project-based education. It will set the scene by identifying and analysing current practices and challenges alongside emerging theoretical positions, through a process of testing against real world scenarios to produce a systematic mapping and inventory of the role of aesthetics in technological education and to summarise this complex in an accessible fashion in an online knowledge base

PR2 Circular Economies of Design ( Leader TU Sofia)

PR2 proposes that an aesthetics of care in technological education is necessary to inculcate the principles of the circular economy (contributory economy) – replacing obsolescence with restoration; privileging of repairability, and advocating for the right to repair and building local community-based repair capacity, reduction of waste through superior design into technological education.

PR3 Teacher Training Module (Leader Cyprus University of Technology)

This PR will prepare teachers to teach an aesthetics of care framework to a heterogeneous group of participants within a technological education context. The primary function of the teacher programme is to bring the twin approaches of theoretical work in PR1 and the practice focus of PR2 into a programme that can be taught in a technological education context

PR4 Student Module (Leader Technical University Cluj-Napoca

This PR will prepare a student module for teaching the aesthetic-ecological approach. This will be a modular toolkit that allows teachers to apply the approach in a range of pedagogical and (trans) disciplinary settings. It will prepare the intensive student programme C2, building on work from PR2 – Circular Economies of Design and feedback received from C1 the Teacher Programme. The results and findings of intensive student programme C2 will feedback into the design and preparation of the final toolkit