To engage students in course materials, educators often turn to cutting-edge tools. As technology progresses, new methods offer an increasingly wide array of options for professors. Forms of communication and inquiry have indeed transformed, but what if a form that dates back thousands of years can provide students with new insights? What if practices from the past can aid us in understanding the future?
In a departure from the digital, students in the Big Ideas course “Thinking Through Art and Design @ Berkeley: Creativity and Practice” wrote their assignments in journals donated by Moleskine. Asking students to write assignments on pen and paper is a rarity. Most students haven’t completed a writing assignment for class without typing since elementary school. So why did they do so in this course?
Professor Greg Niemeyer (Professor of Media Innovation, Toban Fellow, Director of the Art Practice Graduate Program, and data artist) has highlighted the significance of the practice of writing by hand by having students envision how handwriting will be utilized in the future. Course assignments were handwritten as students used their Moleskine journals to create new ways of imagining the future. Students were given an assignment to create a language that would be used in the future along with an accompanying method of translation. The handwritten notes they created highlighted the evolution of language to fit societal needs and also reflected the anticipated concerns of a distant time. Tasked with identifying how new forms of language would emerge to ease communication in the future, students sketched creatively and imagined ways to detail the direction of this speculative society.