Course General Description

Theory is an indispensible element of the design process and represents the systematic component of what is increasingly referred to as “design thinking”. Theory also performs a bridging function; it connects to, and prepares a place for related disciplines and cultures within the sciences and the humanities as they too seek to account for the transformations of experience of time and space that are marking—and making—our world today. Academic theory has been relegated almost exclusively to the analysis of past or existing objects and works yet it is nowhere more effectively or inventively deployed than in the speculative and generative stages of design practice. At the Angewandte theory is seen as the integration of knowledge into design, as a discipline that deliberately changes how we think in order to change not only how, but what we design (much as ‘theory’ is practiced in physics, laying the conceptual foundations and directions for ‘experimentalists’).

School General Description

In the heart of Vienna, the capital of the Danube monarchy, the predecessor institution of the current University of Applied Arts, the Imperial Royal Arts and Crafts School, was founded in 1867. It was closely affiliated with the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (today the MAK), the first Arts and Crafts museum on the European continent. It was established in 1863 following the example of the South Kensington Museum in London, now the Victoria & Albert Museum, and was to serve as a collection of models for artists, industrialists, and the general public. At the time, early-industrialised England played a pioneer role in supporting a reformed Arts and Crafts movement in order to prevent its decline in the Machine Age. In the spirit of Historicism, the aim was to make it possible, also in Vienna, to study the great styles of the past by example of Arts and Crafts objects in the museum and to set up a place of advanced education for designers and craftsmen with the Arts and Crafts School in Vienna. It should train artists and teachers in equal measure to serve the demands of the art industry.