SOVIET FASHION DESIGN AT MICRO LEVEL: BRICOLAGE, SCARCITY, CREATIVITY

The phenomenon of Soviet fashion is widely acknowledged, but it is still little known about Soviet designers’ professional routines and the way they solved their professional tasks in a planned economy. The existing studies explored Soviet fashion as part of the planned economy and everyday culture. The study aims at explaining how Soviet designers overcame the limits of the planned economy and made performative statements. Soviet fashion design is analyzed in terms of bricolage. Evidence comes from archival documents and 14 in-depth interviews with ex-employees of the Perm Clothing Design House and Experimental Workshop of Everyday Service Department. As a result, the author describes the features and peculiarities of individual bricolage in Soviet fashion design, resources enriching bricoleurs’ repertoire, and practices of dialogues of the bricoleurs with resources and technologies. Designers did not limit themselves to reproducing official principles of Soviet fashion, but using the bricolage opportunities, they endeavored to make the inner sense shift. Their performative statements did not transform the public fashion discourse, but they affected the professional discourse of a concrete organization or co-workers. In the context of Soviet subjectivity studies, our findings extend the vision of Soviet subject’s creativity under conditions of scarcity and government control.

Glass Art Department at Lviv National Academy of Arts: unique centre of contemporary glassmaking

The preconditions for the emergence of professional art education in the field of art glass in Lviv and Galicia are considered. The history of artistic glass and its influence on the development of the modern center in Lviv on the basis of the Lviv National Academy of Arts is analyzed. The history of the Department began in 1961 with an experiment, when at Lviv State Institute of Applied and Decorative Art (today Lviv National Academy of Arts) a small department of plastic and glass art was opened. Full formation of the unit took place in 1963–1964 and corresponded to the needs of provision with the specialists of experimental workshop of glass art of Lviv Experimental Ceramic and Sculpture Factory of those times. The curriculum of basic art disciplines is formed in accordance with the specificity of the material – glass art and is focused on consideration of the importance of imaginative or constructive thinking, according to selected specialized direction. For decades, the staff of the Glass Department keep contact with glass artists in the whole world, participates in organization of international symposiums and exhibitions, meetings with students, lectures, workshops with the participation of the most famous artists in the world. Since 1989, the teachers and staff of the Department have been actively participating in the organization of International Symposiums of Blown Glass that are the most long-lasting continuous forums of glass artists in the world nowadays. On the base of the Department, mini-symposiums for students took place, and in 2013 and 2016, a scientific and creative workshop (glass-melting furnace) became the main base for the work of famous glass artists from different countries of the world. Every three years the students have an opportunity to observe the work of the most world well-known glass artists from various countries, participate in workshops and lectures. The purpose of the article is to analyze the activities of the Department of Art Glass of the Lviv National Academy of Arts in the modern studio movement.

Development and Evaluation of a New Platform for Accelerating Cross-Domain Data Exchange and Cooperation

The technologies for collecting and analyzing data are developing significantly, enabling us to gain new knowledge from various types of data. Recently, the considerably increasing expectation for cross-domain data exchange and cooperation has attracted attention from data markets. However, as we lack data-utilization knowledge, an accurate evaluation of data is difficult; a non-price indicator for deciding the exchange of data is needed. Thus, in this study, we propose a new online platform for stakeholders to communicate regarding data utilization. Our online platform, called Web Innovators Marketplace on Data Jackets (Web IMDJ), is built with reference to the process of IMDJ workshops. Web IMDJ is superior to the conventional paper-based IMDJ (hereafter, Table IMDJ) in terms of reducing the burden on conducting workshops. Notably, Table IMDJ and Web IMDJ have different communication media, and this may affect the data-utilization knowledge proposed in the workshop. Therefore, we conducted workshops on both platforms under a controlled experimental environment to compare the proposed data-utilization knowledge. Consequently, the knowledge proposed in Web IMDJ gained equal or higher ratings by third-party evaluators (those who did not join in the experimental workshop). By contrast, subjects themselves evaluated the knowledge proposed in Table IMDJ as superior to Web IMDJ. These results revealed that both workshops have advantages as data-utilization platforms. Furthermore, we derived the best practices to utilize data effectively from a detailed analysis of the data obtained from the experimental workshops.

When Students Design University: a Case Study of Creative Interdisciplinarity between Design Thinking and Humanities

This paper addresses the issue of how to enhance student participation in university governance. This issue is approached by taking into account the growing pressures of the European Commission’s modernization agenda on the educational policies of the European Higher Education Area, and by focusing on the way these pressures affect students’ conceptions of themselves and of the mission of higher education. The thesis presented in this paper is that design thinking and the humanities share a common epistemological core that enables them, if applied in educational settings, to play a major role in fostering students’ trust in their governance skills and in their ability to influence educational policies through a creative mindset and a deeper comprehension of the stakes in present-day higher education. An experimental workshop combining design thinking with the humanities and with the constructivist approach of student-centered learning was held within a course in a humanities bachelor program on the basis of a heuristic framework developed through an interdisciplinary research process. This process was conducted according to the principles of design and hermeneutics. The outcomes of the workshop in terms of the participants’ enhanced self-confidence and decisional skills validate the thesis of this study.

Improving language and interpreting skills. A teaching experience

This paper explores the potential of improvisation theatre applied to training, in particular to interpreting studies. A theoretical background on theatre and learning (at an academic and professional level) together with a theoretical background on interpreting skills and qualities provide the basis for the presentation of a small-scale experimental workshop on the use of improvisation techniques. The workshop involved 16 students and was held at the Advanced School for Language Mediation of Ciels University, Campus Padua, Italy.[1]

THE CONVERGENCE OF POETRY AND JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE CINEMA

Since poetry held a central position in the cultural life of the Japanese nation since the earliest times, the elements of poetic expression naturally grew into the spiritual space of the early Japanese films. This contribution seeks to analyse the insufficiently examined phenomenon of convergence of avant-garde poetry and "unconventional" or experimental cinema in the post-war period. Owing to, inter alia, the interdisciplinary work of the Experimental Workshop, an artistic collective inspired by European culture - active during the fifties of the past century - the poetic impulse continued to permeate the artistic climate in the next decade. Although the cinematic language of the next generation of artists owes more to the influence of American cultural models, the intertextual experiments by such avant-garde luminaries as the poet Terayama Shūji successfully transcended the limitations of particular artistic disciplines, creating an authentic expression on the intersection of literature, theater and film.

Introduction to this Issue: the Betzavta Method and Democracy – On an Experimental Project in Academic Didactics of Philosophy

The article presents the background of the texts included in this issue of SGEGE that resulted from an experimental workshop on democracy. The didactic innovation implemented during the event consisted in enhancing the traditional forms of teaching philosophy (seminar and lecture) with a practical module based on the Betzavta methodology of democratic education. In the first part of the article, a general description of the project is provided. Then follows a presentation of its topic, the reasons for choosing it and the theoretical problems behind it. Next, the organization and methodology of the project are briefly described. In the end, the results of the project are presented together with a short summary of the texts of this volume of the journal.