The MFA English Studio has been making significant progress at ECNU’s School of Design. Since its inception in 2020, MFA English Studio has completed three semesters of operations collaborating with nine international student designers from countries such as Poland, Russia, Armenia, Thailand, Serbia, India, Pakistan, Latvia, and Myanmar over the past year.
The studio has placed an emphasis on the concept of "culture sustainability," and believes that blending cultural elements into design is a crucial pathway towards achieving a sustainable society.
The first cycle studio explored the topic of "traditional culture's sustainability in contemporary design art" in the first phase known as Evolutionary Design 1.0. The interpretation and translation between culture and design can vary depending on context, so designers from five different countries focused on exploring the cultural carriers of their respective regions through a variety of methods such as drawing, modeling, simulation, writing, interviewing, and material processing.
Through these disciplinary methods, the project sought to explore the design evolution of specific traditional cultural carriers in the context of globalization. Designers created translation vectors carrying target genes through three levels of evolution path, technical empowerment, and cultural empowerment.
During the second semester, the next phase "Evolutionary Design 2.0" delved into the idea of culture sustainability in the process of habitat adaptation following human space travel.
Increasingly more attention has turned to extraterrestrial environment exploration as the prospect of migration to outer space becomes more popular. Establishing human outposts in space will require the reinterpretation of earth civilization to fulfill a portable human culture repository, mitigating the potential cultural fault impact resulting from the surrounding shift.
Thus, culture sustainability has become a strategic imperative at ECNU, shaping assumptions about goals, values, and beliefs that will influence behavior in cosmic exploration. The nature of the mediation between different cultures can be either one of domination, subordination, avoidance, or integration, with the ultimate aim of achieving an inclusive, people-centered, and context-relevant approach.
This semester, MFA English Studio has designers from three different cultural backgrounds. The research regarding to sustainability experienced from studio 1.0: culture evolution which focus on exploring our own cultural and traditional roots to studio 2.0: culture sustainability in space migration era.
The vision from the past to the future, from local to cosmos, from earth civilization to extraterrestrial civilization.
Three designers of ECNU provided three different answers in this studio. Mariam Stepanyan chose FROM which is the hidden law of our nature, as her design origin. The work “Transfiguration” transform one form into another, as the results, “Cryptic coloration” “Bicolor” and ”Tropic” using digital methodology to perform patterns. Alicja Ewelina Osinska takes SOUND as the collector of memories. City, Nature ambience and the opposite of sound, Silence, become the three main topics of her research. Anastasiia Birillo tries to visualize SCENT in her study. After collecting a serious of realted stories and context within them, the intangibility and subtlety is translated into a new form through multi-media methodology.
This semester, the studio’s focus on "A Relook on Mythology - Culture's Sustainability in Future Digital World". In this part, the studio aims to examine the role of digital media in the context of culture sustainability and explore its generative capacities to design and communicate ideas in the virtual realm or the "new digital world".
By integrating various methods such as form, material, color, atmosphere, text, video, and photography, the studio also seeks to answer questions such as how traditional culture responds in the metaverse community and how cultural uniqueness can be maintained in the future digital realm. Throughout the semester, the Studio analyzes traditional Chinese culture's myths, exploring their cultural traditions, image characteristics, spiritual character, and humanistic value connotations under the social form.
Through the reproduction of new digital formats, traditional cultural definitions are injected into the metaverse environment, attempting to respond to sustainable communication methods and approaches of traditional culture in the future digital community. This shift in perspective results in many unexpected chemical changes, with the process itself serving as a cross-cultural translation of mythology.
The MFA English Studio in ECNU’s School of Design has established itself as a hub for innovative thinking and creative exploration. The concept of culture sustainability in design, through its various cycles, represents the studio’s abilities to attract a diverse group of international designers, each bringing their unique cultural background and perspective to the projects. By emphasizing the importance of cultural elements in design, these efforts by the MFA English Studio are paving the way towards a more sustainable and inclusive society.
Copy editor: Melody Zhang, Mayfield Joshua Monroe
Editor: Yvaine Lyu
