This website introduces my work and its association with the aims of ICITA. The group and its eclectic membership arose in 1960 in Melbourne, Australia. Its membership viewed the ultimate aim of design education to be an interaction of the technologies and arts thrusting its implications well into the rest of education.
A principal aim of the group was to investigate the origin of the virtue and ideas of inventors and designers. Impressed with the work and philosophy of the German Bauhaus School and design education in general the group members investigated what premise lay behind their persistence to speak about applied design philosophy as an ‘integration of technology and art’. It appeared to be the contingency of the ‘head / hand’ approach designers used to divine ideas and produce high quality products. This ‘head / hand’ approach was already reflected by renaissance inventors like Leonardo da Vinci, Ramelli and others and the psychology as well as methodology of these extra-ordinary people pointed to a much more complex epistemology than that of crafting ‘products’.
It is perhaps no surprise that what eventuated in later research is a recognition that this integration can be an interactive process that plays out as a form of dualistic psychology in which we recognize the ‘head / hand’ process of the technologist and artist within us, thus approximating closer towards what is meant by ‘the integration of technology and art’.
The original ICITA group dispersed in the late sixties after writing a number of articles and these were published in the Institute of Draftsmen of Australia Magazine in 1970. The present author, however, pursued this investigation through his research consultancy with the Victorian Education Department in a subject described as ‘Graphic Communication’ and research at Monash University and RMIT University in Melbourne (Australia).
