icita publications - International Cooperation for the Integration of Technology & Art - is presenting the work of its convenor proposing a model of thought and how it relates to design and art in particular.
This website and its contents is largely associated with the initial aims of a group of interested people who in the 60’s recognized the link between environmental education and applied design education, with its intense complexion to integrate and cross- fertilize the knowledge of a diversity of expertise they described as interdisciplinary thinking. They sought to understand that human existence is dependent not on separation but interaction and inter-dependency. The group, now largely disbanded, called itself the International Cooperation for the Integration of Technology and Art (ICITA Group). The group now lives on in the conscience of the present author’s work and may yet have its second coming in an age that appears to need it, the 21st century.
We have come to recognize that applied designers in general are highly interactive thinking people, that is, they make connections between their own experiences and those of the rest of the world (i.e., others). Their ‘head / hand’ approach to education has wide implications in this model of thought; its proliferation into the new global epistemology for sustainable survival of this ‘only one planet’ is an urgent task for any new education.
Whilst his principal research has been in psychology, design education and how this applies to original and inventive thought, no less profound has been his interest in environmental education. His PhD dissertation (1990) examined the possibility of a cognitive model of the thought process, This has been published and is available through PROQUEST in the USA. This has become an invaluable tool in his teaching of industrial design students.
