Dry Swimming in Practice

Schie 2.0 designs archetypes for the InHolland University in The Hague

One of the aims of the Hogeschool InHolland – InHolland University – is to prepare students for professional practice by simulating situations in which ‘rehearsals’ can take place. Besides a solid grounding in professional skills, social awareness is instilled into students and they are taught to think independently. For example, the University has a programme known as STAP, a ‘learn and work enterprise’ where firms can have assignments carried out at low cost by students, who are thereby placed in practical situations. Students receive payment in the form of study points. The difference with a traditional internship is that instead of a student being sent to a particular firm in order to gain work experience, firms can make use of various forms of expertise imparted to students in the courses at the University. Following naturally from this is the art project that SKOR nominated Schie 2.0 to develop for the University’s new building in The Hague, then still called the Ichtus College. The title of the project makes clear what it is about: here students can practise without risk of being fired.
The new building, designed by SP architecten (Waddinxveen), provided an outdoor space that ended up looking rather forlorn. It needed to be furnished better, so SKOR was contacted. The courtyard could be regarded as a symbol of the relationship with the outside world: it is here that students literally steps outside the protected world of their studies. In cooperation with SKOR the idea soon arose to create an outdoor learning environment which would be experienced as highly physical, as a reaction to the virtual indoor world where learning is conducted via books and digital media. Here students would be able to apply their learning in a playful way.

Communication
Many of the designs thought up by Schie 2.0 are items of furniture that have a highly mediatory capacity.(1) They never exist as autonomous objects with a limited functional meaning, but are developed on the basis of a quest for a communicative value they might have within a certain context. This design idea also underlies the ‘Dry Swimming’ project, which consists of two components: physical and virtual, hardware and software. The former comprises the four objects on the forecourt and in the garden at the rear, which represent four archetypes: the dugout, the sofa, the lectern and the counter. Because of the way they are designed, seamlessly cast without distracting details and somewhat oversized, they transcend the purely functional. The sofa with chair refers to psychoanalysis: here the ‘patient’ speaks for himself. The sofa is deliberately located at the rear of the garden since it represents the most private form of communication. The other three archetypes are located on the forecourt since they represent more public forms of communication. The dugout addresses itself to the group, whose members take no active part but watch and observe so that they can later form and express their opinion, at the lectern or the counter, for example. From the lectern they can pretend to be an authority and announce their views to the public, while at the counter they can enter into discussion and thus practice a form of dialogue that is intimate, unexpected and unprejudiced. Transmitting and receiving equipment ensures that exchanges are possible between the different objects and that all manner of connections can be created in a playful way.

Keeping up to date
In the janitor’s office there is a software programme allowing questions or provocative ideas to be transmitted from there to the users of the various pieces of furniture so as to stir up the communicative learning process. The art committee, comprising representatives of the University, Schie 2.0 and SKOR, proposed appointing an editorial team made up of students and teachers whose task would be to keep the programme up to date and lively. This called for the editorial committee’s involvement and commitment, but in practice the latter is often lacking. Due to this, interest in the project among and teachers got rather bogged down and its possibilities were not optimally used. Various plans are currently being made to change this, such as organising a workshop to enable the objects to actually function as a learning environment. The objects themselves are certainly used intensively: for hanging around, chatting and sheltering from the rain under the roof of the dugout. They also function as ‘works of art’, broaching other layers of meaning and transcending the purely functional. Students also make use of the transmitting and receiving equipment, albeit mainly to play jokes on each other. In practice, however, it appears to serve a fairly demanding
goal as an educational tool. Only unremitting attention can rectify this, but it is precisely this dependence that makes the project vulnerable in practice.

Liesbeth Melis
(1) Lucas Verwey, Jan Konings and Guido Marsille were involved in the design and realisation phase of the Dry Swimming project.

Project data:
Design/artist: Schie 2.0
Client: InHolland University
Location: Theresiastraat 8, The Hague
Completion: 2002