Technical culture and innovation culture: reconciling through design

Abstract

This article questions the relationship between technical culture and innovation culture to return to the central role of design activity in the training context. Gilbert Simondon's [SIM 89] observation about culture excluding technology also points to this fascination with technical objects in everyday life, because they exclude from a culture with a universal purpose assumed by the status of sacred objects [SIM 89]. Technical culture, misunderstood and excluded, leaves room for a deficiency that manifests itself in an absence of its teaching in our training systems [LEQ 15]. Innovation culture, for its part, returns us to our industrial and post-industrial cultures, which lead us to an obstinate search for novelty that pushes technical objects into obsolescence to pave the way for the advent of new technology [BOU 12]. This search for novelty thus takes two characteristic forms: radical innovation (older) and incremental innovation, which is more recent, more widespread, more ephemeral, easier to handle, more attractive in the short term, and characterizes a trend of late modernity [BOU 12]. To overcome this double impasse of a technical culture in the absence of training and an innovation culture with reduced or an incremental innovation characterized by a frenzy of short term change, we propose the implementation of a didactic design [DID 11; 15; 16]. Thus, this article focuses on the effects of design activity in the production of technical objects in the contexts of training and education. In this logic, the learner assumes the role of a designer capable of understanding and acting on the world by producing and building upon innovative ideas to improve it [DID 15].