Compass

There is something of a first lesson in drawing he teaches his students. He teaches art and design. He expects that by the time the students come to him they already know how to draw. His role as a teacher is really to improve the student’s abilities with it. He does this simply by clarifying contexts both fundamental and external of the drawing craft. External has to do with what drawing is for, its usefulness in the world. Internal has to do with an introspective discussion of what goes on inside the student when they draw.

For instance the first lesson: “Tell your brain where up is on the paper.”

He does this usually by exhorting his students to look at the whole paper instead of just the small space on the paper where the drawing will be made. In this way, the student’s reference for up and down is constant and fixed instead of moveable. The idea is for the artist to make the drawing with something of a compass inside him or her that guides the lines and spaces of the drawing.

This compass is actually an organ of the human body. Humans have a very accurate ability to tell up and down, both the true vertical and horizontal line. This derives from a device in the inner ear called the cochlea which gives the human a sense of balance, and so therefore the ability to walk or run or stay in place, otherwise the urge to straighten a picture on the wall when it is out of whack. Just knowing this fact improves the student’s drawing immediately.

But this past week he attended a two-day workshop with his co-teachers in their school, UP Cebu. The workshop, facilitated by Robert Steele and Katie Dore, was called “Compass Education.” And it was an enjoyable and fruitful two days of putting into a particular perspective what he knew thus far of the issue of “Sustainability.” The fact that this perspective involved “systems thinking” made it all the more interesting for everyone.

Systems thinking is becoming a topic of current interest now but most especially in the field of design where everything is studied actually as an expanded system of various factors coming together to affect a particular object of practical usefulness, such as what design objects really are. And the workshop equipped its participants with a view of how these factors may be identified and then mapped within a particular cartesian model, which as far as these workshop went stayed within a two-dimensional field. At the end of the workshop one sort of gets the idea that it could go beyond this but then that would have taken more than two days. So, well and good. The workshop pointed everyone to a particular field that they could learn more of and the research on their own in the future. And so it was a big success with them who attended.

And as always this success may be measured by the number of new words and terminology the participants acquired. Such as for instance the “overview effect,” which was a term astronauts especially of the International Space Station used to describe their experience of being “off the planet” and being able to look at Earth from a distance away from it and there realize a few elemental things such as: Just how thin the layer of atmosphere around it is. And yet, this thin layer of air is the only thing between us and empty space, between us and certain death, so to speak. How the planet is really a spaceship hurtling in space. And why is it that the 15 biggest nations of Earth could work together to put the International Space Station together and yet cannot seem to come together to do anything significant about global warming?  And then, how beautiful and lovable the planet really looks from the cold distance of space.

And then, another term, “the tragedy of the commons” which is another term for greed, such as would apply to the human propensity to consume more than what they actually need, or the human propensity to accumulate more than what they can practically use.

But “Compass” is really a device people may use to discuss the issue of sustainability using four areas of concern: Nature, Economy, Well-being and Society. It is a method of mapping human acts into a working model that they can better see and discuss with the view in mind of thinking out what they can do together or individually in response to that act. It is an educational tool that teachers may apply into their current teaching curricula. All the better that it may apply even for areas as unexpected as art and the ability to draw.