The School of Arts and Crafts in Brno (1924–2024)
within the Contexts of Art Education, Politics, Culture and Industry

The School of Arts and Crafts (Škola uměleckých řemesel, abbreviated ŠUŘ), founded by the Brno Chamber of Commerce and Entrepreneurship in 1924, was intended to represent a specific modern alternative to the primarily German-language educational institutions of its type present in Moravia since the end of the 19th century, yet also to Prague’s Academy of Applied Arts (UMPRUM) and professionally analogous schools in Austria and Germany. Its teaching staff, active both in the setting of the First Czechoslovak Republic and the German occupation of the early 1940s, deliberately focused on the cultivation of a modern local cultural identity and artistic production that would form the linchpin between international modernity and Moravian regional traditions. Active at the School of Arts and Crafts were many noteworthy individuals (among others Emanuel Hrbek, Josef Vydra, Petr Dillinger, Božena Rothmayerová-Horneková, Viktor Oppenheimer, Jaroslav Král, Karel Langer, Jan Lichtág, František Kalivoda, Zdeněk Rossmann, Antonín Jero, František Malý, Josef Vydra, Bohdan Lacina, Josef A. Šálek, Jindřich Svoboda, Karel Otto Hrubý, Marie Filippovová, Dalibor and Ivan Chatrný, Pavel Dias, Vladimír Židlický, Pavel Dvorský, Jan Rajlich, Emanuel Ranný, Petr Veselý); similarly, the school has an equally imposing list of former students and graduates (František Povolný, Bohumír Matal, Ester Krumbachová, Teodor Rotrekl, Inez Tuschnerová, Jiří Pelcl, Josef Daněk, Blahoslav Rozbořil, Václav Jirásek, Kateřina Šedá, Barbora Klímová and others). 

Today, the designation of ŠUŘ remains in use only informally; the official title is the Secondary School of Art and Design (Střední škola umění a designu), and includes as well a higher professional school of the same orientation (Vyšší odborná škola Brno). 

The internation conference, to be held on November 7 and 8, will present during the first day twelve contributions by Czech researchers (in a briefer timeframe of max. 15 minutes) and one performance. The program of the first day will involve selected thematic investigations of the history of the School of Arts and Crafts. The second day will be devoted to six contributions from international researchers (length max. 25 minutes), followed by a roundtable discussion. As such, the program of the second day provides information about the Europe-wide context of artistic training in the 20th century, and the current state and future visions of the Secondary School of Art and Design in open discussion about the tendencies and purposes of applied-arts training today.

During the two-day conference in the Brno House of Arts, one noteworthy contribution will be the presentation of the outcome of a two-year-long art-historical research project by a team from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM) in Prague along with other invited experts on the topic. This project focuses on the scholarly investigation of new or lesser-known facets of the school’s history and its current state, derived from the study of surviving work by significant instructors or graduates from the institution as well as the actual archival holdings of ŠUŘ, revealing alongside the grand narratives of art history the ordinary educational process and instruction methods (textbooks, learning aids, minutes from teachers’ meetings). Using these partial, microhistorical diversions, it thus becomes possible to open against the backdrop of historical contexts various smaller investigations to provide a more complex, three-dimensional image of the institution. In parallel with conveying the positive aspects and innovative methods, these “soundings” will in many cases equally bring up many critical or controversial circumstances, tracing many individual moments in art history and artistic education that emerged from outside the certainties of the established canon. This research project will culminate in the autumn of 2025 with an extensive exhibition accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, to be held at the House of Arts. The planned exhibition will open on October 21, 2025.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7

Lecture Series I – The History of the ŠUŘ, Its Pedagogic, Cultural, and Political Contexts (moderators Lada Hubatová-Vacková, Terezie Petišková) 

9:45
Opening Address – Lada Hubatová-Vacková, author of the conference conception and project leader of Sites of Creativity, NAKI III

10:00
Tomáš Zapletal: Before the Founding of the ŠUŘ
The School of Arts and Crafts (ŠUŘ) has often been regarded as the start of the institutional training of artists in Brno. However, it was only founded during the First Czechoslovak Republic, a relatively late point in the setting of a city already established as a major industrial and governmental centre. To what degree the school drew, or could draw, upon the legacy of previous institutions, and to what degree the school was influenced by systems of arts-and-crafts education in the pre-1918 period, will be the central themes of this contribution. 
Under Austro-Hungarian rule, there were institutions active in Brno that already offered training in the applied arts and have yet to receive any scholarly investigation; in essence, they remain unknown even to the involved public. However, their pedagogic staff included many personalities who had a significant impact on the secondary-education system, its building and its further specialization. Moreover, with the merger between “Šuřka” and the Secondary Textile Industrial School in 2012, the school became part of an even longer tradition of both technical and craft education in Brno and more generally Central Europe.

10:25
Kateřina Kuthanová: The Start of Women’s Industrial Education in Brno: Associations as a Platform for Professional Education
The contribution primarily addresses the development of women’s industrial schooling in Brno in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and its relation to the major political-cultural center of Vienna. It focuses on the start of industrial education for women, necessitated by the era’s gender differentiations in the contemporary educational system. Further, it addresses the specific qualities emerging from the focus on textile and lace production. The major emphasis is on the historical, social, and nationalist contexts that shaped the development of these schools and their programs. 
The main goal is to examine the start of women’s industrial schooling and emphasize the importance of women’s associations and their self-financing of schools at a time when state support was lacking, above all for women’s education. Additionally, it addresses the rivalry between Czech and German women’s groups and schools, and their mutual desires for national and cultural emancipation. The text analyses the specific traits and development of women’s industrial education in the framework of the historic and sociocultural contexts of the era in Moravia, indicating future possible trajectories for research on the question.

10:50
Lada Hubatová-Vacková: The ŠUŘ in the Interwar Years, Ideological Positions between Right and Left, and the “Police Scandal” in 1933
The School of Arts and Crafts was founded in 1924 on the initiative of the Brno Chamber of Commerce and Entrepreneurship; hence intellectually matching the business interests of the democratic state and liberal capitalism. In 1928, though, Czechoslovakia began to experience economic crisis and among the students of ŠUŘ there naturally arose fears of the limited possibilities of finding a place in the labor market. Students began to ask far-ranging questions in relation to the professional skills offered by their education at the ŠUŘ.
From general knowledge of the history of interwar Czechoslovakia and a partial investigation of the archival documentation connected to the school, it appears that the ŠUŘ, its teaching staff, and its students oscillated in the interwar period between the poles of a conservative right and a progressive left. The present contribution draws attention to this ideological division and to the likely ties and inclinations of certain teachers and students at the ŠUŘ to the organized left, represented by the Brno “Left Front”, the journal Index etc. Among other sources, I draw on the police report from 1933 in the Moravian Regional Archive and concrete information revealing the leftist rebellion among ŠUŘ and its subsequent repression; pointing out the connections between several ŠUŘ students to the leftist and avant-gardist activity of literary critic Bedřich Václavek supported by documentation from the Literary Archive of the National Literary Monument. Additionally, the contribution will briefly mention the analogous situation of the political engagements of students at the Bauhaus in the organization known by the abbreviation “Kostufra”.

11:10 - 11:30
Break, refreshments

11:30
Marta Sylvestrová: Zdeněk Rossmann and the ŠUŘ in the Period 1939–1943
The contribution focuses on the activities of instructor Zdeněk Rossmann at the School of Arts and Crafts in Brno (ŠUŘ), where he was appointed in early 1939 by the Ministry of Education after losing his position at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bratislava (ŠUR). He continued to teach at the ŠUŘ in Brno until his arrest by the Gestapo on April 3, 1943. At the ŠUŘ in Brno, Rossmann initially took over the subjects taught by the instructor Šembera, then during the 1940/41 school year acted as the class supervisor for the third- and fourth-year students in the special seminar for graphic design and advertising. Additionally, he taught further subjects, such as the study of typefaces, for all the specializations, including teaching in the section for fashion design.
Also included in the contribution is brief information about Rossmann’s activities in the modernist artistic scene in interwar Brno, his brief study at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and his success as head of the graphic design section at the ŠUR in Bratislava, where he also founded the advertising company Redopa, which went on to hire his most talented students. Emphasis is placed on Rossmann’s achievements in teaching at the ŠUŘ in Brno, information about his students, in particular designer Milan Grygar, who still recalls the influence of his instructors Rossmann and Kalivoda today, and the designers Jan Blahoslav Novotný (pseud. Jebenof) and Karel Pekárek, with whom Rossmann worked after the war in 1946 designing posters for the electoral campaign of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ). Rossmann’s own creative work will also be presented, particularly his commissions during the Nazi occupation. Mention will also be made of the reasons for Rossmann’s arrest by the Gestapo, his imprisonment in the Mauthausen concentration camp, and his postwar return to Prague and work with the Ministry of Information, alongside poet František Halas. His successful postwar career, though, ended with his investigation by a Communist Party committee on grounds of a report of his doubts about the “correct path of the Party”, followed by his expulsion from the KSČ and the loss of his position as director of the publishing house Orbis. Brief mention will also be made of Rossmann’s later creative work, including his role as chief architect of the Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels.

11:55
Valéria Kršiaková: The ŠUŘ and the Teaching of Folk Arts in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (1939–1945)
The present contribution discusses the teaching of traditional folk arts at the School of Arts and Crafts during the period of Nazi occupation, the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” (1938–1945) in its wider immediate cultural and political context. The question of modernizing folk culture through progressive expert training had been actively addressed since the 1920s by the then director of the ŠUŘ, Josef Vydra (1884–1959), at whose initiative folk art was included in the school’s teaching program after 1939. Vydra believed that an answer to the challenges of the modern era could be found in updating traditional manufacturing processes, the use of local substances and materials, or in functional elementary forms. His ideas of a “folk modernism” fell on fertile soil in the ŠUŘ along with other schools in the occupation years, since the Nazi political establishment intended to tolerate certain Slavic national activities in the Protectorate and partially even support them. The contribution examines in what way Josef Vydra implemented the teaching of folk culture at the school, intended as essentially derived from the non-institutional natural creativity of the populace, while also mapping the position of the ŠUŘ in the field of acceptance of local folk arts by the Nazi authorities in the Protectorate.

12:20
Iva Knobloch: The Wartime Cooperation of the ŠUŘ and the Czech Werkbund
With the appointment of Josef Vydra as director of the School of Arts and Crafts in Brno in 1939, a new link emerged with the Brno branch of the Czech Werkbund (Svaz českého díla). Gradually, individual instructors began to join the alliance and take part in events held by its Prague center, most notably the four large-scale wartime exhibitions in the House of Arts and Crafts in Prague between 1939 and 1943. Even during the war, the alliance continued to provide care for the young generation and from 1940 to 1944 organized stipends for students at the arts and crafts schools in both Prague and Brno that often guided them toward further professional activity. The contribution highlights the importance of the ŠUŘ in the activities of the Czech Werkbund in its resistance to the Nazis’ pressures toward Germanization and its preparatory work for the peacetime years in the future.

12:40 - 13:30
Break, refreshments

13:30
Lada Hubatová-Vacková: AJDIVADLO, the Teacher Karel Langer and the ŠUP. A School Project between an Experimental Travelling Theatre and Communist Agitprop 
Described in the daily press as a “new type of Czechoslovak puppet theatre”, the theatre Ajdivadlo emerged at the instigation of Karel Langer, who headed the section at the (Higher) School of Arts and Crafts in Brno for small craft production. From his “little section”, the students were recruited to create the marionettes and hand puppets, as well as working as puppeteers and scriptwriters. 
Active primarily in the period 1949-1957, Ajdivadlo is a key example of the school’s more controversial projects, which both figuratively and literally extended beyond the confines of an educational institution. The school puppet theatre was a gift from the Ninth Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), the first one after it seized power in February 1948; Ajdivadlo “was intended as an active contribution to implementing a new cultural politics”. Karel Langer was a longstanding active member of the KSČ, and as an instructor at the ŠUP worked closely with the head of the ethnography institute of the Moravian Regional Museum, Ludvík Kunz. Authentic prefigurations of traditional folk culture and crafts were frequently distorted, both by Langer and Kunz, to match the interests of the new “all-embracing” Communist doctrine. In this sense, Ajdivadlo was based on the tradition of the travelling popular theatre of Matěj Kopecký, but aimed at “enlightenment of the masses”, particularly in the countryside or working-class settlements. Langer’s school project was also inspired by the Soviet puppeteer Sergei Obraztsov, who since the late 1920s had used marionette theatre for social-political satire. 
Ajdivadlo emerged at t time when television as a mass audiovisual medium was still inaccessible, and travelling puppet theatres could assume the function of mass political agitprop. With the puppet stage mounted on the back of a truck, the students travelled from village to village, and at local assemblies, in “houses of culture” or the assembly halls of collective farms presented a truly unusual, almost para-avant-garde performance combining elements of shadow theatre, hand and marionette puppetry with colored “epicinema” projection. Frequent genres were pro-Soviet “sound pantomimes”, anti-imperialist satires, or parodies of the American way of life, often as cultural agitation during mass election assemblies. The contribution addresses both the formal-artistic experimentation and the political contexts of Ajdivadlo; it will rely on the study by Jana Vaňková-Pavlíčková and documentation from the Archive of the City of Brno.

13:55
Andrea Březinová: Inez Tuschnerová between the “Šuřka” and the “Textilka” and Her Stage and Textile Oeuvre
Painter, costume and textile artist, and teacher Inez Tuschnerová (1932–2015) is deeply linked in both life and work with Brno, the city of her birth. She was accepted in 1949 to the clothing design program at ŠUŘ, yet in this same year the textile department was removed from the school and assigned to the industrial textile school – with many students protesting this forced affiliation with a “purely technical school”. Tuschnerová, though, did not stay with clothing design and in 1951 transferred to the spatial arts department, returning from Francouzská to Husova ulice. Thanks to Josef Adolf Šálek, the head of the department, she started working with theatres even in her last year at the school. After her academic studies in Prague, she returned to the “Textilka” where she taught clothing and costume design, while also engaged in independent textile work – collaborating with the Research Institute for Woolens to create the non-woven textiles Artprotis and Artaig.

14:20
Terezie Petišková: “The Eye’s a Spy, and You Can’t Get Angry at It”. Dalibor Chatrný as an Instructor at the ŠUŘ in 1962–1986
The artistic legacy of Dalibor Chatrný (1925–2012) has a fascinating link to his pedagogic activities. His personal notes, preserved in the family archive, confirm his deep consideration of questions on the possibility of visual depiction, art, or the world in general. At the start of the 1960s, when he began teaching at the ŠUŘ, his own artwork began to witness a wide range of experiments, where he set their rules above the artistic quality of the resulting works. His own view is that like nature, the artistic and aesthetic quality of his production are an inadvertent side effect of his coherent work. In these notes, for instance, we read that at this time he “began irreversibly trusting the elementary values, whether in life or the similar ones of expressive means”, or that “in the actual artistic means, in their systematics, there is a hidden force, for which the recognition can be individually taught, created, questioned, brought to know itself, if we start to resonate with it in our existential energy…” Elsewhere, we find surprisingly non-cryptic statements about his own creative, and partially pedagogic methods: “Only then, if I ask nature the right questions, I receive surprisingly clear answers.” These handwritten notes, which the artist’s daughter Dana Chatrná proved were for his teaching, moreover reveal much about the intellectual background of his thought. Though he invariably listed Czech modernism as his sources of inspiration, these unpublished notes attest to a broad knowledge of the international avant-garde, specifically of direct inspiration from many artists associated with the Bauhaus. This contribution draws attention primarily to the immediate influences of international modernist work from the early 20th century that shaped Chatrný’s artistic and pedagogic legacies. 

12:40 - 13:30
Break, refreshments

15:00
Veronika Rollová, Johana Lomová: Artist and/or Pedagogue? The Gradual Change in the Status of Teachers and Schools (from the end of the war to the 1980s)
After World War II, a group of graduates from “Šuřka” tried unsuccessfully to gain university status for the school. Nonetheless, during the 1960s and 1970s it informally held the position as an institution of tertiary education for the near-adult graduates of other schools (industrial and trade schools, gymnasiums). In the 1980s, though, a major shift occurred: a majority of students arrived directly from the eighth year of primary school. Instructors began complaining of the immaturity of the first-year students, and had to adapt their teaching methods and rethink their demands. Pressure increased on the “professionalization” of the teaching staff: training courses, passing exams, submission to inspections, definition of pedagogic goals. No longer was it sufficient to be a respected artistic personality. In our contribution, we address what this required pedagogic professionalization brought to Šuřka and what it took away. What was lost with teaching systematization?

15:25
Markéta Peringerová: The School of Artistic Thinking. Pedagogic Experiments with the Methods of the Bauhaus and Action Art in Communist Czechoslovakia 
After 1971, when Igor Zhoř was dismissed from his university position in Brno for political reasons, he assumed the post of head of art lessons for amateur artists in Blansko, later as well in other towns. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he organized several multi-day courses. One unique aspect was their “materialization” of Bauhaus training methods, inspired by the experience of Josef Vydra as a pioneer of this approach in Czechoslovakia. Participants in these courses, known as the “School of Artistic Thinking”, created artworks using the principles of international realizations in land art, body art, and action art, all accompanied by theoretical lectures. When Zhoř returned to university teaching after 1989, he used this experience to create a course in “Action Art” and continued his methods for future artistic professionals.

15:50
Vojtěch Märc: Socialization through Art? On the Brno School of Relational Aesthetics
A school “not only creates a relation between teacher and pupil” but also “relations of students among themselves”, wrote Igor Zhoř in 1968 in his piece on the history of artistic education in Brno (to a significant extent addressing “Šuřka” itself). Such statements indicate a possible prefiguration of approaches later summarized under “relational aesthetics”. In fact, several artists studied at Šuřka in the 1980s and 1990s who soon established themselves as significant exponents of this tendency. Is it, then, legitimate to speculate about the importance that this educational institution had for their future work? Did – or does - Šuřka provide conditions for developing the “sociological imagination” and “pedagogic sensitivity” invoked by many of its graduates? And could similar approaches retroactively point to a decisive, if often overlooked “artistic-educational” purpose for art-school training?

16:15
Mysteria Contagion
This performance by Blahoslav Rozbořil and Josef Daněk is based on an imaginative reflection of their experiences during the graduation exam. Its protagonists promise to unveil the secrets of arts-and-crafts education (including its cosmological dimensions). This text collages will be supplemented with examples of work using the latest didactic aids.

After the end of the first day – feSTOval in the Káznice – opening. This exhibition of student work and its interdisciplinary scope presents the latest artistic production of the school. Open from November 7 – 10, 2024, at Bratislavská 249/68, 602 00 Brno-střed-Zábrdovice. Exhibition prepared by the Secondary School of Art and Design in Brno.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8

Lecture Series II – Arts and Crafts Education, International Contexts (moderators Johana Lomová, Veronika Rollová)

10:00
Rainald Franz: Josef Hoffmann’s Students from Moravia and Bohemia at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule and His Approach to Pedagogical Methods in Arts and Crafts Education in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
With the 1899 appointment of the 28-year-old Josef Hoffmann, who had graduated from the state trade school in Brünn/Brno (CZ) before his studies in Carl von Hasenauer’s and Otto Wagner’s masterclasses in Vienna, as the head of one of the three architecture classes of Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule, the modernization of design and architecture training was accelerated there. Proposed for this position by his teacher Otto Wagner, Hoffman was one of several other young Secessionists engaged during this period at the School of Arts and Crafts, meaning that Vienna’s art revolution – the “sacred spring” – was institutionalized by the state immediately after it had first transpired. In his long period of teaching at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule between 1899 and 1937, Hoffmann established a new syllabus and teaching methods. Many of his male and female students came from Moravia and Bohemia and several of them were able to establish themselves as successful architects and designers. The lecture will introduce Hoffmann’s teaching and these students.

10:25
Alexandra Panzert: Reform as a Principle. Central European Schools of Arts and Crafts in the First Decades of the 20th Century
The history of artistic education has at least since the 19th century been a story of constant crisis and reform. The possibilities of an education outside the traditional academy widened especially through schools of design, intended to connect art and life closer again, and to establish connection towards industry. From 1900 to 1930, the initiatives of art school reform across Europe reached a peak, with the most prominent example of the Bauhaus – yet by far not the only one. The Bauhaus was hardly the leader of the movement, but instead just one institution among many schools to be found all over Central Europe, whether Berlin, Breslau, Bratislava or Brno. The paper will give an overview of the broader reformist trend that accompanied European schools of art and industry and present its most important innovations.

10:50
Klára Prešnajderová: The Conception of the ŠUR and the UŠ in Bratislava – The Goal of “Training Folk Talents into Productive Individuals on a World Level”
The placement of the School of Arts and Crafts and the Apprenticeship Schools in Bratislava in a shared building in 1930 was not merely a pragmatic solution to the lack of suitable teaching spaces. Under the leadership of Josef Vydra, there emerged between the daytime apprenticeship school and the evening artistic school a close cooperation that needs to be examined both in connection with local needs and in the broad context of a Europe-wide movement to reform artistic training. This connection brought benefits to both institutions. On one side, the instructors at the ŠUR were able to raise the general artistic standards for the craft apprentices, yet equally Vydra could systematically seek out exceptional talent for study at the ŠUR from among over 2,000 apprentices. Precisely this organic link to the younger generation in the trades and commerce represented the basis of his concept. As such, the Bratislava school could supply the market with a wide range of graduates, from expert craftspeople and entrepreneurs acquainted with the artistic avant-garde to artistic talents prepared for professional practice, whose knowledge of the most advanced tendencies could elevate the overall level of Slovakia’s industry, trade, and handcrafts. 

11:10 - 11:30
Break, refreshmentd

11:30
Wolfgang Thöner: Communism and the Bauhaus. Paradoxes between Politics and Design
For a long time, research on the subject of communism and the Bauhaus focused on the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, who was always assumed to have a close relationship with the KPD and the Bauhaus students organized in the Communist Student Fraction (Kostufra). Hannes Meyer was regarded by both right-wing and left-wing critics as a “left-wing functionalist,” though he held this position only from around 1926 to 1933. His turn towards positions of socialist neo-historicism has remained largely unknown. Even the rehabilitation of the Bauhaus in the GDR in the 1970s itself largely understood Hannes Meyer as a communist and functionalist.
The contribution outlines Kostufra’s work from 1928 to 1933, in particular its criticism of the Bauhaus, modern art, design and architecture. It was only after his dismissal in August 1930 that Hannes Meyer became the hero of Kostufra.
The second part of the contribution is dedicated to the contradictory reception of the Bauhaus and Hannes Meyer in the GDR and shows what role former members of Kostufra played in this until 1986. 

11:55
Megan Brandow-Faller: Women’s Art Education within Secessionist and Interwar Vienna
The talk argues that the self-consciously ‘feminine’ art produced by artists trained at the Viennese Women’s Academy was an important contribution to modern art and design that has been ignored because of its embrace of the decorative arts and craft media. Constituting what critics likened to a ‘female Secession,’ this provocatively feminine ‘women’s art’ was a subversive feminist intervention in response to a misogynist backlash against rising numbers of professional women artists. The artists of interwar Vienna’s ‘female Secession’ created craft-based artworks that rocked the established conventions surrounding ‘feminine’ handcraft, reclaiming women’s connections to devalued handcraft genres. Strongly represented in the well-known ‘Vienna Workshops’ (1903–1932), these ‘female Secessionists’ experimented with similar ideas and movements (expressionism, cubism, primitivism and abstraction) as male artists, overturning women’s unofficial exclusion from the ‘fine’ arts of painting and sculpture. The provocative work of artists like Vally Wieselthier, Emmy Zweybrück, or Fanny Harlfinger in ceramics, toymaking, textiles and interior design disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art. In a very real way, their reclaiming of ‘feminine’ handcraft and matriarchal modes of transmission formed a woman-centered lineage anticipating those of the 1970s feminist art collectives and present-day craftivism. At a time when ‘DIY’ crafts are more popular than ever, the Female Secession could not be more relevant today.

12:20
Hans Stefan Moritsch, Julia Pintsuk-Christof: Becoming a Producing Designer – Design Education at the Transition from University to Craft
The boundaries between the areas of design and production work, which became separated in the process of industrialisation, are now increasingly blurred, not least due to technology-based transformations. New transdisciplinary practices and identities are developing that transcend traditional genre boundaries.
Producing designers must have a high level of expertise in design and craftsmanship, along with an ability to cope with the economic challenges and the increasingly numerically controlled means of planning and production. Designers and craftspeople have always integrated new technologies and methods into their practical work, but the traditional separation of knowledge practices into scientific, artistic and craft makes it difficult to form new professional identities that can react appropriately to current developments in technology and society. In order to prepare today’s producing designers for these challenges, the knowledge of the craft and the tasks and tools of design need to be put into relation again.
The contribution uses research and teaching projects from the BA programme Manual & Material Culture at the New Design University in St. Pölten and ongoing non-university projects in the model region of Lienz/East Tyrol to discuss the contemporary interpenetration of science, design and crafts.

12:40 - 13:00
Break, refreshments

III. Discussion Section – Šuřka Today? (moderator Vojtěch Märc)

13:00
A roundtable debate addressing the current form, problems, and challenges of arts-and-crafts schooling. Discussants are pedagogues and graduates of the Secondary School of Art and Design in Brno (SŠUD).
Discussion participants:
Martin Vybíral, current SŠUD instructor, photography
Filip Dufka, current SŠUD instructor, game art
David Hloušek, recent graduate of SŠUD, graphic design
Kateřina Šedá, artist, graduate of SŠUD, illustration
Julie Kačerovská, head of the book design program at the Faculty of Art in Ostrava, graduate of SŠUD, illustration 

The conference may be followed online at YouTube. The link will be available shortly.
The organizers will provide simultaneous interpreting between Czech and English. 

Acknowledgements:
National Renewal Plan, Czech Ministry of Culture
Program for the Applied Research of National and Cultural Identity (NAKI III). It is one of the outcomes of the project Sites of creativity. Arts and crafts education: constructing identities, saving the heritage of the past, designing the future (DH23P03OVV061).

Organised by:
The Society of Friends of the House of Arts Brno

Supported by:
The Statutory City of Brno, Czech Ministry of Culture, Národní plán obnovy, European Union
UMPRUM, ŠUŘ

The research presented at this conference was partly funded thanks to the financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic as part of the Program for the Applied Research of National and Cultural Identity (NAKI III). It is one of the outcomes of the project Sites of Creativity. Arts and Crafts Education: Constructing Identities, Saving the Heritage of the Past, Designing the Future (DH23P03OVV061). 

The recipient of the NAKI III grant is the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, mistatvorivosti.umprum.cz.