School

One of today’s challenges, sustainable development, is acquiring a planetary scale in the Arctic dimension. Along with economic advantages, intensive industrial development in the Arctic has entailed large scale changes in the environment disrupting lifestyles and indigenous economies and the emergence of a new, often conflicting subculture of labour migrants. For Russia, the issue of sustainable development in this region is acute as never before: the Arctic and all of the country along with it as a major northern state is entering an era of industrial development, tempestuous economic and infrastructural growth, and new climatic conditions. In the context of international aspirations to identify ideas in the area of conservation of local ecosystems and creation of favorable conditions for human life and well-being, the Russian North presents a perfect site for testing daring and, at the same time, ethically and ecologically appropriate solutions to spatial development, creation of optimal life support systems, and conservation and activation of indigenous cultures. It is obvious that these objectives are of an integrative transdisciplinary character and, consequently, the key to their successful achievement is a synthesis of humanitarian, environmental and artistic modes of thinking based on design (technical esthetics) methods.

The core of this project is the School of Northern Design with its years of research and design expertise, which emerged within the Department of Industrial Design at the Ural State University of Architecture and Art (USUAA) in the early 1980s. Now this wealth of expertise has been given an outlet in the format that is very new for designers, a basic research study, thanks to support from the Russian Science Foundation (grant № 17-78-20047, 2017-2020).

Former participants

Students and interns