The Experience Design Group, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies

 

Ronald Jones, an artist and critic, is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden.  

 

At Konstfack he leads The Experience Design Group, and co-directs WIRE, the MA program in curatorial practice and critical writing.  He has been guest professor of Communication Design at HfG in Karlsruhe, Germany, on the Visiting Faculty at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule Frankfurt, Germany and the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India.  

 

Before taking these appointments, he served as the first Provost at Art Center College of Design where he guided the design and implementation of a new transdisciplinary curriculum for the College.  He came to Art Center from Columbia University, where he was Professor of Visual Arts in the School of the Arts, and Co-Director of the Interactive Design Lab.  Before joining the faculty at Columbia, Jones was Senior Critic at the School of Art, Yale University for nine years.  He has also served on the faculty of The Royal Danish Academy of Art, Copenhagen, The Rhode Island School of Design, The School of Visual Arts, New York, among others.

 

He holds a Certificate from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, took the MFA degree from the University of South Carolina, and the Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Ohio University.  He has delivered over two hundred lectures at universities, museums, and art and design schools including Harvard University, The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons School of Design, DIA Center for the Arts, New York City, Royal College of Art, London, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Brown University, Akademie Der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, the Architectural Association, London, among others.

 

Jones contributes regularly to Art Forum and frieze and writes frequently on contemporary art and design for various publications including ID Magazine, Art in America, Parkett, Zone, Flash Art.  He is the author of numerous museum and exhibition catalogs.

 

A practicing artist Jones has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Paris, and Cologne.  His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among others.

 

His first opera “Falling and Waving” was produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Arts at Saint Ann’s in New York City in 1999.  He is at work on a second opera titled “Moon Shot.”

 

Dr. Jones has received numerous awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, and a Mellon Grant.  In addition, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Lucent Project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and served on the boards of numerous cultural organizations including the Public Art Fund, and Artists Space.

 

Keynote Presentation:

 

 

Fail again. Fail better.

 

Innovative design education places greater and greater emphasis on interdisciplinary practice-based-research – it has become ubiquitous at university and design schools - but studies tell us that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices are subject to failure rates higher than conventional monodisciplinary or multidisciplinary practices.

If this makes failure inevitable, could it become an advantage?