The artist James Turrell has been talking about the skill of ”seeing without the focus”. According to him, the art can reveal its true essence only when the observer is not sticking to details. The skill of ”seeing without the focus” can allow the eye and mind to travel freely. It leaves the freedom to interpret the art without unnecessary anchors, prejudices, and helps us to think outside the box.

This is where we come to an interesting paradox: many designers still consider the digital tools in the creative process too exact and accurate to be used in the beginning. They prefer the conceptual phase and the artistic search where one still sees ”without the focus”. Some designers and architects consider the tools more useful in the documentation phase of the creative process, a great help just for producing the visualizations and documents. Or they limit themselves to see the digital tools just as a help for the manufacturing and implementation process.

Now, it seems, there is a great change in the paradigm by the younger generation: instead of a documentation tool, digital tools have become a crucial part of the artistic process itself. They are an essential part of the most abstract phase of the invention by being able to generate multiple variations and options in few seconds. The process can be seamless cooperation with human beings and new technology. Similarly, the end result is not necessarily a physical object or space anymore. It can be a mixture of physical and augmented reality and it can be experienced by VR tools and other multisensorial devices.

Virtual and augmented reality, once far-off on the classroom horizon, have also moved with relative speed into the realm of possible classroom technologies. In fact, recent data indicate that while few teachers are using augmented and virtual reality, it does show the way for the future also in teaching methodologies.

The speed of the change in digitalisation is exponential. The question is can humans follow the pace of the technology – and should they?

Pentti Kareoja