Materiality as a Fundamental Knowledge Tool for a Conscious Use of Digital Education

Pedagogy constitutes one of the fundamental themes in Tomás Maldonado's legacy. From his first experience in 1954, when he was hired by Max Bill at the newly founded School of Ulm,1 Maldonado has been always involved in pedagogy. This is also confirmed in the interview published in Arte and Artefatti: "A decisive role in all of this was played by my challenge with pedagogy, the need to measure myself every day with the teaching activity. Suddenly, I discovered a passion that will remain with me throughout my whole life: the passion to be useful in the intellectual (and professional) formation of young pupils". Pedagogy is, by definition, an instrument-based subject aimed at researching and tuning the best tools and paths for learning the most diverse disciplines. Disciplines that in turn, with their content, influence the same pedagogy tools and paths. For this reason, this survey was approached by analyzing several Maldonado writings in order to identify pedagogical tools and paths used by him; from this analysis they have been identified the most significant pedagogy tools that were compared with the current pedagogical tools. From the research, one topic eventually emerged as particularly close with Maldonado's legacy: materiality. Besides being a topic extensively discussed in several Maldonado works such as Reale e Virtuale of 1994, materiality is also quite relevant and a contemporary topic. This is mainly due to the significant trend towards the digital transition of almost all educational tools. Therefore, by investigating the differences between material and digital tools, a discussion has been carried out on the relationship between Maldonado’s pedagogical theories and the contemporary ones. To summarize, a research question has been formulated: considering the current educational horizon in which practice has become dematerialized, is maintaining attention to materiality and dexterity still a valid perspective? Or is it a romantic vision, nowadays out of the contemporary context in which the designer operates?