However, they decided not to name the school "Bauhaus Ulm"-although Gropius ( 1951) had given his permission to do so-and chose only to adopt the caption of the late Dessau Bauhaus, which the Nazis had shut down: "Hochschule für Gestaltung". In other words: an updated successor to the Bauhaus. When Max Bill joined the project, the focus rapidly shifted from a political school with some design aspects integrated, to a design school that integrated political and social aspects. However, design-related subjects such as product design and urban planning also formed part of their holistic approach. The designated core subjects were "political method" and progressive and informative journalism. In the late 1940s Scholl and Aicher also developed plans for a full-time school to educate self-confident and responsible citizens. In this Volkshochschule (literally translated "people’s high school") they sought to contribute to the re-democratization of German citizens and a new political and cultural beginning in what was very much a post-Nazi period. Scholl and Aicher had founded an adult education centre in Ulm shortly after World War II. In 1953, the Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung, HfG) was founded by Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher and Bauhaus alumnus Max Bill. Extensive publications on the Cybersyn project can be found in Beer ( 1981), Medina ( 2011), Bonsiepe ( 2012), and Espejo ( 2014). Detailed documentation of Ulm's influence on Latin America's design community is to be found in Fernández ( 2006). In this article the main focus will be on Cybernetics and related topics in the curricula of the Ulm School, to shed light on the aspects of the educational background of Ulm-influenced protagonists in Chile and Latin America during the 1960s and 70s often overseen or disregarded. (Fernández 2006 Souza Leite 2012) In the Chilean Project "Cybersyn", the rare combination of design informed by Information Science and Cybernetics met a demand: in retrospect, Gui Bonsiepe, who had studied with Max Bense, Horst Rittel, and also Tomás Maldonado in Ulm’s Information Department, seemed almost predestined to lead Cybersyn’s design team. The influence of Ulm on Latin America's emerging design practice and design education was due on the one hand, to 31 Latin Americans who had studied in Ulm some of whom returned to their home countries, and on the other, to German alumni migrating to Latin America to work and teach there, such as Gui Bonsiepe. Rittel’s time in Ulm can be considered a prerequisite for his work on problem solving and the development of the concept of “wicked problems” in the 1970s (this is to be discussed in more detail in section three). In the late 1950s, Horst Rittel succeeded Bense and gave even more weight to mathematical methods, Cybernetics and the related Operations Research. In 1955, Norbert Wiener took up Bense’s invitation to be a guest lecturer in Ulm. He also introduced the students to Cybernetics. There, Bense introduced Information Theory and so-called Information Aesthetics to the curriculum in the 1950s. He coined the school’s little known Information Department-a small department that heavily influenced the school’s intellectual climate. Max Bense was one of the key figures in the early Ulm years. They had been exposed to a wide range of disciplines, embracing social sciences, technology, and sciences, such as Information Theory, Operations Research-and Cybernetics. Quite exceptionally, and characteristic for Ulm, these design alumni were not only trained in traditional design skills. Alumni of the HfG Ulm had a considerable influence on Design in Latin America in the 1960s and 70s.
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