Digital Quarantine—A Case Study on How CoViD-19 Accelerated Digital Transformation at Our School of Arts and Design

Abstract

Despite the fact that the so-called digital transformation is being seen as one of the megatrends of the past and ongoing decades, there does not seem to be a common picture of how schools of art and design should address this phenomenon or even actively shape the digital shift. The case study discussed in this paper, therefore, sets out to identify the main areas that schools of arts and design could engage with in order to become active players in digital transformation. It does so by conducting both, a series of qualitative interviews as well as an online survey that reached out to representants of the design and arts community at Lucerne School of Applied Sciences and across Europe. Initially, this sample was meant to be compared to a sample originating from the computer science community. Due to the lockdown of European Universities caused by the CoVid-19 crisis, this second part of the study had to be postponed. Instead, the paper completes the findings of the qualitative study conducted in the design and arts community with a series of observations made during the sudden shift to remote and e-learning at our own university of Applied Sciences and Arts. As a result, the emerging topics from the study get critically reflected with the fact that our school of arts and design suddenly became a “remote” school that had to shift exclusively to the use of digital tools and media. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.