20th University Day Vocational Education

This specialist conference is managed by Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos and Sylvia Weyrauch, secondary school teacher on secondment to university (both working at Technical University of Darmstadt, Section of Fashion & Aesthetics).

The conference aims to bring together different players from the vocational field Body Care coming from organisation forms such as trade, industry and educational institutions.

Various fields of digitisation in the hairdressing vocation are being examined:

• Social media and photography at the heart of body representations (such as Instagram)
• Intertwined professional and private video tutorials produced by influencers
• Advertisement in social media (companies on Facebook and Instagram)
• Hairdressing salon: digital cash account book and list of costumers
• Hairstyle apps, virtual hairstylist’s
• Hairstyle finder, hairstyle consulting transferred to the private sphere

This results in numerous overlaps with digitisation in the cosmetic industry (web seminars and company apps), with digitisation in the vocational education sector (“apprentice’s record book” app, maintaining electronic vocational training records) or with digitisation in teacher education at university and vocational teacher training college (Moodle, Mahara, subject-related didactics providing insights in digitisation, blogs) as well as digitisation in vocational training (software-assisted learning, digital teaching media and course books).

At first sight, hairdressing and cosmetic services as part of professional tasks on the body do not appear to have anything to do with digitisation as these vocational practices on skin and hair seem to rely on immediate physical contact. Vidal Sasson, however, explains that cutting hair can be understood as a modular structure of various cutting techniques that he bases on the concepts of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was as an art school at the beginning of the 20th century the leading source of inspirations for modernity and connected the arts and crafts. Central to their concepts was the relationship between trade and mass production particularly with regard to design and architecture. Sassoon refers to the following starting points: On the one hand, he understands the hairdressing trade as applied art in which art and craft connect. On the other hand, he argues that the basis for mass production is a prototype which can only be created when the creative process and the analysis of technologies are combined: “It was my dream of experiencing hair in the realm of geometry: squares, triangles, rectangles and diamonds,” said Sassoon. Creativity is translated into mathematical structures.

With this in mind, you could ask how such a modular procedure of transferring cutting techniques to mathematical structures can be digitised. The specialist conference aims to answer this question of how a “modern synthesis” (Alfred H. Baar) of trade and digitisation could look like. The wide-ranging problems of digitisation that trade, industry and educational institutions are going to face are being examined critically. There are challenges such data protection, software-assisted learning, untried educational concepts and commercial interests.

We look forward to welcoming all of you! You can find a detailed programme here

Kind regards

Alexandra Karentzos and Sylvia Weyrauch