Designing Inheritances. For a Media Archaeology of Educational Environments

The contribution proposes to develop a reflection on the epistemological premises by means of which to try to operationally set up a methodological approach for educational design. To this end, it seemed appropriate to start from the concept of inheritance as a task, in the terms indicated by Jacques Derrida's hantologie (1994). The central idea is that inheritance is not a given, but a task that, again and again, involves us as conscious, critical and responsible subjects. This perspective opens up a theoretical horizon that finds its unprecedented confirmation and legitimation in the light of the most recent acquisitions of modern evolutionary theory. In particular, one alludes to those according to which environments are inherited by species as much as genes (Tomasello 2019). It is thus by redeveloping the concept of inheritance in these terms that media-archaeology (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011) is identified as the methodological option through which to find the cultural matrices that can help make the present time intelligible and future ones imaginable. Even more specifically, this contribution therefore identifies in the tetrad of McLuhan and McLuhan (2016) a functional device to practice (re)thinking environments (and therefore inheritance) that, if thought in terms of an archaeology of the future, could give rise, precisely, to a design strategy with which to give form and substance to an idea of educational design that, among other things, does not reduce reflection on the role that digital technologies could play in this area to a simple computerised updating of the contexts and skills of their actors.