Designblog

The bricks manifesto is a collaborative version
of ‘this is (not) a manifesto’ to bring people together
to discuss their education vision during DDW 2012.9

UnBornLab
Presented at the graduation show of the Design Academy Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2013, UnBornLab is a masters project, initiated by Eugenie de Lariviere, looking at design education from a design student’s perspective.

It was important for me to understand education from my own perspective; as a student and a designer.
Mixing both a field research on a local level, and an academic research on a more ‘global level (that is the European level), I felt the need to always bring the theoretical part into practice, by organizing workshops, discussions, lectures, interviews (etc), in order to grasp an understanding of the big notion that is education.

One way to do so was to analyze how the system functions. I was able to get an overview of it by breaking it down into four ‘elements’, which together, represent the main ‘pillars’ forming our schools. These four elements being; community, structure, content and environment, the interactions they have together shapes the different academic institutions we know of.

(For example: Structure = Content implies that if structure makes content, it induces a top-down approach of knowledge, raising the question of knowledge accreditation, knowledge hierarchy, as well as of formal vs. informal knowledge. Whereas Content = Structure implies that if knowledge forms structure it leads to a more bottom up approach of producing and sharing knowledge for example; crowd source and open source systems. The same goes with structure = community vs. community = structure and so on.)

To communicate the concept clearly, I visualized these methods of the ‘four elements’ by quickly sketching them into volumes. It was once again a means of bringing the theory into practice by giving shape to the research. Making it physical also enabled me to reach people who did not feel strongly about the subject.

Community = Content  vs.  Content = Community

Following on the idea of ‘rethinking’ education from a student’s perspective, I chose to look further on recent shifts in the relationship between ‘content’ and ‘community’, focusing on students as the bearer of contemporary knowledge.

With the faster availability of information the world is transforming at a greater pace and students are often proven to be quicker to adapt to these changes, may they be social, economical, political (etc). The content they bring in the school, as an addition to the curriculum, comes to show more applicability regarding the world they evolve in. In this process, schools go from being knowledge distributors to becoming intermediate spaces where a dynamic cross-pollination of knowledge happens.

The UnBornLab functions as an experiment to document students’ working processes as the basis for renewing design curricula.
The first step of the project was a blog to bring student’s current research (in this case their thesis topics) outside of schools.

DAE Masters Blog

Believing in the importance of students’ self-taught expertise as a school’s temporary knowledge, the idea evolved in the motivation to create a dynamic archive of this knowledge by building a self-generating library of past researches.

Through a series of short video-interviews students present their work, focusing on the research rather than the outcome. Considering students as temporary ‘experts’ of their subjects, the videos can be seen as short introductions on given design topics. One topic leading to another UnBornLab intends to be the start of a dynamic knowledge database of ‘UnBorn’ designers.

Radio Rietveld resident DJ Zachary Airhorn had a little chat with fashion designer Franciscus Van Der Meer about mislabeling, telling stories with garments, fashion jargon and living in London.

fashion -garments- are the most intimate and superficial layer that separates our minds and bodies from all around us. they cover our inner space. so what happens around us? what goes on in the outer space? wars, attacks on politicians, poverty, enough clean drinking water, hiv, riots in suburbia etc. the one word that connects all this is intolerance: angst & anxiety for the unknown and thus the threatening. so how do we deal with each other?
what do we show and what do we conceal? to what extend do you choose for yourself instead of those around you? what’s the relation between our own individuality and selflessness? what the confrontation like, when our inner space meets the outer space?

Franciscus van der Meer

The interview starts with Franciscus calling via Skype during a wonderful song by the Beach Boys, Heroes and Villains. We begin talking about his show at FOAM in Amsterdam, which took place in early 2012. Quickly the interview moves on to the issue of talkin fashion without visual aid, and thus the relation between his collections and this above text on his website from his collection …and I’ll show you mine :

We then speak about his work in London, his time with a label, and his work on his captual collection (a series of five outfits). Franciscus speaks in detail of his process, mentioning how the first outfits are generally more “confined”, while the later ones are calmer. He goes from “a place of aggravation to a place of peace.” The discussion then goes into the importance of atmosphere during a presentation, his annoyance with clichés relating to fashion, and his collaboration with friends documenting his work.

The Design Museum London celebrated the prolific career of the Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel in this, his first UK retrospective, “Crouwel a Graphic Odyssey”. Regarded as one of the leading designers of the twentieth century, Crouwel embraced a new modernity to produce typographic designs that captured the essence of the emerging computer and space age of the early 1960s.
This 1:27:00 long interview and presentation of Wim Crouwel (graphic Designer) and Mel Crouwel (architect) was moderated by Rick Poynor (design journalist/writer) to celebrate that occasion spring 2011. Subsequently the exhibit was held in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam which could be considered a home coming for the eminence grise of Dutch graphic design aswell as the Museum itself.
interview registration by Alice Masters. Exhibition catalog design by Spin.

more? check out this very personal and summarizing presentation of Crouwel putting the exhibition in context. By Crane.tv at the Design Museum, 29 March 2011.