THE
www.designacademy.nl
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ARENA
Graduation
Show 2016
Design Academy
Eindhoven
Monday, 24 October 2016
Programme
COLUMN
Does it make a difference if the government
knows whether you masturbate or not?
24.10.2016
11.00
Isabel Mager
‘5000 ×’
Rethinking the Research
By Olle Lundin
———
In this podcast Anastasia Kubrak is expanding on the political and social impact of satellite surveillance. She is
approaching the eyes in the skies as an
actual problem as well as a metaphor for
other kinds of surveillance. Depending on
who is in control of the imagery, or who
is in control of manipulating the imagery
we can of course foresee various types
of societies.
And I was just wondering: is it really
all that bad? In Dayton, Ohio, a town with
a very high crime rate, Ross McNutt and
his team have come close to the first PreCrime invention ever. In the film Minority
Report our beloved Tom Cruise is a member of a Special Ops police task force
called Pre-Crime. Through the oracles
11.20
Pre Crime are able to foresee crimes and
stop them before they happen.
Ross McNutt and his team are using a
drone in the sky with 44 megapixel cameras attached that send a high resolution
picture of the entire city, every second.
This allows them to pin point any vehicle
or person at any location in the city and
scroll back in time to see where they went
or where they came from. If you commit a
crime and hop into your get-away-vehicle
the McNutt team can just track you down
as time moves on and catch you at your
new ‘safe’ location.
In psychological test situations it has
also been proved that people are more
generous and kind when they know that
they are being observed by other people.
In one test the test group could either
give themselves a present for Christmas
or give money to charity. When alone, they
would egoistically take the money themselves, but if they were in a situation with
people that they wanted to impress, more
members of the test group would indeed
chose to donate the money.
So again, I’m pondering to what extent
should surveillance be considered a horrid
thing. The technology is already here, and
can benefit society. To quote the electro
fusion pop group, Knower - Does it make
a difference if the government knows
whether you masturbate or not? Maybe
these technological advancements will
lead to a more inclusive understanding of
what it means to be human? Of course
as long as totalitarian states and profit
driven companies stay away from trying
to manipulate the masses to take over
the world.
Julia Thomann
‘Project for Fokker’ (film)
11.40
Floriane Misslin
‘Uni-Sex’
Throughout Graduation Show 2016
there are 10 projects marked with
this icon. These projects have been
selected by our Knowledge Circle
for showing an impressive level of
research. Small audio documentaries
about this research have been made –
just activate your phone and grab some
headphones on the 3rd floor to listen.
Interviews by Gert Staal with editing
by Jennifer Pettersson.
12.00
Eibert Draisma
‘The Future of Mankind’
(workshop)
12.30
Aurelie Hoegy
‘Silencio’ (film)
To listen check
13.00
designresearch
podcast.com
Bas Raijmakers,
Julia V. van Zanten
‘Graduate Futures in High Tech’
13.20
Giulia Soldati
‘Contatto’
13.40
Eibert Draisma
‘The Future of Mankind Talk’
14.00
Photo: Angeline Swinkels
Teresa van Dongen
‘Spark of Life’
(Keep an Eye Award)
Chair of the ‘2016 Keep an Eye Design Talent Grant’ jury
Marije Vogelzang congratulates Govert Flint.
Brain Power and the Workplace
Photo: Angeline Swinkels
Illustration: Sunjoo Lee
By Gabrielle Kennedy
Rosanna Orlandi discussing with Benedikt Stonawski his furniture project –
‘Torsion Furniture’, which is based on a process of bending thermoplastic.
———
2014 Contextual Design graduate
Govert Flint is one of the 2016 Keep An
Eye Talent Grant recipients. He will use
his 10, 000 euros to develop his project,
‘Enrichers’ to a more professional level.
Govert got off to a rocky start with
this research. After his TEDx Talk in 2014
about his popular graduation project
‘Bionic Chair’ he tried different routes
- collaborating with dancers, architects
and furniture companies. He exhibited with Het Nieuwe Instituut and at the
Salon del Mobile in Milan. But none of
these pursuits really took his ideas to the
level he wanted.
This year he tried it differently - partnering with Schiphol Real Estate and the
University of Cambridge and with a narrower focus on environmental enrichment.
Environmental Enrichment is a neurological term about how the environment
influences the brain. “Enrichment contributes to the plasticity of the cognitive
reserve and contributes to making new
neurogenesis in the nervous system,” says
Govert. “Enrichment is a space which facilitates both movement, visual stimulation,
cognitive processes and somatosensory.”
In other words when our senses are
activated in unison it affects how the
brain functions – positively influencing
cognitive output. Companies, therefore,
could use this information to make more
sensorially active workplaces to maximize
employee performance.
Govert has finished three types of
enriched workspaces at Schiphol and
is now setting up more research with
Cambridge, AMS (Advanced Metropolis
Solutions) and TU Delft to investigate
how these spaces are actually affecting people while working. This is where
the Keep an Eye Talent Grant will come
in useful.
“I am looking at how does a certain
type of interaction reduce stress? Does
that contribute to social interactions?
Do people perform better in one of the
three spaces?”
Ultimately Govert wants the Enrichers
platform to create products that do not
serve a system or optimize functionality
alone, but can be designed as part of an
interior that makes people function better.
“I think it suits how the brain is ‘designed’ to perceive it’s environment,”
says Govert. “I would like to make these
environments digital, so we can use our
spaces as interfaces. Imagine if we could
send an email by stroking a wallpaper.
“I’d like to see people become more
expressive and to move more freely in
our technological and digital work environments and I would like to develop Enrichers as the platform to create
awareness about such possibilities.”
Success could be gauged by how
convincing Govert can be to big companies to change their environments based
on the Enrichers research. Research that
is now more possible thanks to the generous Keep an Eye Talent Grant.
14.20
Leo Orta, Victor Miklos
Uni-Form
14.40
Teresa van Dongen
‘Spark of Life’
(Keep an Eye Design
Talent Grant)
15.00
Pleun van Dijk
‘Moeder Kind Centrum’
15.20
Michèle Degen
‘Moeder Kind Centrum’
15.40
Naomi Jansen
‘Moeder Kind Centrum’
16.00
Karolina Ferenc
‘Lichen in Love’
(Gijs Bakker Nominee)
16.20
Giulia Soldati
‘Contatto’
16.40
Hannah van Luttervelt
‘Moeder Kind Centrum’
17.00
Alice Wong
‘Reconstructing Reality’ (film)
17.20
Luther
17.40
Miriam van Eck
‘PSHA Groningen’
Issue 3
Monday, 24 October 2016
The Arena
Graduation Show 2016
A Violent Death, Memory & Reality
2015 Information Design
(MA) graduate Alice Wong
won the 2016 Dioraphte
Award at the Netherlands
Film Festival for her
graduation project,
‘Reconstructing Reality’.
Alice was born in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands in 1989. Her father ran a
famous Chinese restaurant. In 1992,
when Alice was three-and-a-half years old
her father was murdered.
The facts are murky, but it seems Mr.
Wong had fallen into the jaws of Chinese
gangsters. Stunned and scared, Alice’s
mother took her three children back to
Hong Kong trying to forget the past and
to create a new life for her young family.
“Over the years different people told
me different stories about what happened
to dad,” says Alice. “That he had died from
liver cancer and that he had died from
lung cancer. I never believed any of it and
sometimes I’d ask mum, but she’d tell me
to stop asking questions and to just say
that he had died in a car crash.”
But in her mind Alice continued rehashing the facts. She learnt that the car
crash story couldn’t be true – there was
no case history of a fatal crash reported
during that month, plus it turns out her
father never had a drivers’ license.
Then one day she saw a segment
on Chinese TV about Design Academy
Eindhoven. She already had her BA in
graphic design and the move felt right.
With the academy being so emphatic
that students focus on their personal fascinations, Alice got to work. She consulted
forensic experts, gathered police reports
and tried to piece together the crime scene.
She researched guns and bullets, and visited her father’s old hangouts, but nothing
led to an answer. “At some point my teachers Joost [Grootens] and Gert [Staal] told
me to stop,” she says. “They said the truth
is within, you will only get close, but you will
never know exactly how it was.” The murder, to this day, remains an unsolved crime.
It was the realization that the truth was
not within grasp, added to the growing
irritation that she owned no memories
of her dad that gave Alice the idea for
her film. “My memories are all borrowed
from others,” she says. “But I think that
this idea of borrowing memories is
maybe more common than we realize.
I doubt many people and certainly not you
or I have ever witnessed a shooting. Most
people have absolutely no clue what it
would really look like and the only way to
conjure up an image is to borrow a memory from a film or other media. So then I ask
is your shooting scene any more real than
my shooting scene?”
Arthur Roeloffzen, one of Alice’s influential mentors, was the one who spoke to
her about the importance of placeholders.
“Thanks to him I started to think more
Alex Coles on
Why Editorial Design
By Gabrielle Kennedy
———
Five years ago design critic and writer
Alex Coles dived down a hole he spotted
in the saturated design media scene.
“So many interesting things are happening
in design,” he says, “but the value of
much of it gets missed due to the nature
of design writing and the publications
it appears in.”
Typically, design writing is polarized
between either short reads, like imagedriven magazine style pieces, or academic
long reads written by scholars. “I wanted
to operate somewhere between the two,”
Coles says.
Together with Sternberg Press (Berlin)
he came up with the idea for a series
of design books called EP – a reference
to old-fashioned vinyl records that contained more music than just a single but
less than a full album, the so-called
‘extended player’. Volume 1 was
released in 2013 (co-edited by Catharine
Rossi) and Volume II will be released
next month.
A lot has been written recently about
the number of design writers crossing
into curating and museum work – like
Johanna Agerman Ross who recently left
Disegno to join the V&A as a curator.
“I don’t curate exhibitions,” Coles says.
“Instead I put together books that could,
I guess, be referred to as editorial design
– a way to describe an activity that
is a cross over between editing and art
direction. Historically, the roles of editor
and art director are kept quite separate –
the editor works on editorials and texts,
and the art director deals with layout
and commissioning images. But
for EP I needed to be involved in both.”
Coles has chosen to work with the
graphic designers Experimental Jetset to
develop the language and identity of the
series, and theorists like Umberto Eco
and curators and gallerists like Paula
Antonelli and Libby Sellers. The goal is
always to create a different viewpoint and
to mix up the too-strict divide between
the interests of the more commercial and
the more academic side of design.
This post-disciplinary approach –
Coles is Professor of Transdisciplinarity
at the University of Huddersfield, UK –
also extends into content. In general,
he wanted each book to explore the links
between design, art and architecture. “At
certain moments in time these disciplines
interact,” says Coles, “and it is the nature
of this interaction that interests me.”
In Volume I Coles focused on the
Italian Avant-Garde in the period
1968 – 1976, its critical developments
and the tumultuous political backdrop
that played a role in it all.
“But it wasn’t just old guys talking
about old guys,” Coles says. “We got
everyone from across generations and
disciplines looking through the optic
of the present to create a really lively discussion about the currency of the past.”
In it Studio Formafantasma (teachers
at Design Academy Eindhoven and curators of Graduation Show 2016) featured,
but instead of having this chapter written
by a design historian or critic, Coles
invited London gallerist Libby Sellers to
interview them. “Rather than talk about
the more obvious angle of how their work
has developed, Sellers asked them about
Italy and why they moved to and then
stayed in the Netherlands,” explains Coles.
“The chapter became more about how
their personal journey influences their
work. It is the sort of behind-the-scenes
thinking that drives design, but which
we rarely hear about.”
For EP Volume II the subject is design
fiction. “This one is less about a moment
in time and more a general swell or
a growing reliance on fiction to both
generate and communicate ideas,” says
Coles. “For it I interviewed Umberto
Eco shortly before his death about the
relationship between fiction and theory
in his writing, from The Open Work and
In the Name of the Rose onwards.”
The third volume of LP will be about
the notion of post-craft.
Alex Coles will be in discussion with Design
Academy Eindhoven alumnus and teacher
Lucas Maassen in The Arena Friday 28th
at 18.00, and again on Saturday 29th for the
‘In Need Of …’ roundtable discussion.
deeply about how no one knows exactly how everything works,” she says. “We
constantly fill up the gaps with different
information by ourselves. One’s memory
can be notoriously unreliable.”
In her film – ‘Reconstructing Reality’
– Alice borrows scenes, or memories
from various films she saw growing up.
“Fragments, chopped up and edited back
together into my life,” she explains. Her
method is a way of presenting research
and of visualizing complex information in
a simple way using story telling. It is also a
technique to introduce perspective based
on honest information.
Alice’s point becomes that when reality
cannot be grasped, perhaps it’s best to
simply question reality, which, as it turns
out, is mostly constructed.
“This is a very ‘design’ film,” Alice explains. “There is a lot of research, a lot of
layers, a lot of content, and it is not glossy
or technical, but it is very visual. Through
the layers the question shifts from what is
reality to how is reality constructed?”
When accepting her Netherlands Film
Festival prize, Alice had just one thing to
say: “I know you probably all think everyone at Design Academy Eindhoven make
chairs, but I made a film!”
And her mum? “I think she is mostly relieved that the lie is over,” Alice says, “but
I also I don’t think she really understands
what I am trying to do about it.”
Alice Wong will present her film in The Arena
at 17.00 today and throughout DDW – check
www.designacademy.nl for daily schedules.
‘Thinking-throughmaking’
By Circle of Knowledge
———
At Design Academy Eindhoven we have
always used design to investigate the
world around us, and ourselves. To us,
designing is not only an activity to make
something, it is also a way to understand
something. More recently we have given
a name to this type of designing: design
research.
Design research takes place at all departments, both bachelor and masters,
as well as the readerships (‘lectoraten’
in Dutch, our two research groups). The
various departments and readerships develop design research as a collaborative
practice, working together with industry,
knowledge institutes and societal partners. This embeds our design research in
wider social, economic, cultural, technological and ecological contexts. It is also
embedded in arts, crafts and academic
practices. Our design research builds on
knowledge in all these areas, and adds
knowledge too, by asking questions, and
by exploring new uses and defining new
meanings for design.
Thinking and making go hand in hand
in design research at Design Academy
Eindhoven. Our design research is best
described as thinking-through-making.
Thinking can take many forms and is
not only done with the head. Collecting,
documenting, mapping, translating, analysing and reflecting are all different ways
of thinking to us. Thinking also helps to
synthesise data into visualisations, share
insights with others, create new opportunities for design, make space for alternative perspectives, create new meanings and dialogues, and explore new
futures. We think with our heads, hands
and hearts.
The Arena
Many of our students are
coming to question the default
option and have set off in search
of alternate forms of expression.
The Arena is a space for them
and others from our extended
DAE community to communicate
the stories behind design
using performance, film, debate
and presentation.
The making part of thinking-throughmaking includes crafting objects, organising activities, telling stories, and designing systems and experiences, for instance.
All of these can be ways to generate as
well as express knowledge in more than
words alone.
The vast variety and richness in our
thinking and making signifies the multimedia approach Design Academy Eindhoven
takes to design research. This is continued in our choice of media and platforms
to express the knowledge our design
‘Thinking and
making go hand
in hand in design
research at
DAE Eindhoven’
research creates. Publications, events,
conferences and education are not just
vehicles for sharing research results, they
are an integral part of our design research
because they help Design Academy
Eindhoven to create new meanings for
design. Everyone at our academy is involved and so are many of our partners.
Get in touch if you want to be involved too.
Find our Research section in the Graduation
Show on the 3rd floor. Follow the Design
Research Podcast route to hear graduates
talk about design research (see icons on your
map and hear podcasts on designresearch
podcast.com). See also designresearch
lexicon.com to learn more. Contact us at
[email protected].
Performance can be
an ideal medium to express
concepts, like the relationship
between body and object.
It affords designers a whole
new way to explore the
larger world issues they are
tackling.
Also in The Arena visitors
will gain access to a more
behind-the-scenes look
at the underbelly as well as
the more cerebral side of
design. Prominent international
speakers will join discussions
on the hottest topics our
students are grappling with
in Graduation Show 2016.
© 2016 Design Academy
Eindhoven
Design: Haller Brun
———
Photo: Lisa Klappe
By Gabrielle Kennedy