Day 1
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Design Academy Eindhoven has long been associated with the design d’auteur: design practices with a strong signature, distinctive critical and material thought, and a devotion to experimentation. These designers were able to resist market pressures and a product-oriented mentality, and their designs led to specific outputs, whether new materials, objects, or processes.
Today, DAE is a design school as well as a knowledge and research institution that fosters discussion about the state of the discipline. New generations of designers challenge contemporary socio-economic, political and legal norms through collaborative knowledge production and critical dialogue. Notions of autonomy and design research are continuously redefined with an emphasis on collaboration, based upon the need to form larger alliances.
Known Otherwise addresses areas of research, which are central to contemporary transformations in design thinking and practice, and are crucial to education at DAE. Its aim is to offer possibilities for imagining and designing the world otherwise, through a continuous redefinition of notions of matter, time and scale.
Known Otherwise is hosted by the Master departments of Design Academy Eindhoven.
PROGRAMME
13:00–14:00 → Welcome
Director of Education Raf de Keninck will open the festival and Creative Director Joseph Grima will lead a panel discussion on the relevance of research at DAE with the MA Heads and DAE Professors
14:00–14:40 → Academic research in and through design
Third Cycle (PhD, Professional Doctorate) research in and through design. Anastasia Kubrak, Vincent Thornhill, and Joost Grootens present and discuss their experiences of doing PhD research in and through their design practices.
14:40–15:20 → Working with Matter
Marina Otero Verzier, Serina Tarkhanian, Rebecca Schedler and Benedetta Pompili discuss working with matter. Matter brings together a group of designers exploring the shifting relationships with materiality. It addresses design practices that question market-driven and extractivist approaches reliant on the understanding of materials as lifeless resources. Focusing on matter and working with material cycles and flows, designers propose alternative systems of value and exchange attuned to social and ecological challenges.
15:50–16:30 → It’s about time!
A conversation with Lara Chapman, Ramon Jimenez Cardenas, Patricia Reed, moderated by Saskia van Stein. It’s about time showcases projects though of people involved with the Critical Inquiry Lab Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven that revolve around a re-evaluation of time. Their research, the dissemination of this knowledge and their design proposals address notions such as the archival turn, a recalibrating with the land, the reconnecting to ancestors or a specific heritage, the role of technology and pop-culture to rewrite deep time. All contributions offer a fertile ground from where to start dialogue touching on design and the matter of time.
16:30–17:10 → Working with Scale / Sensing and Storytelling
Talk with Daniel van der Velden (Metahaven) and Ayla Kekhia (GEO Design student) lead by Formafantasma. Design sits within ever-expansive megastructures of extraction, production and distribution. This session will bring forward modes of research and strategies of storytelling, attempting to define the contours of these design related ‘hyper objects’.
17:10–17:50 → Conclusions: Missing Words
In this talk lead by Afaina de Jong the importance of another kind of vocabulary is discussed with Inge Manka and Bernadette Kresj of the Claiming Spaces collective in Vienna and further illustrated by Maia Kenney and the Contextual Design Magazine Team, represented by YP Wang and Ana de Fontecha Hidalgo. Central to the conversation is the potential for collective translation and interpretation of language within design education in order to transform existing paradigms.
17:50-19:00 → Reception and (non-alcoholic) drinks
SPEAKERS
Formafantasma
Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin are the founders of Studio Formafantasma, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Heads of the Geo–Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE). Both originally from Italy, Trimarchi and Farresin graduated from the Contextual Design MA at DAE in 2009. Together, they have developed an approach to design that is characterised by experimental material investigations and a rigorous attention to context, process and detail.
Joost Grootens
Joost Grootens, DAE MA Head of the Information Design Master, Professor Artistic Research at the Royal Danish Academy Copenhagen, and PhD from PhDArts Leiden University.
Ian Biscoe
Dr Ian Biscoe is holds the professorship Transdisciplinary Design Networks at Design Academy Eindhoven. His research practice brings together the arts and technology, with a transdisciplinary approach that draws on his background in science, systems integration, technology, architecture, performing and visual arts, design and business. His research around the fusion of art, science and technology, includes the study of cognitively enabled built environments, and X Reality networked performance – the subject of his PhD thesis.
Afaina de Jong
Afaina de Jong is head of the Contextual Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven, architect and researcher with a diverse practice which ranges from design and curating, to community organising and graphic design. De Jong describes her vision for the Master Contextual Design as the generation of spatial awareness and public contexts, which would necessitate a revision of our positions and power as designers, and recognise the relationships between objects and space, power, identity, ecology and history.
Ramon Jimenez Cardenas
Ramón Jiménez Cárdenas (b. Oaxaca, México. 1996) is an artist and researcher. He works between México and the Netherlands where he received his MA. Ramón’s practice involves auto-ethnographical inquiries that develop into designed objects, exhibitions, or other. It entails a process that shows how the theoretical is personal, and the personal is theoretical.
Maia Kenney
Maia Kenney is an independent writer and curator preoccupied with dismantling the role of the curator as cultural guardian and establishing norms of multiple perspectives in all cultural institutions. In experimenting with ways to increase accessibility in cultural institutions, she has created virtual tours for Dutch museums and acted as a member of a think tank reimagining the role of the digital in arts and culture.
Anastasia Kubrak
Anastasia Kubrak works as a designer and teaches at the Design Academy Eindhoven, in MA Social Design and MA Information Design. She is a PhD candidate at the Critical Media Lab / FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. From 2018-2021, she worked in the Research department at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. She holds MA in Visual Strategies from Sandberg Instituut (2016-2018), and graduated cum laude from BA Man & Communication department at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2012-2016).
Marina Otero Verzier
Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam. She is Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI) and head of the Social Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven. She studied at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid and Columbia University GSAPP. In 2016, Otero received her PhD at ETSA Madrid.
Patricia Reed
Patricia Reed is a writer, artist and designer whose research focuses on the intelligibility of complex structures and conditions of inhabitability at planetary dimensions. Recent essays have been published in e-flux Journal, Making & Breaking, The New Normal, and Glass Bead Journal. Reed also co-wrote the Xenofeminist Manifesto as part of Laboria Cuboniks.
Photo by Daniil Primak, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Rebecca Schedler
Rebecca Schedler is a designer and researcher from Germany. She investigates complex relations between social, cultural, political, and environmental issues by exploring the intersection of design and science.
Her work deals with interspecies interactions, technology, taken-for-granted materials, such as mushrooms and shit, and how these could lead to a more shared and equal future. Through a Bioreactor-system, she explores hidden systems, the unseen and the abject, which form a vital part of our environment and living space with their life, age, and death.
Rebecca graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL) with a Master‘s in Social Design and holds a Bachelor‘s degree in Textile- and Surface Design from the Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin (DE). She is currently active as a tutor in the Biolab at DAE.
The CLAIMING SPACES Collective
The CLAIMING SPACES Collective is a bottom-up group of students, graduates, teachers and researchers founded 2019 at TU Wien which seeks to foster intersectional_feminist perspectives in architecture and spatial planning. CLAIMING SPACES invites students, teachers, architects/urban planners and researchers to participate in the discourse and to design intersectional_feminist positions and tools together, to create different forms of doing architectural and spatial planning.
Saskia van Stein
Saskia van Stein is an independent curator, moderator, and educator with an emphasis on design and architecture. Since 2019 she’s headmaster of the MA entitled The Critical Inquiry Lab, a department with artistic (design)research at its core. The course provides an environment for the development of a design practice understood as a cultural signifier and an agent of change.
Serina Tarkhanian
Serina Tarkhanian is a Canadian-Armenian designer and researcher whose work explores contemporary issues around care and social conditions of health and well-being. Through a design anthropological approach, she investigates relations between embodied knowledges, their embedded rituals, materiality, and design. Along with the development of ‘microbial co-healing’ tools and spaces, her design research project, The Microbial Bathhouse, delves into biopolitics of microbes, medicine, and pharmacology.
Vincent Thornhill
Vincent Thornhill is a DAE MA alumnus (Information Design, 2015). He is a MA tutor at Design Academy Eindhoven, and PhD candidate in the Arts programme of LUCA School of Arts in Vlaanderen.