Index Graphic Design Summer School Open Set 2012, first edition The catalogue
Tutors Max Bruinsma Petr van Blokland Thomas Castro Liza Enebeis Jan van Toorn Erik de Vlaam
Participants Adrien Borderie Frauke Eversmann Dário Cannatà Silvia Celiberti Gemma Copeland Sofia Evans Laetitia van der Hoek Yin Lau Ho Pietro Paciullo Sum Ping Sibyl Lai Artem Stepanov Stratos Tzanavaris
Vlad Butucariu Irina Shapiro
0.1
Welcome
Initiators and organizers
Preface In the spring of 2012, even while finishing our masters in The Netherlands, we were still facing many questions and concerns about our status as designers and about the design profession in general. What is the quality of design, and where does it come from? How can we as graphic designers contribute to this society flooded by information? How to be a designer in a world that is already designed to such an extent? There is not a single clear answer to that, so we thought: why not gather the young generation together with experienced designers to discuss and reflect on these questions and take action?
Open Set 2012
That’s how Open Set emerged – a summer event dedicated to young professionals and students willing to get in touch with others from all over the world, debating and grasping the new shifts of the design profession. We considered that openness and flexibility should be the main characteristic of an efficient contemporary platform. This was also the reason why we thought the Netherlands was the perfect place to launch it. The work during the event was done under the supervision of Thomas Castro from LUST, Liza Enebeis from Studio Dumbar and Petr van Blokland. Since we thought it was essential to have diverse contemporary “philosophies” and a second critical view, we also invited Max Bruinsma and Jan van Toorn in order to build a mind shifting experience. To understand and feel what Dutch design is and what makes it so different, we had to bring all these people in the “original” environment for a short period of time. The program aimed to explore the boundaries of our profession and share the discourse with other young designers. We were not only gathering graphic designers, but we were open for many professions. The more you step into new territories the more interesting it becomes. 0.2
For the first edition we took the theme Utopia. Why Utopia? Because graphic design always had an utopian vision: perfect shape, perfect message, perfect communication, perfect function. Is this still relevant today? Do designers still create utopian systems? This book is the work of the participants for two summer weeks in 2012. It contains projects, experiences as well as discussions selected from our video recordings trying to cover all these questions. Vlad Butucariu, Irina Shapiro The Netherlands, 2012
Content 0.6 Introduction by Max Bruinsma I 1.2 Introduction by Thomas Castro e-Utopia: or How to Publish in a Non-Format World 1.4 Group projects 1.20 Individual projects 1.56 Discussions
II 2.2 Introduction by Liza Enebeis 24 Group projects III 3.2 Interview with Petr van Blokland 3.8 Group projects 0.12 Final presentation
Welcome
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Max Bruinsma
Open Set 2012
Design yet When Thomas More wrote his Utopia, almost 500 years ago today, he addressed questions of his time. Like who was in charge: the King or God? The people’s representatives or God-given authorities? And how do you organize society, based on these premises? Thomas More is a paradoxical figure: philosophically, he is close to a protestant or even humanist idea of man’s responsibility for his own wellbeing, but he is also a catholic priest, a bishop defending religion’s independence of worldly powers. At the same time he is a law-abiding member of an authoritarian government – who refuses to recognize the King’s authority over the church. These paradoxes cost him his life; he was decapitated on behest of his king, Henry VIII, in 1535. Utopia is More’s vision of a perfect world – a perfectly orderly and reasonable social arrangement. How do we live together? For starters, by all being equal, by having no private property, and by sharing everything. Sounds socialist? Well, you could say that Thomas More’s Utopia is a very early example of communist thinking, if you leave out the fact that it was also 0.4
religiously inspired. Every Utopia is of its time – another paradox, considering the universal and timeless claims of all utopias. Utopia is mostly translated as ‘non-place’ – ‘u’ translating from the classic Greek as ‘negative’ –, but in English the pronunciation of the word is indistinguishable from that of ‘Eu-topia’, which would translate as ‘good place’. Thomas More, in short, already starts a complete discourse in the wordplay he hides in the title: the good place is a nonplace, in other words, the ideal world is an impossible, unreachable world. It is intended as a symbol of a place that reflects our best ideas of society – not as a blueprint for its realization. Much like religion and politics ages ago, design started as an ideological tool, as a tool to promote ideas of a better world in the hereand-now of the 1920s. This view of design has of course a great history in architecture, which since its early beginnings in Babylon, Egypt, China, India and Greece has been applied to materialize a vision of the ideal world. The ‘ideal city,’ the notion of which in the West goes
Introduction
back to late classic times and early Christianity, not only represents the hardware that supports the ideal state, but also expresses in its structural principles how that world should be organized on social, governmental and symbolic levels.
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Max Bruinsma: Utopia
for symmetry symbolizes balance, equilibrium, and hierarchy represents the perfect order of things. Similar symmetric designs can be found in the ‘ideal cities’ of Renaissance architecture and in the abstract compositions of designs for urban development in early and ‘International Since design as we know it to- Style’ Modernism. day is firmly rooted in architecture and its history, one Not Yet might say utopian thinking is at the root of design. If you When I grew up, in the early think that the slogan that 1960s, utopia went by the name our multinational electronics of “the year two thousand.” company, Philips, carried in The 1950s and ‘60s were a time the 1990s, “Let’s Make Things in which utopia was reinBetter,” was just another vented by our parents. After empty advertising phrase, the War, they had rebuilt the think again – it is the gist world from scratch and decidof 5000 years of Western deed it was time to finish the sign ideology. job permanently now. What had remained standing during the The modern notion of design is war was in many places enthuclosely connected to another siastically torn down after utopian era in Europe, that all, or at best seen as obof the early social movements stacle to progress. Nostalgic in the eighteenth and ninelumber. Their utopia is now teenth century. Claude-Nicho- dystopia. Awake, their dream las Ledoux, for instance, was of radiant modernity appears an architect who translated as a dysfunctional suburb – French revolutionary thinking however symmetric it may have into the design of a perfect been conceived. The year 2000, society and an actual village so long the gauging point of that was built according to a great future, transpired to his principles: ‘La Saline be a fleeting moment of intoxRoyale d’ Arc et Senans’. ication, after which everySymmetry and hierarchy rule thing returned to normal. Not it’s design, like they do in a dream but reality. almost all utopian designs;
Max Bruinsma
Open Set 2012
It is like the philosopher Ernst Bloch remarked: “The here-and-now lacks distance, which, although alienating, produces clarity and overview. Therefore, immediacy, in which reality takes place, is experienced as essentially darker than the dream image, even from time to time without form, and void.” Bloch, who lived from 1885 to 1977, is the philosopher of utopia as guideline for acting hopefully in the grey reality of the now. His stressing of the importance and value of the present is remarkable and in his days – the first half of the last century, a bloody battle ground of utopias of various kinds – almost masochistic. Bloch is less concerned with a specific goal as he is with the way to reach it, the process that takes place in the now. The essence of his philosophy is to regard the world and any meaningful human activity in it as “noch nicht.” These two words – “not yet” – are the most concise way to connect present and future. Bloch contrasts his thought with that of Freud, who according to him doesn’t reach beyond “nicht mehr” – “not anymore.” For isn’t the Freudian subconscious not the forgotten, the repressed, the “no-more-conscious” which has 0.6
quite literally sunk below the threshold of consciousness? “All psychoanalysis,” Bloch summarizes his critique on Freud, “is therefore by necessity retrospective.” As phenomenologically inspired Marxist he sees the Freudian subconscious as an expression of a bourgeois “class beyond its expiry date, in a society without future.” Aurora versus twilight: “The not-yet-conscious is the psychic imagination of the not-yet-existent in a certain time and in its world, at the frontier of the world.” It is the imagination of man, daydreaming. In all his future-prone idealism – and he is among many who made the mistake of defending Stalinism as ‘realized utopia’ – Bloch is primarily the philosopher of the dynamic now, of ‘yet.’ That distinguishes him from utopists who pin down the imagined future as something that is a fact for all intents and purposes – something that merely needs to be realized. It is the planners’ hubris, the intractable ambition of designers, of modernism tout court. For designers and planners in the modernist tradition the design is a model, which once made is fixed – not a proposal but a
Introduction
prescription. Not a process but a product. The result is that the design’s links with the present and the past are severed. The design is ‘immediate’ in the sense Bloch meant, and yet distanced. Real and yet unrealized. A modernist design is absolute. It exists beyond time.
Kulturindustrie Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, utopia has become suspect once again. Countless thinkers have declared and analyzed its end, and while they were at it also proclaimed the end of history, politics and, why not, the future itself. It seemed that, in the 1990s, at the threshold of the year 2000, we were not simply on the brink of a new era, but that the new millennium would herald the end of time per se. Perhaps Karl Mannheim, the knowledge sociologist, was right when – even before the war – he worried that “in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment is a repetition of the past, there
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Max Bruinsma: Utopia
The modernist claim of objectivity and the ensuing procedures for design and social construction have been increasingly criticized from the 1960s onward. Functionalism – modernism’s design methodology – reduces not only the built environment and the useful products that furnish it to their respective functions, but also the people in it. One is a pedestrian or driver, clerk or worker, traveller or resident, and design provides each of those functions with a tailored environment: bicycle paths, highways, office towers, factories, train stations, suburbs. The connections between all of this are a matter of logistics, not of sentiment. But sentiment is hard to eradicate, as planners of 1960’s grand designs found out when confronted with activists who battled for keeping the city’s old and human-scale fabric intact. Human sentiment and human action versus
the ‘human function.’ The not-yet-crystalized imagination of the daydream vs. the diamond-hard deductions of the planners. In the daydream, according to Bloch, “the important destination of the not-yet-conscious is revealed,” which is hope, a sentiment that demands people to “actively leap into the burgeoning world.” There is a DIY element in this thought that makes Bloch topical once again in our times...
Max Bruinsma
Open Set 2012
can exist a condition in which thought will be utterly devoid of all ideology and utopian elements”?
on a scale never seen before. Strangely enough, he writes, this intensified consciousness of style does not lead people to look for new and unMannheim’s fears resound in seen things, but to hark back a recent essay by cultural to what has been there all critic Kurt Andersen in Vanity along. It has been remarked Fair. He remarked that in the by others as well, that the past twenty years – roughly past decades are marked by a the first two decades of the penchant toward the past, a 21st century – there have been nostalgic hindsight. The year massive changes especially in 2000 has become retro. the technological organization of our lives, but that Andersen explains the curthese are hardly reflected in rent lack of stylistic innostylistic innovation, apart vation in part as a compenfrom a few really new digisation for radical changes tal gadgets. This is strange. in other social arenas – the Compare and contrast the atdigital revolution, the ontire and interior decoration going reshuffling of world of someone in 1992 with how power and other disruptions. the same person dressed and Nostalgia-in-times-of-inselived in 1972, and you’ll see curity flavored with a hint an almost total make-over. of Decline-of-the-West. But Try and do the same with imhe locates the main cause in ages from 1992 and 2012 and the economization of culyou’ll have great difficulture, which is fatal for ty assigning each the right culture’s aesthetic and stydate. Andersen calls it the listic innovation: “We seem two Great Paradoxes of Conto have trapped ourselves in temporary Cultural History. a vicious cycle — economic The first is that the past progress and innovation stagolder than twenty years seems nated, except in information to take place on a different technology; which leads us planet while the recent past to embrace the past and turn has been the spitting image of the present into a pleasantly the present for the last two eclectic for-profit museum; decades. The second paradox is which deprives the cultures that this freezing of stylisof innovation of the fuel tic innovation coincides with they need to conjure genua public obsession with style inely new ideas and forms; 0.8
Introduction
which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation.” That this vicious cycle is not broken is caused by the intensive commodification of culture. Self expression, this essential driver of style, has become a consumer product available for larger markets than ever, which consequently is provided as mass product by an ever growing Kulturindustrie, as Adorno termed it.
This leads to nostalgia, or in our context, to retro-Utopianism, the celebration of an idealized past. Nostalgia is the reaction to the sad fact that you can’t turn back time. In her essay about “Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern”, Linda Hutcheon remarks that postmodern irony seems to exclude any possibility of nostalgia – and utopia, for that matter. Unfulfillable yearning does not tolerate ironic distance and critique. But Hutcheon – a recognized expert on postmodern irony – discovers a similarity between both terms: their ambiguity. And ambiguity is one of postmodernism’s cen-
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Max Bruinsma: Utopia
Thinking of Adorno – read through the lens of Baudrillard –, one may also see the stylistic stagnation as a perversion of functionalism, specifically when it comes to the design assumptions behind these mass products. For modernist functionalism is at the root of design; a design needs to be functional. But functional for what, for whom? Once, this functionality lay in the inherent usefulness of the product, the way it fulfilled a user’s need – that was the utopian core of design. Nowadays, the focus has shifted to how the product is functional to its producer. Anything that keeps the wheels of industry turning is functional. Use and usability as social functions are narrowed (or dumbed) down to an economic function, and revenue dictates the production process.
So when a product sells well, its manufacturer’s competitor will not think “how can we make something like this, but different, better?” but “how can we make this same thing, cheaper?” The all important function of a product thus becomes its potential to jump on the bandwagon of commercial success. Innovation stagnates while the market – read: the producer – thirsts after new products. What, in this mirror palace of self-replicating life-style industries, is more obvious than copying proven successes from the past, marginally adapting them and market them as new?
Open Set 2012
Max Bruinsma
tral paradigms. Just as irony projects what is not said onto what is said, nostalgia projects an idealized past onto a disappointing present. The effect of both terms, of both affects, is unsettling. Of course, as Hutcheon observes too, there is undiluted nostalgia, which radically – and decisively without irony – rejects the present and obsessively works to reinstall the past. Disney’s Celebration, for instance, a gated community just outside Disney World, Florida, is a textbook retro-utopia, a really existing fantasy modeled on a 1950’s version of the American Dream. But in today’s ‘retro’ products, nostalgia and irony merge seamlessly. As Hutcheon remarks in another context: “invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for exactly what it is – a comment on the present as much as on the past.” In its postmodern version, in short, nostalgia is “both called up, exploited and ironized.”
Utopia as agency In our context, this reminds us of Bloch’s critical view on psychoanalysis. Not coincidentally, the rise of postmodernism coincides with a renewed interpretation of Freud’s work, and it doesn’t
require too much imagination to interpret our contemporary fascination with his “necessarily retrospective” method as a sign of our culture’s uncomfortable relationship with the present. Nostalgia and irony are expressions of this discomfort – they undermine the here-and-now. “If the present is considered irredeemable,” says Hutcheon, “you can look either back or forward.” That is also the similarity between nostalgia and utopia – both reject the present, albeit in opposite directions. Still, nostalgia is not necessarily the opposite of utopia, as cultural historian Andreas Huyssen remarks. He sees a shift in our time in the “time-orientation of utopian imagination, from its futuristic pole to the pole of remembrance. Utopia and the past, rather than Utopia and the year 2000.” If, in other words, we imagine a better future now, it is that of the past. But that is a future without present, or worse, one that qualifies the present as a repressed failure. That is the present of today’s baby boomer, disillusioned in his past utopian fervor, who has abolished any idea of genuine engagement as “so nineteen sixties”. It is the present of “the prison of mere presence, in which we
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Introduction
cannot even move nor breathe,” as Bloch stated in his old age. This insight once again reminds us of the necessity of utopia, not as a model, but as agency, as a principle of action, as a “fore consciousness” of a deep longing for a future that is not yet realized. Or in Huyssen’s words: “The end of utopia, it turns out, is the end of the real.”
Quotes from:
Kurt Andersen, You Say You Want a Devolution? Vanity Fair, January 2012 Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Frankfurt am Main, 1959 (written in the USA between 1938 en 1947) Max Bruinsma, An ideal design is ‘not yet’. Amsterdam, 1999 Linda Hutcheon, Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern. Toronto, 1998 Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York, 1995
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Max Bruinsma: Utopia
With this, your task as designers is clear: design reality, not as a finished product that prescribes its users’ dealings with the world, but as a starting point for working towards a better world in the here-and-now, collaboratively. In other words: design the not yet.
Student name
Group Project
Stratos Tzanavaris
Pietro Paciullo
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Silvia Celiberti
Laetitia van der Hoek
1.12
Title of the project
Thomas Castro
Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry
Sofia Evans
1.1
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
LAU Ho Yin
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Thomas Castro
Open Source Design Methods
[Graphic design is] expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool. With the rise of user-generated content and new creative software, along with innovations in publishing and distribution systems, amateurs outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media. At the same time, designers are becoming producers: authors, publishers, instigators, and entrepreneurs employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences. Graphic Design: “Now in Production� 1.2
e-Utopia
e-Utopia: or How to Publish in a Non-Format World Much has been said about the future of digital media and the alleged disappearance of paper media. But rather then (re-)inventing a digital magazine or book, this workshop was about how the current developments in digital and networked media will change the way humans read, organise, design, produce, distribute content.
How does this change the purpose of reading, will this experience become more profound or will we just scrape from the surface? How does this change the way information is curated or, maybe more important, is being generated, influenced by meta-information and accumulated onto our personal profiles? How does this influence the editor-reader relationship? How does this influence the design it in which it is presented? That is, how do you design something that can be at any given moment a website,
How can you add value to traditional media, so that this is not ‘just’ a book or poster, but something that really belongs to the new century, consumed by a new audience weened on digital tools and network culture? For example, what is the role of a printed book in a world of updates? And finally, how does this change the role of the designer? Open Source Design Methods Engaging four phases within the methodology of design, namely SOURCE, AUTHOR/EDITOR, PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, we explored speculative processes and developed ideas for the production and consumption of content in a world in flux. During the workshop we conceptualized, interpreted and visualized the relation between words, a place, the internet, a network, your devices, and you as the mediator of all. Most of all, we explored how to publish in a non-format world. Thomas Castro, 2012
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Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
For example, how do we define ‘reading’ when using a highly interactive, permanently connected and extremely mobile and sensoric device? Is there a printed media equivalent?
a book, a magazine, a mobile app, or an installation?
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Gemma Copeland Frauke Eversmann Laetitia van der Hoek
Group Project
Step 1: SOURCE We selected an area of Breda and systematically photographed every number we found on the street. These were a mix of permanent and transient numbers: letterboxes, utility markers, signage, stickers, graffiti and birthday cards. This process resulted in a data set of over 400 images. We began by sorting these numbers according to formal characteristics: colour, typography and purpose. This led to an enquiry into the underlying systems behind numbers in the physical environment, such as house numbering schemes.
1.4
From Numbers to the Good place SOURCE (made by another group) This group recorded instances of pricing in Breda, exploring the idea of discounts, suggested donations and arbitrary prices. They had begun categorizing their images in terms of visible and invisible cost.
We began researching the history of fiat money and alternative currency models like time banking, and did some quick visual exercises removing any reference to price value in the source images. We also discussed the concept of exchange, and how to facilitate a system of exchange through design. To test our theories, we did a survey of shop owners in Breda, asking them to explain whether they would exchange their product or service for another and why.
The response was overwhelmingly negative: most participants seemed suspicious of such a question and reluctant to even consider alternate exchange systems, making it an interesting exercise in theory vs. practice.
1.5
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
Step 2: AUTHOR We decided to focus on the idea that price is an arbitrary, artificial human construction. Our hypothesis was that price is no longer related to value. Instead, it fluctuates according to supply and demand, perception, context and the global economy. Our current global economic crisis renders pricing especially unstable. This led us to question what would happen if we could take money out of the equation completely, and instead create a system of mutual exchange.
Gemma Copeland Frauke Eversmann Laetitia van der Hoek
Group Project
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
SOURCE The source was a documentation of the unique selection of animal life within Breda’s central park. AUTHOR / EDITOR The second group chose to look at the park as a cyclical system, mapping the activity of all the different elements within the park over time. By coincidence, there was a concert held in the park that night, resulting in piles of trash the next morning. The group framed this as a disruption to the system, moving their focus from the animals in the park to the negative influence of humans on natural systems. Step 3: PRODUCTION We revisited the park to document the cleanup process, discovering a workforce of 15 men collecting the trash and depositing it into two metal skips. We abstracted our observations to form the hypothesis that systems repair themselves after any disruption, but only by expending considerable time and energy. This led us to question whether we could design something that would prevent this inefficient disruption and repair cycle. We came up with a quick prototype of a recycling station. The idea is to create a closed system,
where all drinks and utensils are sold from within the park. Each purchase would require a small deposit that would be refunded upon return to the recycling station, which would work like a reverse vending machine. To delight and reward people for recycling, the machine would encourage playfulness. There would also be an option to return trash but not collect your refund, which would instead be donated to the park. This system also enables the cleaning workforce to be used for more positive, creative means. We proposed that some of the space in the park could be turned into an urban farm and the cleaners could become gardeners.
1.6
From Numbers to the Good place SOURCE The source material looked at spatial relationships and behaviour in public environments like parks and buses. AUTHOR / EDITOR The second group mapped how people flow through space, in terms of social dynamics and behaviour.
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
PRODUCTION The next group looked at the idea of a city that could use this understanding of social dynamics and movement to predict and respond to human needs. Step 4: DISTRIBUTION We chose to use this idea of a city that responds to human needs, but developed it in a way that focused on the improvement of life and retained freedom of choice. The resulting project, The Good Place, is an open source way finding system that reveals the good side of cities. The Good Place facilitates knowledge exchange and enables private or unknown spaces to become public, social and open. Locals can easily and anonymously share their knowledge of a city, both through marking good places in the physical environment using stickers, and by adding their recommendations to an online map. This online map could be easily searched, filtered and could contain
extra information about each place. The aim is to improve daily life in little ways, removing the barriers that prevent us from discovering a city. The idea is loosely based on the “hobo code”, a symbolic language developed to share directions, information, and warnings between hobos. 1.7
Group Project
Gemma Copeland Frauke Eversmann Laetitia van der Hoek
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
THE GOOD PLACE
Download stickers
Quenched
Relaxed
Connected
Dry and Warm
DOWNLOAD
DOWNLOAD
DOWNLOAD
DOWNLOAD
Social
Rested
Happy
Sated
DOWNLOAD
DOWNLOAD
DOWNLOAD
DOWNLOAD
1.8
From Numbers to the Good place THE GOOD PLACE
Type and hit enter to search for a place |
Download stickers
THE GOOD PLACE
Type and hit enter to search for a place |
Download stickers
Type and hit enter to search for a good place |
Download stickers
Quenched!
THE GOOD PLACE
Type and hit enter to search for a good place |
Download stickers
THE GOOD PLACE
+ This bar is great for beer. Lots of friendly staff! — Anneke, 27
ADD A GOOD PLACE Quenched! Relaxed! Connected! Dry & Warm! Social! Rested! Happy! Sated!
WHAT’S YOUR NAME? WHAT’S YOUR AGE?
1.9
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
ADD A COMMENT
Silvia Celiberti Stratos Tzanavaris
Group Project
Step 1: SOURCE How do we feel towards strangers in public spaces? How do we position ourselves when we are standing amongst strangers in public spaces?
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
We gathered as source material the reinterpretation of a number of spatial relationships between strangers when they are waiting on train and bus stations, sitting in the parks or in a cafe or commuting by bus.
1.10
From relationships in public spaces to urban filter SOURCE We inherited from the previous group as source data all the numbers photographed on a determinate route in Breda city center. We concentrated our operation of using the house numbers as our inspiration.
Step 2: AUTHOR What are the inside numbers? If a house is a metaphor for a persona, what are the inside values that help me measure my perception of the outside world?
/ RELATIONSHIPS MOMENT #1 MOMENT #2
/ CAREER
/ Individual GROWTH
What do all these numbers say about ourselves and should we let them define us? Someone could argue that indeed these numbers are part of your existence so they are part of you and ether we like it or not they define us in relation to our environment. But perhaps they also confine us and lower us to a more superficial description of us. External numbers _ randomly assigned _ locate you in relation to society (house #/age/ earning/…) _ static symbol INTERNAL NUMBERS _ Individual evaluation _ help you to locate the world
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
Numbers outside and inside. They are outside our houses and inside our lives. Like the numbers that define the location of our private space there is data that defines our lives.
_ based on perception: extremely fluctuating values We tried to imagine how our personal perception of the world could be crystallized in shapes, moment by moment. If we set the circle as a reference (value:10) as an ideal of perfect state and harmony (Utopia) we could break such ideal in areas to which we can assign a value on a scale. 1.11
A three-dimensional translation would virtually construct a trace of all emotions summed up moment after moment in something much like a tunnel with two ends each in separate points in space-time (life). → discussions p. 1.71
Silvia Celiberti Stratos Tzanavaris
Group Project
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
AUTHOR / EDITOR The previous group handed us proposals for a new economy model based on service/service exchange instead of our current service-money-service model, with actors such as givers and takers. Step 3: PRODUCTION “Giving expecting something in return is not really giving” inspired us to imagine an online platform based on the sheer purpose of giving, where people would be assigned unknown strangers to “take care” after finding out what their real needs are, and then act to solve such needs.
GIVER
The project was intended to be also a commentary on a future society where all private information will be available online to anybody.
TAKER
ON HOLD 1.12
From relationships in public spaces to urban filter PRODUCTION The groups before us built a thread where the park of Breda had become a protected environment with its own rhythm, suddenly disrupted by a concert night that trashed the place and damaged the park no matter the cleaning that followed.
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
A situation of self sustainability and total independence was proposed as a defensive mechanism (all cutlery is own from the park and is “lent” to the visitors / cleaners switch to farmers to produce food internally/…) We thought about how to distribute this idea of the park as a value to enjoy and protect in order to avoid other episodes of disruption. Step 4: DISTRIBUTION We can visualize the park as a spinning system. When people enter as visitors they follow its spinning direction for as long as they are in it, they take nothing when they enter and are not supposed to take away nothing when they leave. To understand and integrate with this living system visitors want to synchronize to its rhythm. Our aim wasn’t to add elements to an already harmonic equation but
to create a filter to subtract the unnecessary ones: to welcome people and animals but exclude intruders such as noise, trash, pollution. We proposed the creation of an urban filter around the park as a buffer area before entering, so to expand somehow its boundaries. An example: regulating or freezing the traffic in the surrounding streets would filter the 1.13
intruders and create the conditions for people to be able to synchronize with the rhythm of the park.
Artem Stepanov Dario Cannata Sofia Evans
Group Project
Step 1: SOURCE Our initial selected source of data was the visualization of prices in the city of Breda. From here, we segmented the prices in two fields: visible and invisible prices.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
By making this division, we became aware of various different systems that imply pricing that is not necessarily physically displayed.
1.14
From systems of pricing to the trigger of self-awareness SOURCE We were presented with a study on Breda Park and its animals. The animals living in the park were then analyzed chromatically. → discussions p. 1.65
Step 2: AUTHOR Utopia Park Disrupted: Breda Park is at first sight an amazing eco/ human system in which we saw a potential “Park Package”, that could be implemented in other cities around the world.
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
Half way through creating our “package” there was a disruption in the park: a music festival. We were confronted with another perspective of this system and tried to visualize it. → discussions p. 1.68
disruption
1.15
Group Project
Artem Stepanov Dario Cannata Sofia Evans
City
This city has a surveillance system that gathers data and sends it to a computer, which then analyses it and makes decisions. We call it Personal Captured Reality. → discussions p. 1.70
Source
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Step 3: PRODUCTION Utopia City: We designed a concept of a city that automatically adjusts itself, according to the needs of individuals.
Rections and intentions
SOURCE & AUTHOR / EDITOR We were presented with a new concept of public place, based on human presence and flow inside these spaces. → discussions p. 1.70
1.16
From systems of pricing to the trigger of self-awareness
/Information
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
/Behavior
1.17
Artem Stepanov Dario Cannata Sofia Evans SOURCE & AUTHOR / EDITOR & PRODUCTION We were presented with an analysis system to help select the city in which you should live.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Step 4: DISTRIBUTION In this phase we created a set of questions that aimed to trigger self-awareness.
Group Project
WOULD YOU KILL FOR PEACE?
WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FLOWER?
WHAT IS YOUR NEIGHBOURS NAME?
DO YOU SPEAK WITH GOD?
WHO ARE YOUR REAL FRIENDS?
IS IT COLD INSIDE?
WOULD YOU INVEST ON WEAPONS?
WHEN DID YOU LAST MAKE A NEW FRIEND?
WHEN DID YOU LAST LOOK AT THE STARS?
WHO CLEANS YOUR STREET?
IN WHAT ANTIDEPRESSIVES ARE YOU ON?
HAVE YOU SEEN A GOAT IN THE PARK?
The idea was to leave these questions by the house doors. The questions would come in pairs, one of which would be more personal than the other. → discussions p. 1.72
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From systems of pricing to the trigger of self-awareness
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Gemma Copeland
Individual Project Dialog Window The paradox of utopia is that it can only exist if the rules are abided by at all costs. There is an implicit conflict in this idea of enforced, isolated perfection. Once a society removes the freedom of choice, it is no longer a perfect society.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Currently, the model of our society is one of freedom within limits. We’re offered choices, but only within an already defined set of options. This can be seen in everything from political parties to computer dialog windows. You can choose left wing or right wing, OK or cancel, but that marks the limits of your choice. I wanted to explore this idea of choice by opening a “dialog window” with the city of Breda, asking them to choose between two options. I selected common phrases with two elements, either opposites or pairs, and presented them in a way that the public could quickly and anonymously select their preference by ripping off a tag. The words I chose were deliberately ambiguous and emotive. I also thought about how to do this same exercise in a digital way, and came up with a proposal for an online game that prompts users to chose between different word pairs, enables them to add more word pairs and collects and sorts this data. → discussions page 1.75
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Dialog Window
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Gemma Copeland
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Dialog Window
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Gemma Copeland
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Dialog Window
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Sofia Evans
Individual Project Wall Index
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
This project was developed at the end of the 3-day workshop with Thomas Castro, from Studio Lust. All the content presented in this project was collected and appropriated from the walls of the workshop space. It was then transcribed, analyzed and reorganized as an index in alphabetical order, providing a new perception of our discussions, research, conclusions and questions. → discussions p. 1.76
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Wall Index
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Sofia Evans
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Wall Index
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Sofia Evans
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Wall Index
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry
Individual Project Pick – Pack
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
A design to raise up people’s ecology awareness and their self-motivation, simply pick-pack your “belongings” and go!
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Pick – Pack
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
a man-made pollution in the central park of Breda
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry
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Pick – Pack
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry
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Pick – Pack
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Frauke Eversmann
Individual Project An interacting system that exchanges open source knowledge in public space: 1. The Open Source T-Shirt
Looking at the source of our 3 day workshop with Thomas Castro I’ve picked a few words I found most intriguing to continue working with.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Interacting system Connectivity Open Source Public space Citizenship Time banking Exchanging knowledge or services Internal numbers / value Community From that I developed a product to bring people’s knowledge back to the street, make it accessible for everyone to improve every day life and make people interact with each other again. It’s Utopia, imagine everyone wears a t-shirt that describes the subject the person knows a lot about or is really good at. By wearing the shirt he/she marks herself as open source and invites people to ask questions and start a conversation.
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The Open Source T-Shirt
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Frauke Eversmann
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The Open Source T-Shirt
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Frauke Eversmann
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The Open Source Game
2. The Open Source Game I tested the idea with our group of 14 people in the workshop by asking everyone the same question: “What are you really good at or you know a lot about?’ Badges were created with their name and subject of expertise. The result was a classroom wikipedia with subjects like photography, 3D-modeling, food/cooking, internet, crafts work, project managing, logical fallacies and hamsters. This way people not only could use the exposed open knowledge for their projects and ask people for help directly, but it was also a good way to start conversations and get to know each other faster.
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Laetitia van der Hoek
Individual Project
Welcome to Synaestopia: Could ‘The Good Place’ be an even better place? After enjoying two productive teamwork days with Gemma and Frauke, I decided to extend the open source project of The Good Place with a personal approach.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
I’m gifted since I’m born with a neurological condition called synaesthesia. It means that my senses are crossing each other. For instance, I associate Personalities with colours. I get emotions from watching colours. I get tactile sensations when I smell or listen to music. I associate vision with taste. I see a lot of colours when I have an orgasm. When I take a walk in most of the cities, I get overwhelmed by visual signals, commercials, shops, products, people, clothes, colours. The input is so strong that most of the time, I watch the floor or the top of the buildings to rest my mind. In our daily life, we receive a lot of visual signals from our natural direct environment, but also virtual signals from televisions, tablets, computers, phones and other devices. We are used to them. Concept modeling What if we could visit a city and receive sensory signals from the city itself? These would not be imposed by strong visual messages such as fluorescent colour billboards but more sophisticated and inconspicuous notifications stimulating the rest of our senses. I imagined a city that would emit sounds. People would notice certain sounds and get attracted to certain areas. On the contrary certain signals would keep visitors away from certain places and even protect them from eventual dangers. I imagine natural sounds like breathe, aeolian wind flute, branches cracks, air movements, water drops… In early times, before communication was mainly language based, humans were much more in touch with their other senses. Sounds, touch, smell and taste were well trained for survival needs but also to get pleasurable experiences. A certain sound crack in a bush meant the approach of a predator, a specific water sound meant the presence of trout in the river. We could train those senses and use them to communicate. Decreasing visual inputs and increasing other sensory stimuli would be a track for a better body balance and daily comfort. 1.44
Synaestopia One commercial street of Breda, DibevoŠ
Sound personal interest map of Breda center
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Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
Visual personal interest map of Breda center
Laetitia van der Hoek Visualisation It is very challenging to communicate sensations. How to associate an image with a physical emotion? As suggested by Thomas Castro, it was just necessary to unplug the computer, get out and get some real physical sensations from the city. I walked a peaceful loop in the streets of Breda while carrying a video recorder. I guided my walk with the sensations I was getting from the city. The smell of a place, the colour of people facial expression, the sound of the leaves. I was also considering what I was missing, needing. I’m always quite distracted while being outside. I realized that a sound signal preventing me from getting on bicycle paths could be really useful.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
The montage of the movie was done in a relative short time. This short film is available on Internet at the following link: Synaestopia, → www.vimeo.com/48472549 When I see people, I feel their colours. These are the Personal Pantone colours of the people I met during the Open Set summer school. → discussions p. 1.74
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Synaestopia
C = 15 Y = 0
M = 100 K = 10
FRAUKE E 302-3
C= 25 Y = 95
M = 0 K = 0
SILVIA E 36-1
C = 0 M = 60 Y = 100 K = 0
STRATOS E 294-1
C = 50 M = 0 Y = 100 K = 0
DARIO E 23-5
C = 0 Y = 50
M = 20 K = 5
IRINA E 188-2
C = 80 Y = 0
M = 75 K = 0
VLAD E 298-5
C = 20 Y = 50
SOFIA E 173-3
C = 40 Y = 0
M = 60 K = 5
CHERRY E 60-1
C = 0 M = 90 Y = 100 K = 0
ARTEM E 91-1
C = 0 Y = 80
M = 100 K = 10
PIETRO E 18-1
C = 0 M = 35 Y = 100 K = 0
YIN E 258-4
C = 60 Y = 35
M = 0 K = 0
THOMAS C E 107-2
C = 15 Y = 0
LIZA E 157-3
C = 25 Y = 0
M = 95 K = 10
ERIK E 254-9
C = 10 Y = 5
ADRIEN E 275-1
C = 100 M = 0 Y = 100 K = 10
JAN E 1-3
C = 0 M = 0 Y = 100 K = 0
MAX E 249-1
C = 100 M = 0 Y = 35 K = 40
M = 100 K = 10
LAETITIA C = 100 M = 60 E 206-1 Y = 0 K = 40
THOMAS D C = 100 M = 5 E 229-1 Y = 5 K = 0
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M = 0 K = 0
M = 0 K = 0
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
GEMMA E 153-2
LAU Ho Yin
Individual Project Overwhelming We are living in an environment overwhelmed with visual information. It is difficult and confusing to analyse and compare advertisements on newspapers of different products in supermarkets with a discount percentage. Can we have a simpler and better life when there is no prices or numbers on this system?
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Presumed seller is the supplier who provides the products and the buyer is the recipient who buys and stocks the products. Based on their distribution pattern, if we apply this concept to a spot light projection device, the seller (supplier) has a wide area of light coverage, but the buyer (taker) has just a focus light spot. I hope this new system could help our housewives to save living cost and their time comparing different product prices.
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Overwhelming
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
LAU Ho Yin
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Overwhelming
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
LAU Ho Yin
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Overwhelming
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Artem Stepanov
Individual Project Personal Captured Reality
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
The idea arrived from our group work on the utopian city that adjusts according to the needs of an individual which is is the centre point of this universe. Zooming in from the top levels let us focus on the Personal reality, that consists of needs, likes, wants and other <tags>, captured by the city to analyse and then adjust.
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Personal Captured Reality
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
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Thomas Castro Dario Cannata Pietro Paciullo Stratos Tzanavaris Sofia Evans Gemma Copeland Laetitia van der Hoek The text is a transcript of the audio recordings of the discussions that took place during the workshop.
Group Discussions
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
14.08.2012 10:30 (Source) Thomas By the way you’ve met Max Bruinsma yesterday, he’s a very good friend and colleague of us, and we talk a lot about the idea of open source, about the idea of where design is going in the future, the present towards the future. You and I are educated as traditional graphic designers, but through the complexity of the data and the content we are doing, we’ve also been interested in interactive design, media design… so now, in a lot of things we do, we encompass all these things. Basically it’s like no media design, “medialess”. So we get a job and the client asks us to do something in this field, and it’s some kind of open question. So how do you go forward? Or if there is no brief, or if the brief is open, how do you create your own brief? And a really good way to do that is to set parameters for your design. One of the hardest things to do is to have no limits. So when you have no limits, it’s actually good to give yourself some limits, but the point is that it’s self imposed limits. It’s not necessarily the limits that the client or the market imposes to you. So one of the things that we can do as designers these days, is to ask what is the source of our project? We’re doing a big project now on a mobility platform with a big design group, and there is no content. There is no word written, or one page of data
gathered for this project. So the clients are coming very empty handed and saying… “this is the idea, we have some budget, we have two or three years to do this, what can we do? As a designer we’re asked on a daily basis to generate our own content. You know all the designers who are presenting at Casco are all doing their own sources. → www.cascoprojects.org Almost nobody, or they do it in collaboration with somebody else. So as designers we are not doing only the traditional things of design like typography, that we’ve learned in school. We’ve been asked to write stuff as well. Oh my god to write!! We’ve been asked to set up a symposium together. Or design conferences. Where the content and the content creation become the goal. So nobody is expected to be a really good writer necessarily as a designer. We LUST are more designing than writing articles, but we are not like Metahaven for example who are constantly writing articles and are always disseminating what are they doing. → www.metahaven.net But we have our own ways of using open data and content to our advantage. So what I want you to do, is to take two hours of your time this morning and find a source of data, ok? A data set. And bring the data set back here, and inside your group I want you to analyse your dataset. What’s analysis? You can categorise it, you can deconstruct the data, evaluate it, dividing through time, etc… I mean there are so many ways to do analysis, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. So what can be sources, like different sources of data? These days, where do we get open source text from, for example? Where does this exist? Dario Internet. Thomas Internet, that is a standard thing. Are we talking for example about Project Gutenberg? Or are we talking about twitter streams? You know social media has opened a whole new avenue of content, right? In almost every given situation I would go to Twitter to find out what is going on in terms of news, than going to find out from a normal source of news. It’s faster. That’s starting to change what graphic design is. We’re not designing static objects 1.56
Group Discussion: Source, Meta Design anymore, everything has a dynamic aspect to it. So dynamic data sources. But I don’t want everybody to be online all the time, what would be sources gathered out there in the city? You can ask people. What are data content storage things that people are walking with? Ask them for the first ten SMS and write them down. There’s also a lot of people with text t-shirts, there’s a lot of data like that, that you can gather. I don’t know if in your country you have that, but here at the grocery store is also a place where people are trying to sell stuff. It’s another kind of open source of information. So between digital sources or physical sources, I don’t really care. That’s up to you, and if you want to take more than one source that’s fine too.
Pietro Or it can be like the birds and how they travel, autumn, spring…
Cause you can take a really shitty source, but through analysis you can make it really interesting. And it has to have some kind of body, don’t get just five, ten messages. Give us something to work with.
Stratos Like crowd-sourcing the paths.
Pietro Our aim is to define a place and the place is the park, and to define the animal inside the place. If you consider a location like the Breda park, and if you consider the various animals, then you can define direction because more animals move inside. → 1.23 Thomas Like a microcosms. Pietro Yeah… like an interactive park. Dario But why do you categorize only the animals? and not the people that cross on the streets, by bicycle? Thomas I think there is room for both. I really like your idea about an organic system, maybe a cell, you can abstract the park system into a cell, and then you can have a virus that is destroying this neutral system.
In urban planning they are actually starting to use this as a tool. In an university in America they had a park and they didn’t build yet any trails, they let the people decide where the sidewalk will be. They let the park like that for few months and built the sidewalk where the trails were. → OpenSetBlog / desire paths
Thomas Yeah, The way LUST works, is based on generative design, but there are designers that are system based like the group Conditional Design, Luna Maurer and her companions, I think they call themselves studio Moniker now. → www.conditionaldesign.org They are a group of four designers, they are like a club. Basically they would meet at someone’s house and put a big piece of paper in the middle of the table and they would came up with a rule based game. So they would say like… rule nr.1 would be “Draw a line”, and then the next person would draw a line splitting that line to another location. And they film it from the top, and if you look how their thing is growing like an organism, it’s amazing… These are design strategies what we use to break away from Modernism where everything is so hierarchical. Like Max Bruinsma was saying, the idea of breaking down old Utopian hierarchies. But what are the new Utopian hierarchies? The breaking down of one, means the building up of another. In South Korea now they have a print1.57
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
14.08.2012 15:36 (Meta design)
Thomas Yeah, these networks that can be mapped… Oh… it reminds me of another system where people take the shortcuts. It’s a real anthropological thing that you can notice… you can build as many paths as you want but humans or even animals will always find the shortest path between two places they want to go.
ed wall like a grocery store, and then with your phone when you are waiting for your train to come you can take a picture of the QR code of what you need, and then it automatically sends to the processing center so that when you are back home that evening they deliver you the goods.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Sofia So you don’t have any direct contact with any product. Thomas Yeah. And of course you can say I can do that on the web as well, what’s different? Well the difference is that it is killing time. It’s this idea of filling spaces into your life. What is the first thing you do when you have nothing to do? Take out your phone and take this position. So somebody thought about that, you know a lot of people do this in the metro station. It is like this idea of non hierarchy. So let’s make a deal that we are not going to design anything, what I’m trying to say is to talk about the meta things of design not the formal things of design. I want to talk about something different these three days, because that’s what you guys are here for, get introduced to something different. So how you design things, what is the content, how you organize the content? Let’s not talk too much about the color, the typography, those kinds of aspects but more what these kinds of systems are suggesting, for us to be able to use and apply in design in the future. In the end we are not talking about doors or chickens, these are all inspirations and the whole system becomes an inspiration for design and design criticism. So that’s what we
are going to do, is that how to take this system, be inspired by it and transpose it into your own system for something that you can use, new tools.
14.08.2012 16:40 (Future of design) Thomas How royalty systems in the music industry work? The ideal way to do it is to cut this “big fat lazy”, which is the record company, and the person who’s listening music actually paying the musician directly. → OpenSetBlog / decentralization of content So in the end they will make more money than making under the whole system. This break down of hierarchy is mainly utopian. It is the same as with the designer publishing books. Now you have students making these little booklets and publishing them on Amazon and earning little money. It is not about earning money, but at least they get something instead of waiting for the government to give it to them. It’s not my thing, we should do it for the love of doing it and of course we should be paid for doing it, but there’s a lot of people out there, design bloggers, who are monetizing their interest. I’ve been to a symposium in San Francisco and there was Swiss Miss, and she has this tatoo thing… what is it? Gemma Tattly. Thomas Yeah Tattly. She said it was just an idea, she made it in a kind of democratic way, she gets some money as the owner of the website, and the designer of the tatoo gets the rest. So the designers are earning money from designing these tatoos but also they support her. It is a different way of thinking to design, but is not my favorite way of thinking of design, but if it is your thing it is an opportunity to go on a different direction. And that is what I want to introduce you to guys, that it’s not a traditional direction any more. 1.58
Group Discussion: Future of Design Everything is blown to hell and you can basically rebuild it the way you want to rebuild it. I’m saying there is a really good way to redefine the way we look at graphic design to fit the world we live in. But because the world is changing each year so fast, faster than ever before, how can we as designers keep up? And you are always behind when actually we as designers have to be one step ahead. We have to define the visual language of the world that we live in. We are the organizers of that, right? Silvia We are organizing but not defining.
Dario Yeah, because we do it consciously. Thomas And hidden in there… what is our role? Do we still have to fight for small projects? Designing brochures, designing flyers? Or should that be left alone to youprint.com for 50 euro? Maybe they’re better at that. Silvia But do you call yourself a graphic designer? Thomas Yes I call myself a graphic designer. Because I have no other name for it. But it is true that our job is shifting. As everything is becoming template based, you have an exact opposite direction that everybody likes. Letterpress printing, because it is totally opposite to template based printing. But somewhere above that I think is the role of the designer, still open to read that definition. That’s such a good point because old professions like architecture was disseminated so many times, but that’s fine no one questions people’s architecture. That’s fine, 1.59
When Metahaven does a workshop or something the question is always: but who’s your client? And that’s my question: why can’t they just do theoretical design? Somebody has to be at the cutting edge while the other people are disseminating. We have to define the clients. Silvia But you must have an impact on reality. Thomas Sure, but can that extreme of that “theoreticalness” and academics exist next to the template that sends grandma postcards? Stratos It is difficult to measure the quality of research so they have to prove that this has importance, how do you qualify that?
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
Thomas Yeah, but also defining. The minute that you put something out in the culture and it is digested by the culture, it becomes a new culture. It is like the circle of fashion, the minute it becomes the high fashion then somebody from street fashion cites that fashion and then becomes street fashion, and then a designer sees that street fashion so it becomes the next high fashion. So I’m not saying that the graphic design jobs are the only sources of visual and textual culture, I’m saying our role in that is much bigger.
but can paper design exist? And the conceptual design? Design that never is produced? And I have a lot of colleagues here in Holland, a really good one is Metahaven, who do a lot of conceptual theoretical design, almost like science. You look at something in the society, you make a thesis, you research that, and you publish the results. Who’s paying for that? Maybe nobody, maybe it is like a personal research, but the moment they have something solid they can approach a publisher or maybe Casco invites them to have a show. This is graphic design as well. You know post modernism was about deconstruct the page, but now that we’ve broken through the surface and the surface maybe doesn’t exist anymore, then we can open the profession into theoretical design, that’s the next step. And that’s something that not many schools talk about any more. It’s like a grey area.
Thomas I think that this is nice about graphic design, that there is not a right answer. So you can propose a lot of answers, you can build your own way. But it has to be based on something.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
15.08.2012 11:20 (Systems) Dario This idea of Utopia we took further as a system to translate into a recreational environment for humans. Sofia We noticed something very real and shocking for the park. A music festival came into it. The system was disrupted. Dario But still it is an anticipated disruption. So we said there is this structure built by man that could be characterized as the fake natural aspects of the trees, grass, lake, but which are static and permanent and then we have the position of the furniture, the infrastructure of the park. Then we have these elements that enter-
tain like the animals in the park. We had this idea of representation with the elements of disruption and on top of all these things would be represented the humans. Thomas These are things that for example industrial designers and art designers are working on now. That’s the intrinsic value of a product, robustness of a product in time for example. So they are coming with new ways of developing things that can be recycled very fast. Dario Yeah because trash is something made by man, but probably the only reason the trash came up is because it doesn’t go out by itself. So probably we can make trash recyclable by itself, something useful for the environment. Thomas And again this is going back again to what we were talking about the desired paths, where you observe the system first and then you decide the paths. I know that there is a lot of urban planners and architects working on this kind of deconstructive city planning. Or even building programmed planning, so this is the new thing instead of that top-down approach of modernism where an architect has an idea of how the city should be planned, in the center should be a statue… and from there you are radiating out, you can 1.60
also say that the city is an organic system and the grid can be changed in any different way. So you have architects that designed for example the Arnhem train station, where they mapped the zones where the people actually traverse the system of the city. So they mapped all the paths over time and the main ones became the avenues. Gemma It is interesting to think to this idea of paths, in terms of trash, that an object becomes trash once it was used. Thomas No matter how you describe the cycle, everybody has it’s own point of view, but the objective fact is that something that a designer can do is for example the lifecycle of things, like at the end of the lifecycle of a plastic cup, what can you do with it? If we have a philosophical discussion about the value of humans versus the objects we’ll be here till September. So a lot of these discussions we can transfer into how to design a system. Another thing that was interesting is that you said this is the moment of disruption. → 1.23 So when you look at the system and you see let’s say the history of anything, what’s the disruption moments, like the invention of the printing press for example. If we look further what is the next moment? The invention of the computer and digital printing. It’s the moment to democratize design, and put design methods and production methods in the hands of the maker. But what is the disruptive moment nowadays in our culture? Is it social networks? Social media? For every disruptive method there has to be a redefinition of what it is
Group Discussion: Systems and Maps that we can do as creative people to answer that disruption. Dario But it is always an unconscious disruption. Thomas Yeah but now we can’t be ignorant. Product designers for example have to think about these things. We can’t be ignorant to the things that can destroy our environment by not using non reusable materials for example. Sofia We can also talk about an ecological Utopia.
Stratos If you design things that are not external but they are integrated into the systems and don’t have a linear form but circular, then you might reach a point that you might not even have to worry about disruptions, because they will be integrated into the system. Sofia Disruptions are good as well. Thomas It’s not a perfect system either, because you always have to be like in basic physics, you always have to be using some sorts of resources to be producing something else. The resources we think that are free like the Sun, is also decaying. So there’s no way in the system of making and not consuming something.
What designers are doing now, which is a smart thing, is expanding the system in which they are trying to do this, so again is not like you try to solve the resource problem, you try to resolve how the consumption is. Basically for all designers it works the same: you start with a problem, there’s a source material, you have to edit or author the source, you have to produce the source and you have to distribute the source. And how people do that? Everybody has his own method to do that, and that’s just my description of the system. If you ask anybody else maybe they will have extra levels in that system, or less levels. Cool!! Is somebody recording these discussions?
15.08.2012 12:10 (Maps) Pietro Regarding our editorial part of the work I remember a book, the name of the book is “Image of the City” by Kevin Lynch. → OpenSetBlog / Image of the City In the book Lynch defines two different flows inside of a city. The way people move from one way to another defines flows which intersect each other. People move to their work, so it is one flow; people stay alone in a strange city and they ask friends where to go. Like this I discover a new city and create a my own new flow. The city is mapped as a static place, but the city is also like a continuous movement. Map represents the city, but what is a map? A map is static, but the city equals movement. → 1.24 To define a flow we need a location. To define location we can use GPS systems or we can use Twitter or Facebook. Like this we 1.61
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
Thomas Yeah, in any kind of creative process these are the side factors to deal with. That’s why I think that the most perfect distribution system is printing on the Internet. Because you don’t make more than it is necessary. I’m not saying it’s the ideal model but we might reach a point that there will be no more printed books.
This is an interesting discussion because we abstract this problem into content because we’re graphic designers, or media designers. So how does this work as well? I’m talking about information recycling, open source is another method of reusing something, and then saying that you don’t have to reinvent something from scratch. When I studied graphic design, you were never thinking to copy somebody, and now I’m not saying copy, but there are new social, cultural things out there happening where using something twice is not necessary copying, it is about adding something of your own.
Sofia …the history of your network activity…
can define a new life of the city. Thomas Do you know the situationist Guy Debord? It’s this kind of idea, of flows and ways of experiencing the city. Dario They created map movements in the city. Peitro If I am a stranger in a city I define new maps with my iphone. Actually I create new maps of the city. My friend defines new maps as well. At the same place, but by different movements.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
15.08.2012 12:38 (Predicting behaviour)
Dario …all electronic changes you make in the system, cameras put them all together and based on that with an error probability they can say where you will be in the future. In our system city cameras can capture a person. For example, this person is tired, working slower, drinking water, so maybe the system puts a bench right here. Can be another example of future education: kids are going to school and the screen is popping up with the last lesson. → 1.24
Dario We were working on the continuation of the previous group ideas about a new city, an utopian city system and the definition of a new city captured on movement. But why only the movements? Not everything? Everything can be captured not only the movements. The new elements could be captured not just by GPS systems, but images capturing cameras, and all information possible. So it would be like a central computing system and would gather information from people (social networking, open sources), from reality itself from the city (from analytical data, like weather, water, food), and then this computer would send reactions and change the things, change reality, people’s life…
Silvia It is funny, because we made a system for people to find each others needs and solve them. And you, guys, make a computer system which will think about it.
Sofia …it would adapt the city according to people’s needs. It would be a system which is able to predict according to all this information, past, present and future, and the city would evolve according to everyone’s needs.
Gemma That is why Utopia is impossible, because it is not exactly how you planned it. And the people who argue that it is scary will try to change your perfect world.
Dario They invented actually this system of predicting where you will move within the next 24 hours in a 20 meters are based on your behavior. They track your mobile, and your social (Internet) network…
Leaticia Is there a door to escape from the system? Dario Suicide only! But it will be prevented. Thomas Like, this guy is going to commit suicide in 20 meters distance. Dario Yeah, and one could argue that it is scary, one could argue that it would be perfect!
Thomas So is there a way to visualize this somehow, to make this real? Dario I think so because this system is made from reality. The camera captures and analyses and introduces something
1.62
Group Discussion: Design as a Thought back into reality to respond to that is captured. Sofia We just put it all together. Thomas To me if would be interesting to abstract it in a way, to make something that is an abstraction to that system. You can visualize that like just in a series of signs in the city. You can buy some cheap furniture and put it on the street and put something like “Do you feel tired?”
Dario We were wondering if this branch situation can be very different. So, maybe a guy is tired, but he does not want to sit, he wants to go faster. Maybe not the bench changes to appear near him but the road tilts.
15.08.2012 14:25 (What is distribution?) Thomas This is your content: everything what was made during this three phases: source, author, production. How do you want to distribute, publish your idea to the world? And what’s the world? Is it the world or is the people
it in order to not cause a disruption. → p.1.19
Silvia It is some kind of level of awareness.
Thomas So your solution is not necessary a thing, it’s a law?
Thomas Yeah, because it is like the loop that I made, once that you have that level of awareness, it becomes again the source. So once you publish it and have that show and you have that space for people to visit, it is again in the public again. So it can be used again as a source. People can for example add a very basic level say “Hey did you go to that show yet? It is that amazing piece, I want to use that idea to this thing that I have”.
15.08.2012 16:05 (Design as thought) Stratos What we thought was to visualize the disruption and the breach in the system. So the breach is a corruption of the data but can also be something beautiful something that is part of the system. The system is like a spinning wheel, and when you enter you should take the direction of the wheel and move with 1.63
Silvia So that means that you are synchronized with the park. So what tools can we give to you? So that when you get into the park you can synchronize?
Silvia Yeah because it is an intervention behavior and not a design thing that we would add. If we would have more time you could make the rules more specific. People could drive through the zone. The question is how do people know? What happens once you reached the zone? It could be like some kind of gate there, or some sort of symbol on the ground. A yellow line, to know that it is the synchronization. Thomas What I really like about that is what I was saying about how graphic designers are branching out and because we are really good at communication and media and we have a vision how to link these things together, a lot of us are being asked by communities and government to do this kind of projects. What the new graphic design is in this case? When a design product is a more conceptual idea and thought, this conceptual idea that something
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
Stratos You can escape from the scarring aspect of the idea of “what people need” by putting it in a form of suggestion. There should be an option to reject. Option to choose.
who entered that door? Is it Breda? Is the people walking into the park? Maybe it is the park. Because for distribution is not necessary that you take one thing and reproduce it. Distribution is also like a show, basically it is like a dissemination of a piece.
is soldered. And you don’t necessary do it through printing, billboards or anything like that, you do it through the series of city orderliness or awareness.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
Silvia You have to talk with them, it is a completely different action. But isn’t it design as well? Thomas Off course. I know a lot of designers who don’t do any physical work anymore, their work is thought. All they do is write. And when they finish writing they curate their show, and then they invite other designers and at the symposium they talk about themselves. And then they disseminate that information and write it again. And maybe they design their book that disseminates that information. That’s true, that would be one thing that they do as traditional designers but everything leading up to that is something that they’ve appropriated from different branches of society as a design activity. Silvia It is like designing rules instead of designing the pieces.
15.08.2012 17:10 (The medium) Dario We thought of a representation of people’s identity through feeling, emotions and what identifies people. What we were trying to do was to make some public questions with white space for the answers. Doesn’t even require the answer, the white space would be enough because it would intrigue them. The questions would be like this, divided into public space and private space. So you would have these things to hang on the doors. I didn’t want to connect it with the poster. It has to be like a comment. → p.1.26 Thomas But how can you change this idea of a poster but keep it in the physical space of the city? How can you take the same medium and come with an addition to it? To change it, to become a new medium. I’m just saying
there’s so many cool ways of using the same old, tired poster system and make it fresh. And you are saying the two sides of something, that’s one way, but what are other ways. Like adding time to the poster for example. Dario Yeah in a way we wanted to introduce this white space to invite to write on top… Thomas But is the white space in the invitation like a zen zone or is it like an invitation to write? Sofia For reflection. Dario I think it is both… Thomas I’m pretty sure that if you will put this in the city, by the end of the week you will have something written like Xanax, cheeze, a nazi sign on it or other kind of jokes. Actually almost every time you will have to design a poster from now on you will have to ask “why do you need a poster?”. I love to design a poster: to have this big white sheet of paper and do everything I want on it. But if information is not the only thing carrying this poster any more what can it be other than the old thing that it was? I think that from now on it should be like an inherited question that designers have to think about.
16.08.2012 12:00 (Source, author, production, distribution) Thomas What I really love about what we were talking about is that today all of these new philosophies are converging on to this day. You are putting your thoughts into it so I’m not even introducing all
1.64
Group Discussion: Source, Author, Production, Distribution the thoughts. So what is happening is that you get this creative collective that is publishing under one name, so this is one of the phenomenons that is happening lately that have the goal of exposing systems for the better of the others. I don’t know if you guys know but you have this thing called Esky where you start one story and this story is passed on to each other. It’s this idea of group work. So that’s one way how some designers are solving Utopia, or the New Utopia. The idea that we all collectively do something. But in the sense that we created the vocabulary of our workshop. And we would say this is now the Pirate Bay. What would you download as a designer if i tell you that you have to write a story about Utopia?
So what I want you guys to do today, using this around, as a starting point to make something, make a story, using your skills as a designer, to comment one of the things we were talking these last two days. We will all come back together here and we all individually present that one piece of “quoting quote” graphic design that you all produced today. I hope now that the graphic design you are thinking about is different than the graphic design you were thinking of when you entered the workshop. Right? So when I say now think of a piece of graphic design, what is that to you now? So…, source, author, production, distribution. Each of those things can be subverted by a designer. We already established that. Traditional design? out of the window. What are the new forms? What are the new utopian 1.65
16.08.2012 17:00 (Senses) Thomas Hopefully some of these pieces will try to ask more questions than they try to solve. So… let’s ask the maker questions. Laetitia Welcome you all to the new city of Synestophia. → p.1.52 So i was checking around the work of everybody and I came to the conclusion that you can not be fully happy if you get all your needs fulfilled and then…what? It’s like eating good food all the time, it doesn’t feel good anymore if there is too much. So you need a constant flow of things to be happy and I was thinking of a city which would work like an organism, which would be friendly to it’s visitors and it’s inhabitants. And in the future, because we will be more and more, we will have to leave nature alone and fulfill just our basic needs. So, as I’ve been telling to people I have Synesthesia, and some people are saying that people with Synesthesia are the people of the future. I tried in this short movie, to show how the city would interact with you when you are taking a walk, and instead of having just visual signals, let’s say posters or
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
When people ask us why are we so interested in data or statistics, we always say that our goal is always transforming data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into stories. That’s basically what we are trying to do. So data in itself is not interesting for us. So when you have like this graph, we do these graphs as well, but it doesn’t really tell a story. That’s why our graph, like in the work I showed you, are data visualizations, it’s like a stream of text, that has color, has these levels of understanding within it.
forms of design? And another thing that will maybe help to abstract it, don’t try to solve a problem try to comment on a problem through abstraction. It will really ask more questions than answer the answers. It’s like the start of the next phase of your workshops. And because it’s a group, and there’s no copyright, you can take any part of that research, and appropriate that to yourself. You can inject new kinds of ideas into it, to fulfill your design goals.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
flayers or all those banners everywhere, you would be able to get much more out of the city, for example the sound you could get with your ear and decode the messages into some proposals, if you take them or not. So you decide if you take the path or not.
Can you make a connection to the themes we were talking about in the workshop? Is it connected to this idea of Utopia?
Thomas You know, I follow this podcast, Radio Lab, it’s from the national broadcasting radio in America, and recently there was an episode called “Colors“. → www.radiolab. org/2012/may/21/ So in the podcast they cover different stories under one topic. And one of the stories they covered was about the fact that the way we look at colors depends of the cones we have in our eyes. And some creatures have more cones than others. And I think that a shrimp or something has seven cones, so it can see so much colors than we can. We have three cones? or something like that? But there are some women that have four cones, and those women can see way more colors than normal people can.
Letitia I think there is a connection in the way that all people could have this. It makes you more happy.
I’m curious, can you explain the steps leading up to the set of information and the content that inspired you to make something like this? Laetitia I isolated very shortly some keywords like emotional and interactive. It would be interesting to stimulate also other senses than the visual ones. Then I was thinking how to get into the sound, and get people connected through sound. And I found this sound code and I thought that people could go through the city and just hear something or smell something. Thomas You mean the idea of embedding sound in the city scapes? Was one of your first ideas to do that into an app, or… Laetitia Yeah into something more technical, with computers… Thomas I was thinking that it would be nice to show us how you perceive the city, so your interpretation. And what else I found interesting that it reminds me of some sound art, one artist that was embedding sound from the city. He has one piece installed under a bridge in New York and when you pass by you hear this rumbling. It is like on top of the other sounds of the city, he ads another layer that is like an alien sound. 1.66
16.08.2012 17:40 (Unpredictable) Gemma It is so funny the reaction of the entire class as soon as you Dario and Sofia start talking about The Utopian City. It was like people started to say: “uuuuu, nooooo, it’s becoming a dystopia”. And I was thinking that technically it is good but people do not like it. Why not? And then I was thinking that it starts taking the choice out of it, the freedom, it becomes something like a Minority report kind of thing, which ties into what Max was saying about how Utopia is, in it’s plan like an oxymoron. Because to be an utopia you need everyone to follow the same rules, and be equal. So I was thinking about choices and freedom of choice, and everything. Honestly I was thinking of what choices I make every day. And one of them was like the false choices you make when you are at the computer, like my Indesign quits automatically. And you can send a report
Group Discussion: Unpredictable
Thomas Wow that’s an interesting combination. Can I have that? Is it high resolution? Gemma Yeah. It has creative commons… Thomas Oh really? Gemma So then I was thinking okay, so then to make it more like a concrete poetry, maybe a game or some kind of website would work, and you could make a choice. Thomas What I like about this, that it is almost like a gift, like when we are designing. Because a lot of the stuff we do is generative, there’s a moment while you are doing something and suddenly you see something happen and you say “Oh my God, this is so amazing”, something unpredictable, and then you have to add common sense and say I have to stop, because it might be the stepping stone for something else. What I like about this is that you were thinking of design in one way, but just by going through the process from the bottom up, just starting with your thing, and then making these cages and going
on outside and then saying “oh maybe I can use this data to make something else”. Or you can use the tweets to write poetry. It reminds me of the work of Christopher Walt, you know the big letters. So what I mean is that you laid out a system for yourself, a system to design, and by going through the system things are generating by itself, that is surprising, so you never thought about doing this, right? So it just kind of occurs. So what I like about it is that it is a way to get to new images, when you need to get away from cliché, you need to surprise yourself, you almost have to unlearn what you know, and the only way to do this is to work in this way. Where a lot of coincidences occur.
16.08.2012 18:20 (Structure) Sofia What I did, was that I went around, and I took a bit of every text from these walls, and put it into a file. → p.1.34 Because when I heard what I had to be doing, and I saw all this information connected with each other, everything touching very much, so I created this file which is an index but not completely. Because I don’t have the separation markers of letters, so it becomes almost a poem of what we’ve created. I also created an audio file with this sequence with all of the text, and yeah, there is amazing content here, that rearranged makes sense. So I’ll read you a bit from it… let’s start here: “Human, human presence in the space. Time defines a position flow, always variable. Human needs, humans, humans. Hungry, I bought an ice-cream, I bought fresh grapes from the market, I did shopping, I don’t know”. I printed one of these for each one of you, because… yeah it’s from all of us. Sofia I was overwhelmed with all of this, what can I do? Let’s organize it. Let’s create some kind of new structure. 1.67
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
or just click OK. And you can not get out of the window unless you make one of these two choices. But he already made the choice for you because either way it is OK. So I thought that I just can do this kind of dialogue window, or dialogue boxes, maybe I should do this in an urban dialogue window in Breda, and offer these different choices. So I chose 20 phrases that are either oxymoron or all together or opposite. → p.1.28 And then I just made them into these little things where you can pull them off. So people can reflect on their actions. And I placed them in different places in the city, and spread them without thinking about them, and I noticed nice associations like “wifi evil, less dream, cream on…” so I was just playing around arranging words. It is also like concrete poetry, because these are having interesting contrast and contradictions.
Thomas But it’s not that what we find in a lot of the contemporary design? It’s just structure, you don’t even have to project something on top of it. Before you needed to design something nice, curly, put some gold… whatever, it’s already too much. If you organize your information in such a brilliant way, you don’t even have to design anymore, you’re there.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 1
16.08.2012 19:30 (Contribution) Stratos I thought I would try to read the stages as if they were data, and then look at them from a distance and try to see what I can get out of it. So I wrote down every stage in a name hoping to encapsulate the meaning of the stage, and trying to find similarities. And what I saw, for example, they created a city that responds to your needs, over there. Actually what it does is minimizing the disruption, from over there, or a given game that minimizes the distance between two strangers, when we are talking about special relations between strangers and public spaces. Or a part of system that also reduces the disruption. Or an urban filter that changes the social dynamics in space and time, like the guys did over there, with the dots moving in time. So taking this as a starting point, I thought to present it in a form of questions and everybody would jump in, and comment, or answer, or… add their own thoughts. And what I wanted to ask, was that “is every project a process?”. Because we see a linear form. Is a human a process also? Are some projects interconnected? When projects connect, do they overlap? With more connections we will have more overlapping. If
you completely connect with everything that can become one with everything, can this be Utopia then? So this is also continued with… Are we disconnected with our environment when we developed the consciousness? And now we are disconnected because we see ourselves outside of it, is it something that is enclosing us. Can we connect with the environment without loosing our consciousness? Could we do that by increasing our awareness of everything? Do we have the capacity for so much awareness? I can know what you know and i can feel what you feel. And… this would be my last statement as a conclusion. I was also thinking of a map that would reflect the feelings of the people, although I found out that it is somehow already made. Thomas Wow, that’s deep… Stratos It’s some kind of experiment where everybody can come and add… Thomas Why don’t you put this online, to be just a facebook page where you just put a question and people react. Or a Twitter stream. Another thing that I like is your initial announcement of the thing of the top, all the threads… because I was thinking while you were showing that those are the results. But you can go opposite, I would have started with that as a project. And say like, design a bottom system that reduces the disruption. You know what I mean? You are using that as conclusions, but you can go the other way and say let’s try to design that system from scratch. So it’s like it goes back and forward. And I’m sure that when you’ll do that you’ll have something totally different than what the thread is that led to this question, or led to this conclusion. Allright…great…
16.08.2012 20:15 (Wrap-up) Thomas It is a really nice fading of what are we doing. We are consuming together, sharing together, creating together, and we are all sitting around the same table conversing and sharing a moment. In the history of men, even in religion, it is a very special moment when you sit down and share something. 1.68
Group Discussion: Contribution and Wrap-up So yeah I can see it as a very nice abstract metaphor for graphic design, or any other creative endeavour. So, we’ve reached the end, look around you, we created so much time in a span of seventy two hours, maybe less, because we didn’t work 24 hours a day… but yeah, thank you for the input, like any other workshop I got as much out of it in terms of energy and interesting discussions, and I hope that you all also got that. I also hope it will inspire you for the coming weeks, a week and a half, to reach new heights, personal heights as a designer and personal heights as a creative thinker.
Thomas Castro: e-Utopia
1.69
Student name
Group Project
Dário Cannatà Pietro Paciullo
Liza Enebeis
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Yi Shu
Sum Ping Sibyl Lai Cherry
2.70
Title of the project
Laetitia van der Hoek
Gemma Copeland
Sofia Evans
Yin Lau Ho
Silvia Celiberti
Stratos Tzanavaris
2.1
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
Artem Stepanov
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Liza Enebeis
2.2
Living on the outskirts of Utopia
Living on the outskirts of Utopia The more comfortable you are in a situation, the more likely you let things go by unnoticed.
As designers we constantly have to re-look, reevaluate, rethink, and take a different angle, strive for a different approach.
Liza Enebeiz The Netherlands, 2012
Working with trash does exactly all this. The group of Openset students, who all have high aesthetic talent and passion, were put in the situation in which they have to find, collect and work with trash. It puts them in the opposite of what all their ‘system’ and being is focused on: working with trash, the undesirable waste material, something to be disposed and not looked at; something that disgusts us rather than attract; ugliness instead of beauty, the end of a product’s life cycle instead of it’s conception.
2.3
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
It is important to challenge yourself, to put yourself in situations that are completely unusual. Then you suddenly notice different sounds, smells, colors, temperatures, structures and behaviors.
In an extreme way, this principle is related to how we work at Studio Dumbar. If we are invited into a new project, we try to understand the briefing we receive and to follow its line of thinking. But our response is not only a linear answer to the question put forward. We go for alternative paths, different angles and other ways to address the challenges in a project. This is the only way to be able to find the unexpected answer.
Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry LAU Ho Yin
Group Project
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Waisted: Waisted Freshness Waisted Junk Waisted Youth Waisted Resources Waisted Beauty Waisted Pleasure
2.4
Wasted
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.5
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry LAU Ho Yin
2.6
Wasted
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.7
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry LAU Ho Yin
2.8
Wasted
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.9
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Lai Sum Ping Sibyl, Cherry LAU Ho Yin
2.10
Wasted
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.11
Adrien Borderie Vlad Butucariu Irina Shapiro
Group Project Manifesto on Digital Recycling CONCEPT Digital trash = Analog trash. The content of computer trashes has to be recycled to build new products. Our computer trash is an interesting source of material that can be used for every kind of creation. It is meant for creative people. The original files have to be decontextualized to be re-used.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
APPLICATION DONATORS are also CREATORS. In order to take files, you have to give files. The more Donators there are, the more files can be reused. The application has to filter the files. The files with embedded copyright CANNOT be re-used. The name of the file has to be analysed and eventually changed. The presence of the name in the internet searching engines has to be verified. The content of the files can be SHREDDED (deconstructed), in order to lose any recognition.
2.12
Digital Recycling
DONATOR
FILTER
IDENTIFIED NAME BUT NOT CONTENT
SHREDDER
CREATOR
2.13
NOT IDENTIFIED NAME AND CONTENT
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
IDENTIFIED NAME AND CONTENT
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Adrien Borderie Vlad Butucariu Irina Shapiro
2.14
Digital Recycling
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.15
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Adrien Borderie Vlad Butucariu Irina Shapiro
2.16
Digital Recycling
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.17
Dario Cannata
Individual Project Trash the feeling
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Short clip consisting in a sequence of trash objects asociated with words, trying to embody the essence of the brand or product.
Enjoy!
2.18
Trash the feeling
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
Man!
2.19
Dario Cannata
Old No7!
Gives you wings!
Love in it!
Keep talking!
Extra!
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Power!
2.20
Trash the feeling
It is tosted!
Filtered!
Bio Engineering!
Wake up!
Poor! 2.21
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
Premium Quality!
Dario Cannata
Two balls!
Suck on this!
French!
On fire!
Out of space!
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Angel!
2.22
Trash the feeling
With style!
Stay connected!
Extra extra large!
Hours power!
Sponsoring! 2.23
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
Vodka based!
Sofia Evans Gemma Copeland Frauke Eversmann
Group Project Non-place Identity
Finding: When sorting through our trash pile, we noticed that the content we had collected was primarily paper, with a large amount of tickets and receipts. We began by arranging our paper ephemera alphabetically, looking at only the words they contained. To counter-balance this, we rearranged the collection in terms of the different graphic elements they contained, such as numbers, barcodes and pictograms.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
We were intrigued by the complexity of encoded information contained within this discarded paper. Each piece of paper told its own story: from detailed product information, travel itineraries, product purchases and bank balances. There was a certain tension between the exact, mechanical nature of these records and the human stories they hinted at. For us, these receipts and tickets were the physical manifestation of the “non‑place”: they are ephemeral, disposable and soon forgotten. Nonplace is a term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé. It refers to transient, insignificant in‑between spaces, like airports, supermarkets and highways. We move through these spaces without paying attention, concentrating instead on our destination or purpose. These spaces are devoid of narrative, identity and culture. They could be anywhere and everywhere, and so they become nowhere. This led us to question whether we could stage interventions that disrupt non-places, restoring a sense of narrative and identity. Using Breda’s train station as a microcosm of all non-places, we undertook a series of exercises that explored this idea.
2.24
Non-place Identity
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.25
Sofia Evans Gemma Copeland Frauke Eversmann Restoring narrative: Our first exercise involved recording, through video and written transcript, everything that happened on Platform 4 over a ten minute period. The result was a strangely poetic stream-of-consciousness style snippet of daily life.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
We created a poster from this transcript and installed it in the same place we originally recorded it. Through this process, an ephemeral moment that would have otherwise been forgotten was made eternal and precious.
2.26
Non-place Identity
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.27
Sofia Evans Gemma Copeland Frauke Eversmann Restoring identity: To explore the notion of identity, we isolated and scaled graphic elements from our collection of different tickets. These formed a number of abstract flags that could signal the identity or boundaries of the non‑place.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
We took these flags back to the train station and photographed them in the passport photo booth, which added its own exact record of time, date and place.
2.28
Non-place Identity
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.29
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Sofia Evans Gemma Copeland Frauke Eversmann
2.30
Non-place Identity
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.31
Silvia Celiberti Stratos Tzanavaris
Group Project More Contentedness
The workshop started emptying a bag of random trash collected from the street and arranging the chaos following different criteria. The “happiness” arrangement (trying to value how much satisfaction was related to those objects once they were still “alive” -based on our subjective perception-) inspired the following project.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Brand new products with their content to consume brings us to a certain feeling of contentedness; content is although doomed to decrease and disappear trough our use and so the related contentedness, leading to a tiny death each time we get,let’s say, to the bottom of a peanut butter jar. The contentedness feeling is although available again through replacing the first peanut butter jar with an identical second jar at the store. First, we created a video to visualize this unidirectional and irreversible process and the irony of its cyclic repetition in time (vimeo.com/48516463).
2.32
More Contentedness
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.33
Silvia Celiberti Stratos Tzanavaris In the video we see the life of a peanut butter jar, which appears brand new on the cover. Once open, its pages start to be quickly ripped away, leaving a useless back cover with the empty jar deprived of its content. Secondly, we created a website (morecontentness. com) where it is possible to actually purchase a virtually infinite amount of contentedness through books/products. Each one of the books contains the life of a product: brand new on the cover with its content inside the pages and the empty package on the back.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 2
Each book on the website will have a cost identical to the specific product and brand available in store. *In the video we use as soundtrack an auditory illusion called the Shepard Paradox, which consist in a pair of chords that sound as if they are advancing up the scale, but in fact the starting pair of chords is the same as the finishing pair. If you loop this sample seamlessly then it should be impossible to tell where the sample begins and ends.
2.34
More Contentedness
Liza Enebeis and Erik de Vlaam: Trashland
2.35
Group Project
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
Student name
Frauke Eversmann
3.38
Title of the project
Yin Lau Ho
3.1
Petr van Blokland
Irina Shapiro
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
Petr van Blokland Irina Shapiro
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Interview
Spend your time well! The text is a transcript of the video interview took at Buro Petr van Blokland and Claudia Mens to wrap-up the three days workshop.
Irina …and in the end I remember the list of topics that you discussed with the students, it was huge. Off-course it is utopia to do everything in three days but it is also hard to reach it also in five years, ten years…
Irina Indeed, but there are things like programming languages, Javascript, python, which traditionally are not an issue in the graphic design education. I think it is hard to be let’s say professional in coding, graphic design, photography… to handle all of these at the highest level. Petr But you are totally free to put a limit to any amount of detail. You say if I studied it for an hour that’s about it. If you study it for about ten years then that’s it, and you don’t do any other things. In any level there is a function. If you are a conductor for example and you
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Petr van Blokland
Petr But that’s always true, any simple thing can be a lifetime of work.
have to direct this orchestra, and you don’t know anything about violins, what are you going to talk about? What can you demand from people if you don’t know what they are doing? So, many conductors could do the whole play by piano, but they are not professionals, they are not heroes in piano, it’s just their way of expressing. Composers they play piano, but they are not the ones who will play piano on the stage. It is a different tool. So if the knowledge about Javascript it is something that you use to talk with a Javascript programmer on how to do things, then you will have a different kind of communication, as you would have without knowing anything about it. So you don’t know what kind of problems the other people can expect when you work with them. If you don’t know anything about offset presses than you will have a different design, and you will have a hard time talking with presses. If you make an internship for a day, for an hour, or an year, you will have different knowledge and different communication. You want to get to a stage as a designer where you know the disadvantages of a medium, so well, that you can turn them
Petr van Blokland Irina Shapiro
around and turn them into an advantage. Every medium has it’s flaws.
in sports. Because eventually when people can do various things very well, from various areas, it pays back. Any strange combination of thinks makes you unique. You have this area filled in that nobody has, between these two extremes. But the fact that something is changing fast or requires a lot of knowledge shouldn’t hold professionals, designers back of finding everything about it. If you don’t someone else will. And then it’s very difficult to explain, specially nowadays, what’s your added value? Why should the customer pay you for something that you don’t know?
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
Irina So what are you saying is that if you are the master of the rules you can play with them, you can change them, you can create your own rules. Petr If you know the boundaries you can go further , or see if they really are the boundaries and go a little bit further. If you don’t know anything about boundaries you will hit them in the wrong way. They’ll fire back at you. Irina During Open Set one of the most urgent themes is about all these things require time and nowadays everything is changing so fast: technology, guidelines, request of the skills you need as a designer.
And… yes, there is more information than ever before, and it’s changing very fast, but on the other hand it wasn’t ever as much information available as it’s now. Because the knowledge was already there, but was in the hands of the people on the other side of the world that they didn’t even know about. And now it’s available. It is both a challenge and a threat. It’s a threat that when you get out of the school you are compared with the rest of the world immediately. And in the past you could be the best of the village or the best of the town, and
Petr Yeah but there’s choices in many directions, you can know a bit about a lot of things and a lot about a few things, or combinations. When hiring people in the studio we look for people who are multiple specialists, who can do different things very well. And it can be very different things, like being good in music, or being good 3.4
Interview
now you are compared with the whole world. Every piece of knowledge it’s something you were not born with. Every skill it is developed: maybe there was the talent, but the skill wasn’t there. So you should develop it, spend your time well. Irina How do you define Graphic Design?
It’s this kind of people that are looking for an identity and want an answer, but there’s no answer. And you’ll never find an answer. If you do, you are fooling yourself. Because you are making a definition to something that it’s undefined by definition. So, do your thing. Every time you do something it changes. In the book “The information” it is explained how you can prove mathematically that the language only exists if it changes. There is no fixed definition of a word. Because if there would be a fixed definition of the word, and there was the definition of the graphic design, we would not be able to talk
Irina In this case, if people are interested in how graphic design will be in 10 years, or how the profession will look like it is again an open question. Petr Yeah in general terms you can describe it, but there is 3.5
Petr van Blokland
Petr Well one thing I wonder if it’s worth while trying to answer, what is Graphic Design, it’s kind of the same question about art. Who cares?
about it. If I say “this computer here“ I would change a little bit the perception of the word computer in your head. because next time when I say “you remember when I said this computer here”, you’ll have an additional meaning of the word computer. So every time you speak about something it changes the meaning of the word. It adds additional circumstances, additional context. So every time you talk about something it changes the meaning. So the whole word is changing the meaning. If I say “mail” you are not talking about physical envelopes anymore. You have to mention that I’ll send it by mail, but by post. That was mail twenty years ago. So world has changed. And the only definition you can get for Graphic Design is what Graphic Design means for you now. And that’s very different from asking what’s graphic design. It’s very hard to define. As soon as it’s defined it escapes.
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
Petr van Blokland Irina Shapiro
not an answer to the “is” as question. What is it? It’s an area. And parts of the area to the people who have agreed that are part of it and part on which have been agreed less as being part of it. But it’s moving certainly. If graphic design was as something that was printed and static then there would be no more static pages in few years time. Everything is moving, everything is interacting, so the area between interface design and interaction design and traditional graphic design blurs. Where does it end?
time limit, or if we assumed that the time limit is there, awareness is different. The idea behind the design game is that in design cycles, if you do something and decide if it’s good or not, and you do it again, you learn from the transition of one cycle to the other. Because inside your cycle, inside your miniature production process you have to make this sketch. Which is two minutes of production. Because you already know what you want so you just have to draw a line. And you know how to draw a line. That’s not an experiment anymore. So breaking up this big assemble which is too complex to solve into pieces that you can solve, or if it’s too complex you can still break it into pieces and try to solve it again, you end up with little things that you know, little blocks. So having skills on how to sketch or how to write a function of code, or how to do a presentation in a conversation with a customer, those are skills that are building blocks by themselves and not an experiment. If everything is an experiment, let’s say we make something totally weird and see what gets out of that, that won’t give you a solution in the long time because there are too many
Irina I would like to come back to the last day of workshop where was the design game. And this is again a different approach than the previous days. You gave them an assignment, you gave them just one hour, and limited time, so people were as limited as they were free in the beginning. Could you say more about it? Petr Yeah, it’s not so different… the freedom they had in the beginning was limited because we only had one hour, a half an hour to make that list. So we were not able to talk about it for three days. The only difference is that if I was emphasizing on the 3.6
Interview
possibilities. Every time try to design the freedom you can allow yourself with the time and the complexity given, and the limitations that you have because it has to be a functional idea. And the only way of learning that is to repeat it over and over again. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a skill. Handling this time management itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crucial for designers, if you never did it, then you will always run out of time.
Petr van Blokland
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Group Project Shape and colour
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
Petr van Blokland started his workshop by letting students pick the topics they were most interested in, from a list of about twenty, ranging from optics exercises to more complicated ones like coding. Below are some of the sheets the students worked on in order to make them aware of the details they should pay attention when dealing with typography, colour and volumes.
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Shape and colour
Petr van Blokland
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Group Project
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
Typography
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Typography
Petr van Blokland
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Group Project Design Game
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
The game it developed towards a valuable tool for designers and customers. Through the game the participants get feedback on their own design process in relation to the dynamics inside a design studio and the influence of market dynamics. The Design Game is the simulation of a world in which 12 design studios and 4 customers compete to design products that will sell best. In several rounds the
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Design Game
acquired knowledge and experience can be applied in the next design. The game takes a few hours in which participants find themselves dragged into a self-supporting world of design decisions and product requirements.
Petr van Blokland
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Group Project
Open Set 2012 / workshop 3
Student name
Max Bruinsma
Jan van Toorn
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Title of the project
Petr van Blokland
Yin Lau Ho
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Open Set 2012
Student name
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The Final Presentation
Friday the 24th of August students arranged the outcome of the three workshops into a small exhibition and received feedback from Max Bruinsma and Jan van Toorn. The time reserved for talks with the new tutors had an essential role in reflecting upon the works and finding new paths for further development.
Max Bruinsma and Jan van Toorn: The feedback
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Graphic Design Summer School Open Set 2012 Catalogue Breda, The Netherlands, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-1482647365 ISBN-10: 1482647362
Editing and design: Vlad Butucariu, Irina Shapiro www.studiosquash.nl
Visuals on the cover design: Adrien Borderie Open Set has been made possible with the support of Max Bruinsma, Petr van Blokland, Jan van Toorn, Dennis Elbers, Simone Dresens, Ward Janssen and the students Mariette Twilt, Adrien Borderie and Bart van Haren.
Open Set partners: Graphic Design Festival Breda House of Visual Culture Breda
Copyright Š 2012 Studio Squash. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or part in any form.
Contact: www.openset.nl info@studiosquash.nl
DUTCH GRAPHIC DESIGN SUMMER SCHOOL OPEN SET