SUPERLOCAL

It is urgent that we update our methods of production. They cannot exist any longer just to maximize efficiency or profits; instead production must address social and environmental viability.

We are a group of designers who believe that the future of production will be characterized by making things locally. We believe that there is a need for an alternative to the usual (industrial) way of producing goods. We believe in the rising of networks as the new and best generators of social and economic value. Finally, it’s a fact that producing locally means less shipping and therefore less pollution.

We designed some production lines in the city of Eindhoven, finding and connecting resources, materials and labor all found within a short bike ride, in order to make everyday objects: a hair dryer, a dressing table, a mirror, a lamp and a stool (production 1.0). The production 1.0 (beta) is released in open source on the system website, and serves as the starting point for an evolutionary process applied to objects.

The goal of SUPERLOCAL is to provide an open production database for making everyday objects, and thereby give creative and critical tools to people for re-creating their world.

Vélo M² Open Space Capsules and Energy Modules for Cargo Bikes

The cargo bike is a great alternative to the car in congested cities; with our stackable modules we give sustainable initiatives endless possibilities. Vélo M2 (pronounced Vélo em carree) is a multi-modular capsule system fitting on cargo bikes. With our energy module supplied by solar and pedal power you can have the electricity on location to power an open-air cinema, a mobile fablab and much more on top. We bring all these plans to an open source platform and community where anybody can contribute. Cargo Bikes can be used for more than only transport, with Vélo M2 we give the tools to rethink how we interact in Public Space, move in the city and use energy.

A Parasitical Breed of Consumer

‘A Parasitical Breed of Consumers’ is a self-initiated project that takes advantage of openly accenssible urban structures of consumption. Those ‘loopholes’ enable users to step out of the role of solely being consumers to becoming producing actors. The project looks at freeganism as an expression of personal convictions and individual subjectivity.

A Parasitical Breed of Consumer revolves around food as a basic human need commonly embedded into capitalist structures and explores distribution systems of supermarkets to make unsold produce accessible. Participating individuals are enabled to take advantage of freely accessible materials with help of strategies and techniques that educate about sourcing materials, transforming found materials into tools and extending the life-cycle of previously discarded materials.

Through the discovery of value in often discarded ‘low quality materials’ this project counters the economic logic we, as consumers, producers and distributors have gotten used to and, instead, shows alternative solutions that would enable for individuals to become more active and conscious in relation to their behaviours of consumption.

The project was developed in the context of the Master studies in Contextual Design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven and was completed as a graduation project in 2013. As a research project relating to theories of Extremism, it surely was essential to my personal development as a writer, researcher and social human being. This project marked the beginning of an ongoing exploration of convictions that form the basis of a personal active-ism.

The project was shown at the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, NL) in the context of the exhibition ‘The Museum of Arte Util’ from 7 December 2013 – 30 March 2014, under the creative direction of artist Tania Bruguera.

https://jeannettepetrik.com

Super Scarcity

A project by Parasite 2.0 for CEFA Onlus
@ Ansaldo, Milan, October 7th-10th, 2015

“Super-Scarcity” is a commune between real and virtual that gathered for three days to discuss these topics. Through lectures, performances, roundtables, workshops and exhibitions, “super-scarcity” elaborates a series of optimistic visions for the future characterized by a scarcity of resources.

Today, the public opinion tends to consider the topic of the access to resources as an issue exclusively connected to the third world. With the constant growth of the population, the environmental troubles and an always more urbanized world, the access to resources will also affect those countries that have never faced the problem.

Relator: Giuseppe marando , Marco Ceriani (Italbugs),Giacomo Piovan, Zeno Franchini, Evelyn Lavenghi, Franca Formenti Adriana Santanocito e Valerio Panella, Luca Astorri, How we dwell, Giulio Fonseca(Godugong), Lucia Tozzi, Andrea Balestrero, Rossella Ferorelli, Marco Boffi, Franco Berardi (BIFO), Rossella Farinotti.

Graphic project and communication curated by From Outer Space.
Pubbilication design by Silvio Lo Russo and Alessio D’Ellena. Photos by Alice Pedroletti.

www.superscarcity.it

De Andere Markt / Living Lab (Genk, BE)

Unemployment is often being addressed by decision makers and unions via e.g. implementing policies, programs and projects that aim to create jobs, (co-) working spaces and platforms or create better conditions for jobs. However, citizens are too little involved in the debate on these work-related aspects. The region of Limburg (BE) faces -especially since the closure of the Ford factory in Genk- a great need for enhancing the public debate on (local) work, workspaces, conditions and tools (to create, find, share or experience work) as well as their organisation in the city/regional space.

Therefore, De Andere Markt (The Other Market) has set up a Living Lab in Genk (BE, Limburg) for the coming two years. Living Labs are ecosystems where the research is not carried out in closed design studios, but via a systematic participatory approach, integrating research and innovation processes.  This particular lab is an explorative platform for researchers/teachers, students, policy makers and local community to collaboratively think and work together on the future of “work”, both oriented at the own neighbourhood as on the broader world. Via interventions, games, prototyping and coaching activities De Andere Markt supports designing or doing future work. We investigate two main questions How can we use design to engage (often marginalized groups of) citizens in (1) the public debate around work, work spaces, tools and their surrounding conditions? (2) How can we co-design proposals for future work, work spaces and tools?

By exploring these questions, we want to increase people’s capabilities of contributing to the public debate on work spaces, platforms and tools and their organisation in the city/regional space. Moreover, we want to enhance the (democratic) public debate in the region of Limburg on work with a wider range of actors (employed and unemployed, different cultures, gender groups, young and old, etc.). Via this public debate we want to come to new design proposals for work, work spaces and platforms. Finally, we want to connect these proposals to existing initiatives, institutions and organisations. To enhance the chance for citizens to be heard in the public debate around work, we will create supportive actions and tools. We collect stories about the skills of inhabitans and (small) organisations in Genk via our shopfront in the city of Genk and a mobile market, a cargo bike with which we ride through Genk. The shopfront and mobile market are conceived as a kind of reversed employment agency: we collect and display stories about local skills and conceptions of work, instead of jobs.

We conduct interviews under the form of individual creative sessions where we reflect together with shop owners and entrepreneurs on how their businesses are functioning and what are the economic and social networks they form. We organise Minilabs, wherein we generate new ideas about the future of work through co-design processes at fixed moments in time. Inspired by stories collected in the streets and in the local businesses, these labs are set up as brainstorms between citizens, researchers, professionals and policy makers.

Next to the Minilabs, we organise Gamelabs wherein serious games are used as vehicles for participatory prototyping and/or simulations. Abstract, intangible notions such as work or economics are made more concrete by collaboratively prototyping ideas and games. These games will then act as visual tools that support a process of coproduction and participatory design of new types of work, workspaces and tools. We organize Designlabs wherein ideas can be materialised into platforms, tools, objects, services or spaces. The most ‘visible’ and physical outcomes of these labs can be proposals/prototypes for the future of work, work spaces and work tools. We organise coachingtrajectories to enhance the opportunities of systems, products, services, tools or organisations that are generated during the labs to genuinely contribute to the debate about the future of work. All the interventions, labs and outcomes are publicly shared via our website, forming De Andere Markt media channel. We pay great attention to developing tools that support citizens, policy makers, designers etc. in contributing to mediated public debates on work (focused on participatory production of media).

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Location: Hoefstadstaat 27, Winterslag, Genk

Team: Liesbeth Huybrechts, Teodora Constantinescu, Oswald Devisch
(UHasselt), Pablo Calderón Salazar, Katrien Dreessen, Ben Hagenaars
(LUCA/KULeuven)

Website: https://deanderemarkt.wordpress.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DeAndereMarkt

*Funding: PLAY!UC, JPI Urban Europe & TRADERS, Marie Curie, City of Genk

 

SAMENSPEL

How to re-shape the connection between a big harbour (company) and it’s villagers in a visual and active way? RDM (Rotterdam Droogdok Maatschappij) is a drydock company located in a remote area in the harbour of Rotterdam. The isolated location made the firm built its own village Heijplaat (back in 1914) in order to provide housing for its employees. My project ”Samenspel” is set in, and focuses on, this very specific area.

Since the RDM was experiencing a crisis during the 90’s, many people from the Heijplaat lost their jobs. The village is in a phase of transition since this very moment. It doesn’t seem to be functioning as it was once meant to be. Many recreational activities and former functional spots of the area shut down, houses got progressively empty. The harbor area is connected to the city through a ferry service. However, it remains difficult to reach, and it is experienced by outsiders being too far away from the city centre. The RDM site now is hosting projects under the aegis of the Campus and the Submarine Wharf, which offer facilities for applied research, innovation, and experimentation. These enterprises attract visitors and users coming from outside the village of Heijplaat. These current recreational activities in the RDM area are not addressed to the residents any more; which cause a malfunction in the social structure and the connection among the inhabitants and their surrounding.
I focused on the question: ”How to re-shape the connection between the RDM and the village? Can I design (the implementation of) a new function for the RDM re-attracting locals, visualy and actively?” The port of Rotterdam and the village started a three-year restructuring process from 2014, year of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of their establishment. The project ‘Samenspel‘ develops within these years. The small village of Heijplaat is inhabited by a community which revolves around clubs and associations. I joined a residents’ initiative which aimed at establishing a Jeu de Boules (Petanque) club.
I planned to set up and design the club’s identity. My activity and collaboration with the club, designed to function on the area for two years, resulted in June 15th 2014, in the first Heijplaat Jeu de Boules Tournament at pier 2602 at ‘the entrance side’ of the RDM. The Pier was recently re-opened after renovation, but lacked a specific function, it was underused. Because of this fact, and because the beautiful and robust image triggered me so much, I decided to claim that piece of public space in order to re-use it, as strong and exciting event location for a moment.
Surrounded by the sound of the Maas and the windy harbour we played the first Heijplaat Jeu de Boules Tournament with a mix of local residents from Heijplaat and visitors from other parts of Rotterdam. The ‘image’ of the day was on one hand formed by the scenery of the area itself and the participating teams. I curated and visually shaped these elements with the participation of many company’s within the RDM.
”This project started as part of my Minor program (Public and Private) and ‘ended up’ being part of her Graphic Design graduation project, at the Willem de Kooning Academy.
Samenspel was made possible by/many thanks to: City of Rotterdam Art and Culture, Van Es Zand & Gravel BV, Kruiswijk BV, Franklin Offshore, 100 jaar Heijplaat, Dokkaffee and all the participants.
The tournament day was filmed by: Niels van der Vaart, 31,1 Film. Edited by Janneke Absil

Ministry of Truth and Typography // Critical Poster Design

My project is self-initiated. My client is the unconscious viewer walking on the street, the inhabitant of the city, and the society being exposed to visual communication and posters in the urban landscape. They are participants in writing the content and being exposed to my work.

I offer an alternative for the viewer to see in comparison to the common poster that sells, invites or builds awareness. My goal is not to sell, invite to an event or build awareness of something but to mirror the news produced in the society back to the society. My work falls into the discipline of critical design.

I started to reproduce texts from the print media in Namibia in 2013 into typographic posters. What interests me in this process is how a poster, a piece of paper, can create a very emotional attack in a viewer, but also how people talk either about the design or the content. How many times do You see a viewer discussing a poster on the streets? Or are they a mere background of the urban landscape?

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby say that critical design “provides a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical and economic values”. (Dunne & Raby, 2001, 58)

I hand stamp the posters and sign them, like a proper ministry would. This poster states the following: “African Leaders Are Mute, Even as Their People Die at Sea” and the whole news text can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/africa/african-leaders-are-mute-even-as-their-people-die-at-sea.html?_r=0

All work of mine can be found at: http://ministryoftruthandtypography.blogspot.be

COMUNfARE – creating spaces for popular design and making (economies) in common

COMUNfARE (lit. commons-making, or communal making) is a long-term practice-led research project, in which we concentrate on the environmental, social, economic and political context of the Vallagarina district in the Italian Alps and its connections to other places in the world.

Project updates (in Italian) via the locally preferred social network.

With the project, which represents a new phase in our socially and politically engaged design practice, we want to contribute to progressive eco-social change on different levels and scales in the area we come from.

Over time, we set out to activate a variety of translocal situations of intergenerational, open, collective learning. Through these, we want to explore, develop and foster self-organised structures and relations pursuing a twofold aim — to become more aware of the diverse dynamics that traverse and shape the district, its economy, people and environment, while creating, broadening and diversifying spaces in which to be less exposed to and tied into the disciplining, precarising and scarcity-producing mechanisms of ‘the market’.

Like this, with COMUNfARE we want to support the constitution, cultivation and expansion of the commons as a material and social dimension that empowers people to nurture other values and ways of relating than the narrow ones reproduced by capital.

While the defined localised framework of the Vallagarina district is the setting in which our research is physically based, and which therefore represents its point of departure and main arena of reflection, speculation and intervention, we wish to constantly weave into the project the global framework which this area is part of, and whose processes inevitably mould the district and are in turn moulded by it.

Some of the research questions we currently ask are:

— What structures and initiatives can facilitate the cultivation of practices of co-operation, care, dialogue, mutuality, and self-organisation in our lives, while weakening the influence of personal profit, competition, accumulation and individualisation?

— How can knowledges, experiences and expertise held by people inhabiting the district be activated and involved into the project? How can people learn from each other in a liberatory, empowering way?

— Taking the anthropocene as the wider framework in which we operate, how can the non-human other be actively encompassed into processes of progressive social change?

— How can a socially and politically engaged design practice be made resilient when operating in a peripheral non-metropolitan context?

Precarity Pilot – re-defining the path of our working lives

Precarity Pilot is an online platform and a series of nomadic workshops that aim at addressing in inventive ways issues faced by precarious designers.

Shaken by the concerns that emerged from our earlier investigations, namely Designers’ Inquiry (2012-2013) and Designing Economic Cultures (2011-2013), Precarity Pilot wants to support designers in re-shaping, re-orienting and taking ownership of the course of their working lives.

In the context of Europe, where cuts to welfare systems and unfair working conditions are making it difficult to confidently imagine the course of one’s working life, Precarity Pilot is an attempt to direct our efforts and everyday activities as designers towards constructing a different economic environment – both through what we produce and through the ways we practice and live.

Precarity Pilot is not primarily concerned with stabilising precarious design practices as they are, but rather with creating conditions in which it is possible for designers to imagine and actuate what they could become when not pressured by precariousness to conform to the needs of the market.

Nu_Volante – a collaborative local street brand

NU_VOLANTE is the attempt to found the (probably) first local, open and collaborative street brand in Italy.

In Italy and other southern European countries exists for already years the phenomena of immigrated street vendors (often from Senegal) that try to make a living by selling mainly cheap Chinese products, like sunglasses, lighters, umbrellas or bracelets on the streets.

The brand Nu_Volante (“the new flying ones”) tries to connect immigrated street vendors to local (eco–social) manufacturer (social cooperatives) and designers to create small, simple and beautiful products and sell them in the local streets to citizen and tourists through a network of street vendors.

Within our pilot project that is about to be launched in the city of Bolzano, North Italy, a local manufacturer has a central role in the collaboration: It is a secondhand/upcycling furniture and textile work-shop and a small co-working space for engaged designers and artisans. On one side they will produce a part of the products that are sold on commission by a network of street vendors. On the other side they provide a physical space where designers, street vendors and their own production team can meet to discuss and exchange ideas.

The project’s aim is to raise the social and economical situation of the immigrated vendors and give more visibility to small local manufacturer that often have only a very limited budget for advertisement and marketing. In addition the project has a great potential to raise a new kind of culture connected to street commerce. (Italy ones had a flourishing culture of artisan and street markets that get more and more “invaded” by poorly produced products.)

Another goal is to inform (local) people about the legal situation of these street vendors that are often targeted by prejudices saying they would be part of a Mafia-like structure – which in most cases is simple not the case.
Instead most vendors possess a license for street vending and even pay social security contributions. They travel to the bigger Italian cities to buy their products from Chinese markets and try to resell them in touristic towns and villages.

In a longer perspective the project aims to create new social relations between the vendors and local citizen and could become a bridge for new developments (e.g. the possibility for education in the field of handy-crafts or a shift to participate in local markets instead of selling only on the streets).

The project resulted as a hands-on research project from a more theoretical study about the transformation of our western value system which I paraphrased as with the title “Open Value”.

More information on the website: www.nu-volante.org or on facebook: www.facebook.com/nu-volante