Seminar Series: Re-worlding

This seminar sets up a dialogue and exchange with MAU, Malmö University, K3. The session is moderated by Anna Seravalli and Ann Light.

This seminar dives into how findings in a particular and situated context can be connected to other actors in society: musea, art collectives, policy etc. It introduces us to how art and design researchers share their research with the world and enter into productive collaborations with the world and evaluate these collaborations.

Our initiatives for change require some feedback - to us - to know that what we are doing is achieving what we set out to - and to the world around us - be that funders or those we seek to engage in supporting or sponsoring our activities. When we reworld, we ask more of this process than many evaluation procedures can map to. There is some hint of ontological change and a journey to places beyond what we can know now. How is it possible to give confidence in the direction of travel when the issues are complex and intrinsically uncertain or indeterminable? The goal of this session is to look at reconnection as a process of valuing and making links between worlds, not only as ideas but as pathways that we seek to travel and to know we have travelled.

• 12.00-12.10: Welcome, short intro to the theme and program
  
  
• 12.10-12.25: Theoretical perspective about value creation and how to "measure" it by Joost Vervoort of Utrecht University, researcher in the CreaTures project (https://creatures-eu.org/)
  • Joost Vervoort is Associate Professor of Foresight and Anticipatory Governance in the Environmental Governance Group at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. He is also a Honorary Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto Japan.  Joost is a Fellow of the Urban Futures Studio, a Fellow of the Utrecht Centre for Global Challenges, and a member of the Utrecht Young Academy, where he leads a project on the use of the future across UU. An ecologist by training, Joost holds a PhD from Wageningen University in stakeholder engagement through scenarios and other approaches to sense-making in and navigating through complex systems. (https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/JMVervoort)
    
    
• 12.25-12.40: Case Malmö Tillsammans: a cross-sector project to support local development in Malmö. The presentation raises concrete challenges/questions about ongoing work with valuing and making links between worlds (https://malmotillsammans.se/, in Swedish)
  • Priyanka Mellergård John presents Malmö Together (Malmö Tillsammans), a cross-sector project driven by  Sensus (an organization that focus on non-formal and voluntary education), Malmö Ideella (an umbrella organization for civil society associations in Malmö), Nyföretagarcentrum Öresund  (an organization that supports entrepreneurship in the Malmö region) and the city of Malmö. The goal of the project is to support citizens driven initiatives to address societal issues like segregation, inequality and unemployment in three areas of Malmö. In each area an incubator will be established. The incubators together work as an innovation platform for the whole city. Malmö Together aims at being a resource for associations, companies and citizens in Malmö to address issues that are important for them, find solutions and create a sustainable city for everybody.  
    
    
• 12.40-13:30: Discussion in small groups with one representative from Malmö Tillsammans in each group
  • How do we bring together different views, structures and practices across organizations?
  • How should we value the different contributions when we bring these things together?
  • Which principles do we choose to "measure" the actions we take together?
    
    
  • Questions to be discussed:
    
    
    
• 13:00-13:30 reporting from the groups and general discussion

• Keynote talks:
• Monica di Sisto, Fairwatch: "Towards a caring society"
• Matteo Moretti, Sheldon.studio: "Designing digital commons"

• Discussants:
• Francesca Forno, University of Trento
• Alvise Mattozzi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

• Chair:
• Chiara Bassetti, University of Trento

Organised as a dialogue between four academics-practitioners we reflect on the practice of creating the right environment (open public structure) to re-imagining today’s society, making use of design and art as medium.

• At ONA the design in dialogue lab theatrical elements creates the condition to experiment and practice different settings for dialogue, challenging participants to rethink existing practices and positions.
• At L200 the self-organisation of a common space becomes the shared ground for learning. Imagination through doing is the core pedagogical tool.
• Communitism as a third space uses imagination as the core of all its activities and explores how heritage conservation, personal development and collective action are constantly nurtured by an environment of creative enthusiasm.
• During this session the protagonists of each of these spaces will start a dialogue around their practice, complemented by a comparative perspective between 50 spaces in different cities developed in the research project Grounded Urban Practices, and slowly invite all participants to join this collective exchange.

Our Keynote Speakers:

• Panayotis Antoniadis on L200, https://langstrasse200.ch/en
• Charlotte Schaeben on Design in Dialogue Lab, https://newrope.world 
• Natassa Dourida on Communitism, https://communitism.space 
• René Boer on Grounded Urban Practices, https://groundedurbanpractices.net 

The purpose of the seminar is threefold. Firstly, the seminar addresses how to link (or not to link) autonomous artistic and design research to private and public institutional frameworks in order to generate research results with a strong impact on society. Secondly, it creates awareness about intellectual property rights (“IP”), and in particular IP at UHasselt. Lastly, it tackles different types of dissemination and exploitation in art and design research, duly taking into account the interests of all parties involved: the PhD student, the promoter, and on a larger scale the university and also the society as a whole.

The plenary part of this seminar revolves around ethnographic research and how it can be used in artistic and design research to situate and problematise some of the general assumptions we often hold as researchers. It introduces us to the creation of ethnographic techniques that are particular for artistic and design researchers.  It sets up a dialogue and exchange with Limerick University.  

This first seminar will dive into the necessity to rethink how we position our Faculty’s artistic and design research in today’s changing world.  We rethink our own position, but also the platforms via which we do art and design research today, our research groups, our faculty research days, our doctoral program. Is our positioning and the positioning of our platforms able to navigate in a landscape in which culture is in a very fragile position and polarisation is driving public debates: on climate, care, migration etc.  What input do we need as researchers to navigate this landscape more consciously? In this first seminar we co-design the program for the rest of the year based on this structure: the keynotes, the formats etc...

Programme:

1. What do you care about or - better - what do we need and want to care about in our (PhD) research?

2. How can we as institutes reorganise our platforms - our doctoral programs, our research groups, our labs  etc - , to reconnect and collectively address some of the issues we individually and commonly care about? Some examples: Do these platforms need to actively contribute to the cultural field we are active in (e.g. role of studio space, curation)? How do they promote conferences in a time in which travelling has become impossible and the climate needs care? How do they need to take into account the position of young parents in a time many are working at home? Can we reorganise our platforms to allow for more equality between groups or to be more welcoming to refugees or people who locally need our attention?

3. What people would you really like to hear on the following topics.

   Ethnographic approaches in art and design research
   Creative Writing in art and research
   Imagination in art and design research
   IP and dissemination in art and design research
   Managing Projects in art and design research
   Ethics of Care in art and Design research.

ArcK PhD presentations:

• Lieve Custers: How can we open up participatory planning processes in neighbourhoods that are densifying and talk about values? In order to preserve the open space in a suburbanized region as Flanders (Belgium), densification is one of the ways to go. But densification means that the existing living environment transforms and has an influence on liveability. This creates tensions between different collectives of policy makers and citizens as they imagine other futures for the neighbourhood. In my presentation I will discuss the participatory planning processes in two neighbourhoods that are densifying: the neighbourhood mobility plan in the Heilig-Hart neighbourhood in Hasselt (case 1) and the neighbourhood spatial plan of Zwijnaarde, Pleispark and Schilderwijk in Ghent (case 2). These are new planning instruments that are being developed throughout the process which gives us the opportunity to experiment with ways to make the value trade-offs between the different collectives explicit and co-create a future for the neighbourhood. I will talk about the research methods that I use, which tools I developed to start a dialogue in the two neighbourhoods and how I write and communicate about my research via different platforms.

• Elisa Servais: The (added) value of Experiential Retail Environments (EREs) - Gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon in order to better design for it In the ever evolving retail context and more specifically with the growth of online shopping, customer expectations towards physical stores have shifted from a product to a full in-store experience focus. This, in turn, has impacted retail designers who are now pressured to design stores which deliver "valuable experiences" to consumers; or what is often referred to as “experiential stores”. BUT, is there really value in integrating an experiential dimension to physical store concepts? And if so, where does this value lie and for whom: the consumers, retailers? And what about society and the world at large? Finally, and most important to this research project which has a special focus on retail designers’ practical concerns: HOW should in-store experience be designed to generate (added) value? Although the overall aim of this research project is to address all of the above questions, its specific focus is to develop an evidence-based design support tool for retail designers (and retailers) in order to address their daily concerns as regards designing for valuable in-store experiences.  

• Mela Zuljevic: Wayfinding in-between the historical landscape and the design space: Uses of the past in participatory design. In my PhD research, I am interested in how the past is used in the design space of spatial development. The intention is to explore how visions of 'development' can be conceptualised, staged and challenged, by mobilising the past as a resource. The methodological approach starts from participatory design and design anthropology while learning from historical research and critical approaches to heritage and development. The project looks at specific case studies related to the heritagisation and redevelopment of post-industrial landscapes, primarily in the context of Genk and Leuven (BE). By making a ‘Transition Landscape Atlas’, I work with different design and collaborative methods, in particular participatory mapping and video-making. 

MAD PhD presentations:

• Lodewijk Heylen: Against Heroics (on the Avant Garde). To break free. To wake up, to cast off the shackles of conformism. To innovate. These are the demands of computational heroism. You have the possibility to make a choice, to choose for a heroic life, a creative life, against all odds. Now, we all can achieve heroism. Every moment can become significant, more significant than the last. Everyone can now consider themselves an influencer of their own making, presenting every meal as a groundbreaking discovery, every reiteration of a viral dance video as trendsetting, every travel or trip as though it were an exploration by Magellan himself — if we can consider him the all time hero of exploration. What it actually induced is a mediocre world with a collective aversion towards mediocrity; an adoration, a glorification of heroes, mirror-images of Ayn Rand’s champions, who are in fact very average people; a disgust for anyone who does not succeed in transcending her or himself, who is therefore considered a parasite or a scrounger, a coward. She who is not able to fit the hero role — the entrepreneur, the creative individual — who is not able to perform the heroic gesture, is discarded, discredited, neglected, forgotten, and blamed for not trying hard enough, for not wanting it enough.

• Elise van Mourik: With or without you - Artistic strategies to rethink participation and publicness. The works that will be produced during this research period will address neoliberalism as a practice and particularly the concept of 'open relationships that sits at its core. Since the liberalization of the economy from its traditional political, ethical and cultural entanglements, neoliberal thinking has introduced flexibility beyond merely an economical concept. Whereas it allowed for more open terms for laissez-faire capitalism and free market policies in the course of globalizing trade, today its philosophy characterizes many other types of relationships: between governments, enterprises, institutions and individuals, all of which are under pressure of becoming more flexible and independent as well. This ranges from for example entrepreneurship in favor of class mobility, ideologically, to shaping more flexible working conditions, practically; via free-lance contracts or open office landscapes that accommodate both work and leisure.

This research aims to critically rethink those new flexible bonds. It focusses on how neoliberalism normalizes attitudes towards work and the self, discourages collectivism in favor of individual freedom, and fundamentally challenges “what a relationship is” by promoting the concept of independence over that of mutual responsibility. Neoliberal thinking does not merely stretch the terms but puts the notion of participation itself into question. The open relationship it proposes goes beyond a form of moral lenience empowered by its transgressive flexibility between cultural, political and economical interests, but is the capacity of a system of (social) production to function independently from any unexpected or original or outside events; to function as an autonomous scenario in and of itself that no longer requires decision-making, attention, in other words; participation. Or: what would be a play without the need for a public?

Method: This research envisions to approach the subject as a political-architectural concept, considering the open, the autonomous, or the flexible as spatio-political terms that can be reflected upon by artistic strategies between the author, the work and the public. The research will take place on the intersection of architecture, the arts, and performance studies, and will draw notions from political philosophy. It aims to rediscover the bond that publicness has with the artistic work. The research will be conducted within the artistic practice by experimenting with open, closed, remote or connected ways of situating a public via script-related works such as scenario’s, performances, scenographies, and designs of space each questioning its relation with the public via different degrees of distance.

• Carl Haase: How can the abstraction of communication strategies lead to a better understanding into the flexibilities and interpretation of language use?  The research’s original position or core function has been in the mass collection and abstractions of the various modern communication strategies we in our Western Culture use in our day to day lives. The mass collection acts as a way of mapping or analysing the realities and range of meanings, which in turn will generate different searchable patterns. The abstraction can be understood as the breaking down of essential information into its most rudimentary and meaningful structure. This in turn allows for continuous storylines that emerge from vast data points. Currently, the result is four defined case studies developed through organizing international collaborations with other research based artists, designers that have been working within the subject of the playing off of how to visualize the origins of modern communication to how we could visualize the flexibility of these structures. As everything around us is in a continuous discourse, the research has introduced one way in which to examine our relationship with our surroundings, with others and our shared society.