Vormgeving

Led by designer and educator Catelijne van Middlekoop, Studio Moonshots is a fluid environment that fosters critical thinking alongside design processes and creative output within the context of communication, visual culture, media and technology. The studio’s students often possess broad interests and a general fascination with visual, cultural and digital media or specific craft-based phenomena.

Tools such as graphic design, film and (visual/written/ programming) language are used to conceptualize ideas and make them presentable and understandable to others. Students are encouraged to extend their work field/scope beyond the digital and into the physical domain. Curiosity in and a solid understanding of both digital and technological developments at large is required.

In a continuously changing world which is becoming more and more complex and in which the role of the designer as well as design are constantly questioned, critical thinking and self-reflection are two essential competencies. These will be addressed in all aspects of the studio’s activities.

Led by designer Jelle Zijlstra, Studio Turn Around! sees the system of mass waste production created by our consumption patterns as the main challenge for designers today. We must find ways to move towards a circular society: a circular society can be achieved by utilising new technologies. These developments allow us to rethink and rebuild the lost connections between human needs, technology and planet Earth.

‘Turn Around!’ refers to the need to work towards a systemic change in our industrialised society as well as to circularity and the drive to investiagte what this really means for industry, for design and for society. The machinery of industrial production can’t function without the circular movement of turbines, axles, cogs and wheels. Currently, the outcome tends to be linear: a system of take - make - waste, with profit and wealth as ultimate goals. Moving away from this to think in circles seems to require a shift of mindset, an awareness of long-term outcomes and how parts of the global system are interconnected.

Studio Turn Around! will ask students to consider their position as a designer in relation to these ideas. How can the individual help create and strengthen the awareness needed for circularity? What will inspire people to aim for value and well-being instead of profit and wealth? How can we make things – and people – turn around?

Led by artist Irene Droogleever Fortuyn, Studio Urgencies views design as a positive profession contributing to questions and challenges in different contexts and on different scales. With the current scientific understanding that energy is the fundamental particle, not matter, it makes perfect sense to include the flow and exchange of energy in the process and outcome of a design practice. Combined with the knowledge that the researcher is part of the research and the awareness that all is part of an interconnected ecosystem, this creates a fantastic playground for designers of the future to contribute to the challenges of this era.

Studio Urgencies offers a challenging and adventurous programme with questioning, imagining, making, mapping, exchanging, researching, exhibiting, interacting and designing at its core. It aims to help students discover and develop their responsiveness to and interaction with the world around them, within a safe learning environment that supports personal and professional development.

The key skills of a Studio Urgencies student include endurance and persistence, curiosity and openness, a strong sense of ethics and aesthetics and a keen environmental and social awareness. The ability to observe, listen, question and reflect before formulating an opinion is crucial.

Led by designer Mario Minale, The Invisible Studio works with the invisible processes behind the material world, from manufacturing and prototyping to policymaking and self-designing potentialities. The Invisible Studio also works with the invisible processes behind creativity and innovation, using body consciousness and practicing mindfulness. Through the observation of visible patterns we study symbols, images, myths, archetypes and eschatologies.

Inspirations are systems and ecological design, lo-fi theory and permaculture principles. We prototype and develop production tools. We are open to feedback in every phase of the process. We constantly exercise improvisational skills to help reframe mindsets. Transdisciplinarity and biodiversity are our sources as well as our aims.

Traditionally, design was linked to objects and to technological change, to the individual, to the market and to being carried out by experts. But over the last decade it has turned towards a user-centred approach – situated, interactive, collaborative, participatory, focused on the production of human experience and life itself.

Led by designer Thomas Lommée, The Morning Studio positions design as a tool for connection and healing through protest, engagement and change. Being in sync with what surrounds us, being embedded within a community, being at ease with ourselves – these conditions have been eroded by a dogma that celebrates the individual, stimulates overall competition and commodifies just about everything it can lay its hands upon.

Within The Morning Studio, students will focus on concepts and ideas that counter this fragmentation by focusing on projects that have the potential to reconnect and mend. Together, we will create projects that are at times humble and other times bold, but always straightforward, directed towards everyday life and focussed on long-term implementation. In doing so, The Morning Studio aims to use design as a tool for constructive protest and collective action, opposing by proposing, calm but engaged, patient but stubborn, as a group if we can, fully autonomous if we must. At times with humour and irony, but always with great attention and care.

Students taking part in The Morning Studio should be driven by a desire for change, a strong interest in collectivity and collaboration, and a strong interest in the mundanities and extraordinary occurrences in everyday life.