Workshops

By Beste Ozcan & Valerio Sperati

“You know that feeling of being at a concert when everyone’s singing together, and you suddenly feel euphoric? Or looking over the edge of a canyon and getting goosebumps? Or standing among giant, ancient trees and feeling that your own life is just a tiny blip in the world? These are all experiences of awe, wonderful and often overwhelming.” – Dacher Keltner

Inspired by encounters that shift our perspective, critical reflection can lead to life-changing insights. GOOSEBUMPS X introduces a new paradigm, uniting diverse visions to achieve complementary outcomes. "Goosebumps" refers to the body's involuntary response to intense emotions, like awe, excitement, or wonder. This workshop explores how inducing goosebumps can become a coping mechanism, offering lighthearted moments and joy even in challenging times. 

For instance, GOOSEBUMPS X builds on insights from the previous workshop, “Design Against Taboo – DAT”. The DAT workshop gathered students from diverse backgrounds to confront difficult, often taboo subjects such as the body, sex, death, gender, and mental or sexual diversity. (Watch: Design Against Taboo).

GOOSEBUMPS X seeks to creatively and artistically transform uncomfortable or painful emotions into euphoric experiences of awe. Students from various backgrounds will collaborate to design and build a multisensorial immersive space, “AWEscape,” where visitors can immerse themselves in sensations that evoke goosebumps.

By Romain Iff, Pierre Musy & Michel Kessler

Xenia, an architecture collective centered on the concept of hospitality and the inclusion of the foreign in the broadest sense, invites students to create an experimental environment inspired by Expanded Cinema. The workshop aims to dematerialize traditional architectural concepts, replacing them with fluid, ephemeral structures that invite performative and participatory interactions.

Drawing inspiration from Tjebbe van Tijen’s Corpocinema and the Eventstructure Research Group, we will investigate the possibilities of inflatable structures, projected imagery, and interactive scenography. At the heart of the workshop is the concept of the "Movie Drones," a multi-layered cinematic experience where visitors encounter dozens of simultaneous projections. These projections merge into an overwhelming visual and sonic tapestry, a collective portrait of the city, turning the individual image into part of a shared sensory narrative. Against the backdrop of an increasingly atomized social media reality, Expanded Architecture provides a shared framework to transform fragmented information into a collective experience.

This experience will serve as a space for experimentation and collective transcendence, where the boundaries between film, architecture, and public space dissolve. By blending cinematic material with spatial interventions, the workshop seeks to transform architecture into a living, breathing medium for storytelling and shared rituals.

The goal is to explore how public space can become a stage for architectural and cinematic experimentation, creating transformative experiences that reimagine the relationship between the individual, the collective, and the city itself in a joyful way.

By Xander Wilhelm & Celeste Tellarini

In an era of food delivery and individuality, we propose a journey back to the primary act of sharing a meal. We aim to reimagine the picnic as an act of coming together and celebrating our shared spaces, where the preparatory work necessary to the final event is as crucial as the event itself. Planning, coordinating, discussing, solving and inventing are in fact already part of the ritual.

The picnic, a timeless tradition, serves as our canvas. It represents a low-threshold, accessible way to break free from our domestic routines and engage with each other, experiment with other ways of performing ordinary actions and take a break from the hectic everyday obligations. The workshop will explore the art and science of picnicking, viewing it through the lens of design. We will start by evaluating the specific characteristics of mobile dining equipment, how it differs from our everyday household objects and experiences.

The focus will be an investigation of a series of tools that enable temporary inhabitation. Participants will develop innovative ideas for picnic equipment along the topics of transportation, seating, cutlery, weather protection, playing and entertaining. Our goal is to create tools and utensils that serve practical purposes but also think beyond our traditional understandings. Something as simple as a picnic will provide us with many questions not only on social interactions but on sustainability, cultural biases and the limits of design.

During the workshop we will explore different categories of tools and facilitators, developing ideas through prototypes. The final day will be a picnic, a joyful moment in which the daily camping equipment will be tried and tested during the event.

By Büsra Köroglu & Lina Stefanova (Kostoff)

Carnival! A trope attempting to become the weld between architecture and public. They become both creators and observers, playing the dual roles of participant and spectator in a carnival-like setting. 

This workshop is an experiment, a space of possibility, a place for critical exchange and joyful discussion, where the everyday can be celebrated. Rather than wearing masks on our faces, the surfaces of the city will be dressed up to create artefacts of a different nature. Inspired by Erasmus de Bie's painting Carnival Floats on the Meir Square in Antwerp, the participants will focus on a series of architectural elements from the cityscape. 

We will be using different methods of dressing up such as layering, wrapping up, camouflaging, covering to reimagine a carnival scene in Antwerp. This workshop aims to employ an experiential, collaborative, and multi-disciplinary approach, encouraging participants to critically engage with architecture through creative play, dialogue, and hands-on experimentation. The method carnival is a metaphor of whimsicality and mode of transforming the public space into a space of possibility, where participants can explore new forms of thinking.

By Franziska Käuferle & Sergey Kolesov

​It is all about the clash. More precisely the clash of two icons, the Old Masters and the New Friends.

The carefully selected paintings of the Old Masters will teach us something about space, light and atmosphere. The students will recreate and complete the missing part of the space that is shown in the painting. It will be translated into a plain white model without any texture or characteristics on its own.

Then it is time to introduce the New Friends. These friends will have a strong identity and language of their own and will come from a completely different, more recent era. They will teach us about colour, materiality and zeitgeist and will deal with the surfaces of a room. The two icons will be combined, the clash. The identity of the New Friend will be adopted, further interpreted and applied on the Old Masters. The result of this workshop is unpredictable and the outcome will be quite whimsical.

By Filipa Alves

Around us there is a world of unseen wonders, hidden just beyond the reach of the naked eye. A dive into the microcosmos reveals a universe of intricate structures, vibrant colours, and mesmerising patterns. Within a single drop of water, delicate microorganisms move with elegant precision, while the complex geometry of a butterfly's wing or the cellular structure of a leaf unfold in astonishing detail.

What seems chaotic at the surface often transforms into an ordered realm where natural beauty thrives on scales imperceptible to us. This hidden dimension, brimming with unexpected beauty and complexity, serves as both a reminder of nature's endless creativity and a source of inspiration, offering a fresh lens through which we can explore design, art, and our relation to the natural world.

This interdisciplinary workshop invites students to playfully explore the unseen beauty of the microscopic world as a source of inspiration for their creative works. Through hands-on sessions using microscopes to observe biological samples, students will collect images, translate these visuals into design concepts, and develop projects ranging from artworks to conceptual designs or three-dimensional models at different scales.

The week will be organised around the following activities:
a) Brief introduction to microscopy and nature-inspired design.
b) Collecting samples from the local environment (e.g., leaves, flowers, minerals, water, soil) and preparing the materials for observation.
c) Capturing and documenting microscopic images to be used for the rest of the workshop.
d) Translating these images into design concepts through sketching, ideation, and interdisciplinary discussions and collaboration.
e) Refining concepts, model-making and prototyping.
f) Preparing the final exhibition, showcasing the students’ unique interpretations of the microscopic world.

We expect that this workshop will inspire participants to view the microscopic world not just as a source of wonder and curiosity but also as an endless source of creative potential, reinforcing nature’s interconnections with art, design, the built environment, and ultimately with our own cultural heritage.

By Wendy Wuyts & Esther Vandamme

In the “Raw Material Vision” workshop, participants will embark on an immersive sensory journey exploring the potential of renewable materials such as hemp, reclaimed timber, and biopolymers. Set in the year 2050, this workshop aims to challenge conventional design paradigms by integrating eco-materials into futuristic design practices. Participants will begin their journey with a forest bath, engaging with the natural environment to discover the unique textures, colours, and shapes of these materials. This sensory experience will foster a playful and whimsical approach to material exploration, encouraging participants to embrace unpredictability and creativity. 

The workshop will also incorporate elements of science fiction, allowing participants to transcend current societal, technological, and economic limitations. By crafting a science fiction love story set in 2050, participants will explore relationality and the emotional connections between humans and materials.
Throughout the workshop, interdisciplinary groups of students will collaborate to create 3D objects using these eco-materials. This hands-on approach will challenge academic norms and encourage deep reflections on shared values across disciplines such as planning, architecture, design, and cultural heritage.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a deeper understanding of the potential of sustainable materials and their role in shaping a more sustainable and imaginative future. The workshop will culminate in a small exhibition where participants will present their science fiction writing and 3D prototypes, sparking curiosity and inviting others to dream of wondrous futures that defy convention and embrace the unpredictable.
This workshop not only aims to inspire innovative design thinking but also to foster a sense of wonder and playfulness in the exploration of eco-materials, ultimately contributing to a more sustainable and imaginative future.

By Juliana Berglund-Brown & Robbe Pacquée

Reusing existing materials is a key strategy in reducing the environmental impact of the built environment. Practices of reuse often lead to whimsical results; as designers assemble existing elements with different stories into a new whole, the usual design process turns topsy-turvy, and the designer must embrace unpredictability. Yet practices of reuse remain scarce, and the existing extraction paradigm prevails. A key friction in this process is the way we assign value to our constructed environment. This workshop will challenge students to develop a broader understanding of value, including the social and environmental value existing materials hold.

On a conceptual level, the workshop will focus on three themes:

(1) How do we assign value to the materials, products, and buildings around us? We’ll explore the influence of time, culture, memory, and ownership. We’ll identify the limits of current value systems and explore alternatives through critical theory.
(2) How do these values shift when we reuse existing parts of our environment? Connecting values over time, we’ll explore concepts such as spolia, and the as found.
(3) How could a more holistic understanding of value change the way we design?

We’ll address these themes by finding synergy between perspectives from different visual arts. Specifically, we’ll address questions of re-use through the lens of ready-made, a 20th-century modern art movement. Working exclusively with found objects and assembling them in minimally invasive ways, this movement offers a multitude of alternative perspectives on value. Each student’s contribution will be of great value in this interdisciplinary exploration of environmental and social sustainability. The workshop is conceived as a mix of radical conceptual exercises and working hands-on with reclaimed materials. We’ll focus on active discussion between students and stimulate peer learning across disciplines. We’ll kick off each morning with a lecture and a short radical exercise in small groups, confusing on conceptual exploration. In the afternoon we’ll work on a week-long building exercise, gaining hands-on experience and finding joy in working with reclaimed materials.

In the spirit of Ready-made, we aim at running a no-waste workshop. We’ll exclusively work with existing materials. Any large-scale assembly will be deconstructed at the end of the workshop. The materials will be returned to the sender.

By Roland Fuhrmann & Phoebe Blackburn

Hats are a rewarding field for free creativity. And yet, historical associations prevail:power, social status, disguise, religion, gender... What vision of the future can we draw with this object? A hat transports to another dimension - both its wearer and its viewers. Whether it's a crown, a steel helmet or a pirate tricorn. Hats have an inherent magic: they are whimsical, things can be conjured out of them, the wearer of a magic hat can also disappear. Hats are a sign of self-expression, emancipation and can bestow superpowers. By wearing different hats, your perspective metaphorically changes too. Our theme brings everything under one hat: design, fashion, architecture and art. A hat is a shelter, a kind of wearable architecture that protects and conveys messages at the same time. Hats are featured in art: from Rubens and Vermeer to Vigée Le Brun, Magritte and Beuys, art became a trendsetter for hat fashions.

There are no limits to the design of this wearable artwork, only its weight, because it has to fit on your head. Your hats should be made from waste materials and packaging as a source of ideas, sourced locally. On a planet with finite resources, using the materials we have around us is a necessity. However, your hat can also contain electronic and mechanical devices as well as light, sound, water, plants and animals. In our day, hats can function as camouflage to deflect video surveillance, and protection against radiation. The hat could be a message to the skies - for birds or aliens.

We are using the fun factor inherent in hats, inspiring students to present a whimsical vision of the future on their head.
Act I Planning
Students are split into 3-4 mixed discipline groups. Starting from a problematic of the
group's choice, students choose a theme for their hat.
Joint visit to the local skip to look for suitable, inspiring materials and objects
Sketches, collages and designs for the hat structures
Act II Realisation
Interdisciplinary, collaborative construction of the hat structures; existing hats or
construction helmets can be used as a basis.
Act III Performing and Sharing
Hatwalk: finished hats worn by students in a whimsical show at a public space in Antwerp
Production of a short video to be shared on social media
Publication of a pdf showing student hat creations with a description.

By Susana Piquer Villaverde & Giovanna Giampetruzzi

This workshop has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.

In an era where future narratives often lean towards cautionary tales, this workshop invites master’s students to explore a different kind of future—a future imbued with whimsy and imagination. Our focus will be on the ideation, design, and proposal of new utopian spaces that reflect a vibrant and positive outlook, leveraging the power of whimsicality to inspire and captivate. Participants will embark on a creative journey to conceive spaces that challenge conventional boundaries and embrace playful, innovative concepts. By integrating elements of fantasy, surrealism, and unconventional design principles, the workshop aims to cultivate a vision of the future that is not only aspirational but also profoundly engaging. To do so successfully, we will need the approach of students from different fields.

The process will involve brainstorming sessions, collaborative design exercises, and the development of detailed proposals for utopian environments. Emphasis will be placed on exploring how whimsicality can infuse both function and form, leading to spaces that stimulate joy, curiosity, and wonder. Students will learn to incorporate elements such as imaginative materials, fantastical forms, and interactive features that defy traditional expectations.

Ultimately, the workshop seeks to shift perceptions of the future from the mundane to the magical, demonstrating how whimsical design can offer both practical and emotional benefits. By the end, participants will have crafted compelling, visionary proposals for spaces that not only inspire but also foster a sense of hope and possibility for a brighter, more imaginative world.

By Maxime Szyf

Remembering the loss of loved-ones, when tears of sadness change into moments of thankful joy. Let’s think with a younger creative generation about loss and sadness.. Most memories are happy and positive, but we need a catalyst to remember with joy and whimsicality.. We will work on solutions, services, products, interactions, … for all moments of loss, with respect and empathy in order to remember with a smile.

Everybody has been or will be confronted with loss. We will dive into these personal experiences in order to possible find points of contact. We will research the context from all perspectives and dimensions, in order to fire up discussions on limits, possibilities, systems, feelings, touchpoints… The broadness of these touchpoints will offer a wide spectrum of solutions in all expertise fields of the students.

SAYING GOODBYE WITH A SMILE is a whimsical research in what is perceived as sad and dark. However over time (days, weeks, months, years) the memories become lighter which is a sign that the mourning process is having its effect. Solace through smiles and laughter. We will dive into the processes/process life cycles (pun intended), researching stakeholders to be able to empathise with loss (Are we ourselves stakeholders? Have we (students and tutors) been confronted with loss - sudden or expected - and what have we learned?) The approach for the group is to think as a design office, and sharing all insights, discussing opportunities, showing progress in thinking and solutions, preparing a group presentation/experience.

Interaction, co-creation, Triple diamond approach (analyse, create, realise), daily interaction and presentation of progress in
group in order to progress together in thinking about how far we can or should go in this taboo topic.

​www.duurzaamafscheid.be​
​www.soulace.be​

By Susanne Pietsch

We only ever see part of the world with our eyes. The rest is completed by our mind. We think we know the city around us because we have learned how it works. But what if this familiar logic is just a simple way of seeing? What if we are deceiving ourselves and not seeing everything?


Perhaps parallel worlds exist that unfold in the moments when we look away? Perhaps beyond our perception things continue quite differently than we have been taught to believe.

Picture the elevation of a house. You think you know what happens around the corner– but what if what you believe is only an illusion? Perhaps what we see is just a flat backdrop. And that back door that seems to lead to the courtyard? What if it opens the gate to another world? Behind the stone slab of a façade, there is obviously structure and insulation. But who knows? Maybe someone lives there. Or a whole series of beings in a world of another scale. Wasn't that electrical box a little further to the left yesterday?

We all know the stories of hidden worlds that exist outside our view or come to life when we are asleep. We used to believe in such things when we were little. Have we really learned so much better since then? Or have we simply lost an ability for illusion, and with it a world that was much richer? Panamarenko, the Antwerp artist, dreamt all his life of building a flying machine that he could lift off with. And he never lost sight of this goal. His determination was stronger than his ratio, creating an entire universe of objects. The capacity of imagination is an enormous power.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if things were less fixed than we think? If the world were not only what we know for sure, but also what we can imagine? In this workshop, we will explore the invisible dimensions of the city. We will go in search of moments that hint at the transition between reality and fantasy and transpose these into models that reveal their secret dimension. We will create our own interpretations, our own perspective on reality and space, the architecture of the unseen, and bring these into the school by means that feel adequate, for example large models, drawings and stories, poems or anything in between.

By Annelies Vaneycken

This workshop on whimsicality draws inspiration from visionary creatives who, throughout his-tory, have imagined and worked towards radical and positive transformations of the world. These pioneers didn’t just imagine a better future—they actively pursued it. One such figure is Constant Nieuwenhuys, who envisioned humanity evolving into Homo Ludens—a playful, crea-tive being liberated from work and boundaries (Nieuwenhuys, 1974). His New Babylon project (1959-74) embodied this vision, driven by the belief that architecture* itself could provoke pro-found transformations in daily life (Lefebvre, 1997).

In this workshop, we will critically engage with Nieuwenhuys’ ideas to develop new, whimsical visionary narratives, where design becomes a catalyst for developing joyful, humorous, uncon-ventional, and playful situations.

Pedagogical Approach:
1. Research: The first workshop phase begins by observing (fieldwork), contextualizing, and analyzing an existing societal challenge and closes with an imagination session to envision a more whimsical alternative.
2. Creative Writing: The students will then engage in a creative writing workshop, play-fully exploring their whimsical visions in narrative form.
3. Materialization: The narratives developed will serve as the foundation for a chosen form of materialization—whether within the participant’s own discipline or, inspired by interdis-ciplinary exchange, through experimentation with new forms.
4. Publication and Presentation: In the final phase, the students will compile their work into a collective publication and prepare its presentation.

Throughout these four phases, daily group discussions will encourage students to share ideas, stimulate critical thinking, and refine their creative processes.
While the final publication showcases a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, the primary fo-cus of interdisciplinary exchange will occur during the workshop process itself.

By Ji Zhang & Wenjun Deng

In the contemporary context, where visual aesthetics are increasingly prioritized due to the influence of graphic media and the extensive use of digital tools in the design process, tolerance is often reduced to a corrective measure aimed at achieving a purified image of the designer’s intention. However, the ongoing climate and political crises urge us to reconsider this obsession with perfection and return to working with raw and local materials as well as traditional methods, where tolerance takes on physical forms and becomes a visible part of craftsmanship. Elements such as corner cleats in woodworking or stitching in textiles demonstrate how tolerance can be integrated into, and even celebrated within, the final work.

To encourage students to adopt a whimsical design attitude that acknowledges and celebrates imperfection in response to the growing complexities of our environment, we propose a workshop inviting students to rethink tolerance as a strategic design element—an opportunity for inclusive and resilient design.

The workshop follows four stages: Recognition, Reflection, Reimagination, and Representation. In the first stage, students will receive a presentation on tolerance across various fields, then explore the campus as a given site to document instances of tolerance in the built and natural environment. In the Reflection stage, students will work in small groups to study the factors driving tolerance in these examples, visualizing and presenting the rationale behind them. In the Reimagination stage, students will analyze inconsistencies and propose alternative approaches to address these confrontations. Finally, in the Representation stage, groups will materialize their ideas, creating a collective landscape of tolerances, where these elements are made visible and appreciated as expressions of the underlying mechanism as well as autonomous design subjects.
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By Archita Bandyopadhyay & Meera Vasudev

Inspired by the Fluxus movement of the 1960’s this workshop would be a collaborative journey of learning and unlearning, breaking out of normative patterns, speculating and experiencing the familiar with unfamiliar processes and bringing forth the playful, eccentric and absurd/quirky versions of the self.

The Weasley twins from Harry Potter created extendable ears to eavesdrop on conversations. Edward Scissorhands could prune gardens. Mr Fantastic would physically stretch, reform and deform around problems. The fictional world is full of amusing devices that allow changing size, duplication, flight, healing abilities, and time travel amongst others. Essentially, they transform and empower the body when worn.
Through Henri Levebfre’s Rhythmanalysis as a starting point, students will be guided into a sensorial exploration of the university campus to consciously embody various social interactions with people, plants, trees, birds, insects and animals in their everyday setting. We will map the existing associations with the various elements - of kinship and endearment, of distance and aversion, of care and responsibility. The mapping will lead to the design of devices and cyborgian extensions which may brazenly exaggerate or understate these associations.
We will design Whim-kits (like the flux kits) which will contain these devices that are to be held, worn, read, performed and modified. This in-turn will allow for an unconventional seeing, reading and exploring of everyday rituals in familiar settings.

These devices will act as elements that mediate between body and space, with the body as the unit of measure and as a tool that reshapes, modifies and creates spaces and experiences. These explorations might alter, heighten, or deconstruct one’s self perception, how one engages with nature and people, and one’s understanding of the body as a complex container in relation to environments.