Lectures

Building and breaking structures - Calais refugee camp
Monday 13 February, 19:40 - 20:25
Aula Rector Dhanis

Senior lecturer at SAUL Grainne Hassett will present her work Building and Breaking Structures at the Calais Refugee camp. In August 2015, Grainne founded The Calais Builds project, and to date has designed, organised and built some of the major community infrastructure of the Calais Refugee Camp. Grainne will discuss the building and breaking of many systems of social and collective organisation in the camp. She will explain how she has stepped into the political and ethical void surrounding the refugee camp, and developed a way of building in very difficult circumstances essential facilities at the camp such as the Women and Children's Centre, Youth Centre, Community Centre and the Vaccination centre. This is a story of architecture and building without budgets, without political will, without a future, and without hope, devoid entirely of the utopian hubris surrounding architecture, but for people.

Displacing Design
Monday 13 February, 20:25 - 21:10
Aula Rector Dhanis

What is the place of design? Where does it belong? What does it mean to be a faculty of design sciences? According Max Borka, former director of the Interieur Biennale, founder of Mapping the Design World, co-founder of DAMn° magazine, and director of the state of DESIGN, BERLIN festival – design first and foremost has to displace itself, away from the comfort zone of its power centres, before it can tackle one of its  most urgent missions: to design for the displaced:  “Mapping and State of DESIGN aim for a radical redrawing of the global design map, based on totally different criteria. Tomorrow’s best design is often the offshoot of what is held in contempt by today’s ruling classes. As the grand old man of radical and anti-design, the late Ettore Sottsass, used to say: true innovation comes from outcasts, from places that reach from Afghanistan to Zambia. And when it is still to be found in design’s glamorous power centres, London, New York, or Milan – it most often comes from the unsophisticated and hungry living in the suburbs and periphery, such as whores and pimps, the displaced and refugees, unhindered as they are by the canons of good manners and taste, knowledge and tradition.” (http://www.stateofdesign.berlin)

Lunch lecture by Mathijs Provoost
Tuesday 14 February, 12:30 - 13:00
Campus Mutsaard, K1.6

Nonverbal communication (NVC) is the richest way for people to emotionally express themselves. However, in computer-mediated communication (CMC) NVC is underused. People in long-distance relationships (LDRs) already have adaptive behaviour through CMC. What if you don’t have a story to tell? While CMC is considered to be less ideal, LDRs still have a tendency to disclose more intimacy, closeness and relatedness to each other than non-LDRs. As CMC has been mainly designed for business purposes, there is an opportunity to target relatedness experiences and a challenge to find inter-relatedness of the daily activities of LDRs while living in displacement.

CMC can empower people to possible new communication experiences rather than providing simulations of actual reality or just being mobile devices on an experiential level. The presentation includes a broad range of meaningful experiences and stories, achieved via adaptations to nonverbal CMC, about feeling related at a distance.

Lunch lecture by Alexandra Deschamps Sonsino
Wednesday 15 February, 12:30 - 13:00
Campus Mutsaard, K1.6

We live in a society that is very centered on user needs, but a particular user. Alexandra will talk about designing for society and culture and the role a designer needs to take in a space that is more and more challenging and requires a real sense of entrepreneurship.

Evening lecture by Julian Lewis
Wednesday 15 February, 19:00
Campus Mutsaard, K1.6

Julian is director of architecture, urban design and landscape practice East and has extensive experience of developing ideas, design and research as well as project implementation on a wide range of building, landscape and urban design projects. He is interested in how places influence architecture and the designed public realm, and what role architecture can have in cities. Julian will present recent work and ideas by East aimed at bringing public space and use to the foreground of the changing city.

Lunch lecture by Dries Rodet and Charlotte Truwant
Thursday 16 February, 12:30 - 13:00
Campus Mutsaard, K1.6

The young Swiss/Belgian office(s) Charlotte Truwant & Dries Rodet architects share an important part of their work.  Although not all the projects are the fruit of a reciprocal collaboration, they have a common interest and responsibility to define their position as architects operating in a fragile and complex environment.

Both are continuously investigating the confrontation between the building/the object and its specific surroundings. Their projects are abstract spatial ideas that crystallize as compact architectural objects in dialogue with their environment. They believe that architecture is no longer the foreground and landscape the background, but both are continuously searching for a possible equilibrium.

They will present projects that attempt to formalize the encounter between the universal and the specific, the abstract and the specific, space and place.

Lunch lecture by Stefano Mirti and Fosca Salvi
Friday 17 February, 12:30 - 13:00
Campus Mutsaard, K1.6

In our current world, to know how a digital community works it is quite an interesting skill / knowledge. Dynamics, tacit and explicit hierarchies, content production, relational issues… ...design in the age of social media, or better: teaching in the age of Instagram.

We will present our experience with digital communities and MOOCs (massive on-line open courses). Online courses born as experiments in which teachers together with the students wanted to learn how to conceive and develop a course only using social media and digital tools.