Workshop Eindhoven 4.9.10, mapping “silence”
Designing household energy practices
Our Social Spaces collegues Virginia Tassinari and Nik Baerten were part of Designing household energy practices. A “non-conference” bringing together designers, companies and academics “.…beyond awareness raising and formal education for sustainability, how could the affordance of products support new and more sustainable ways of living? After giving visibility to energy flows, how can design help to rethink the basic interactions with our domestic environment to scripting practices that requires less energy?” More information on this event, you can find here.
It has been an exciting week with the Cumulus conference coming to Genk. I will report on this conference more thoroughly soon, but first I want to congratulate our collegue Virginia Tassinari that she has been elected to be part of the Cumulus board. Two times a year she will, together with designers and thinkers all over the world, meet and exchange practices and knowledge.
Cultural Probes and Pecha Kucha (20.6.10). A little report.
Our Social Spaces researchers had an active day yesterday making and sharing stories about their research and personal work and experiences. We joined a workshop on Cultural Probes and a Pecha Kucha evening.
MAPit (workshop: hands on) at i-beta festival, Heerlen (11.06)
Social Spaces will be present at the i-beta festival in Heerlen at the 11th of June to present MAPit, a mapping toolkit to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogues and creation processes. The mapping kit answers to the fact that people from different profiles, backgrounds and expertise do not necessarily share the same ‘language’. Adding a visual layer, that is open and adjustable to all participants, creates a different dialogue and enables everyone to join the conversation. Via the toolkit a group of people visualises thoughts and ideas in a playful way and in that way stimulates and guides cross-disciplinary creation processes. MAPit uses an open-source set of icons indicating people, things, activities. Empty icons are also available to create new icons during discussions. In this way, icons can be added and adjusted, implying that the system is never complete and is open to iterative refinement. The MAPit toolkit also contains ’strange’ or critical icons, like ‘bombs’ and ‘locks’, allowing people to disagree and enabling them to risk a step on uncommon ground, which is more conductive to creativity. On the i_beta event, we will discuss the role of mapping toolkits in moderating cross-disciplinary creation processes in the field of e-culture and creative industries. We will also work with our own MAPit toolkit, exploring the roles of creativity and e-culture in (the future of) the Meuse-Rhine Euregion.
More information on this project here
puntKom #4 – Your textile or mine? A workshop on smart, interactive & social textiles
The fourth puntKom (puntKom is a series of informal evenings on culture, technology, design,…) will be a hands-on evening on smart/ interactive /social textiles.puntKom #4 is held on the 11th of March at the Media & Design Academy in Genk. The evening starts at 18.45h and ends at 22h.
(We can only allow up to 15 people to register for each workshop. Do not hesitate to do so…)
puntKom is a mix of crispy lectures, tasty workshops, bite-sized performances and yummy demos. In short, a meeting place for you (yes, You!), passionate about media, culture, design and technology! It is organised by the Master Program Communication & MultimediaDesign.
Previous puntKom sessions:
Next puntKom sessions: