LIKE EVERY YEAR, DAE STIMULATES TALENTED STUDENTS THROUGH AWARDS AND GRANTS, FUNDED BY DIFFERENT FUNDS AND PARTNERS. THIS GRADUATION SHOW (OPEN 17 – 25TH OCTOBER 2015) THE 4 WINNERS OF THE KEEP AN EYE GRANT WILL BE ANNOUNCED.
KEEP AN EYE GRANT:
Keep an Eye Grant is awarded to develop talent in the creative field to students with a vision for their talent and future career. The grant is an initiative by the Keep an Eye Foundation, www.keepaneye.nl.
WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO MEET THE NOMINATED STUDENTS:
This week: the two Contextual Design master students and one Social Design master student nominated for the Keep an Eye Grant and the Gijs Bakker Award. For the full list of nominees and more information about the grants and awards, see awards 2015
Eva Jäger & Guillemette Legrand | The Era of Khaki Ethics
MA Contextual Design
In the Era of Khaki Ethics, ethics are blurred toward a new mental state, where people can feel comfortable with contradiction and multiplicity rather than adopting simple extremes.
Eva Jäger and Guillemette Legrand are design strategists that have collaborated on The Era of Khaki Ethics. Born from a thesis that explores how shifting binaries of ethics create possibilities for a new design context, The Era of Khaki Ethics establishes a theoretical and visual framework to anticipate, interpret, and create in a world defined by the Extreme Present. Jäger and Legrand carried out a series of activations to produce creative content for a ‘khaki’ era.
This year-long project has thus far resulted in lecture-performances, design briefings, site specific installations and a creative platform, khakiera.com. This online platform expands the scope and logic of the project with additional cross-disciplinary collaborations with a number of creative professionals, in fields ranging from sound design to policy making. Jäger and Legrand invite design practitioners, theorists, organizers, and companies, to use the platform in a similar way.
Allison Crank | The Reality Theatre: Shopping in the Ludic Century
MA Contextual Design
“Shopping is a public performance. Stores are theatres where you can be both performer and spectator. What if we designed stores as stages? What if shopping were a script for new stories?
Shopping architecture is the most common form of a ‘third place’: a space for public activities where you can see and be seen. However, with the rise of online shopping and cyberspace shops and malls are facing rapid obsolescence. To counter this, I propose that stores should be transformed into playgrounds for experiences, where consumers become actors with the ability to perform, spectate, play and indulge themselves in the environment.
To reflect the wants and needs of people in this age of spectacle and play, this ‘Ludic century’, I designed the Reality Theatre, a prediction of the next urban shopping machine, an experience stager of limitless possibilities.
The Reality Theater is a new third place. Architecture, props, clothing and even movement are augmented and celebrate virtuality. Realms blend with other realms, linked by an escalator that frames the view. Virtual movement allows the visitor to consume the space as spectacle and animation.
I also designed an experience that allows you to visit this virtual world in the form of a VR play: a narrative that gives life to this fiction and lets you see how the Reality Theatre works.
You assume the role of Ms. Smith, who is shopping for a chair in the Reality Theatre, from the moment she enters, to her interactions with the designer, to when she leaves.
I leave it up to the viewers to immerse themselves in the virtual stage and performance.”
Jessica Smarsch | Constructing Connectivity – Designing with Body Movement
MA Social Design
“Constructing Connectivity uses mind-body engagement to create volumes and textures in textile. Movement is an essential part of human emotion and creative work is known to produce positive feelings. Constructing Connectivity combines expressive body movement with digital, interactive processes to create designs for industrial production.
Constructing Connectivity is a thesis about bodily actions and the level of mind-body connectivity achievable through the textile making process. In this thesis, textiles become a medium and metaphor for connectivity. In critical making, we not only produce a physical outcome (design), we engage in a conscious/unconscious dance between ourselves and our tactile world. The state of body and mind synchronicity fosters prolonged periods of connectivity while also creating opportunities for conscious decision-making. Yet the process of making is seldom necessary today; our industrial machines have far surpassed our own capabilities, we’ve made ourselves redundant. While recognizing the many benefits these technologies have bestowed, the level of mind-body connectivity and creative human interaction inherent to textile making is lost in this process, as is any personal narrative.
This body of research, supported by case studies and design actions, demonstrates that frameworks and guidelines can facilitate conscious actions. Subsequently, those actions can create opportunities for mind-body engagement. Additionally, the ability to interfere, reflect and change or customize outcomes is an important measure to take in achieving connectivity. Finally, many current design examples and emerging methods indicate there is a strong desire to reintroduce human elements into the things we make. Accessible digital tools create new and important ways to do this, to construct connections between the self, machines, and the things we make. Constructing Connectivity, as a design research, process and outcome, links physical action, digital tools, and industrial production to once again achieve the level of mind-body engagement inherent to textile making.”