IDW 2019

by Saurabh Mhatre and Venkatkrishnan Ashok people in motion by Dian-Jen Lin and Hannes Hulstaert media-tasting: why do you design? Why do you design? What defines your practice? Are you shaping your practice with free will or are you being confined by the givens of your practice? Liminality is not a comfortable space, especially for graduate students. Without guidance and a clear compass in mind, one can easily get lost amid the pressure of time, money, peers and family. However, how many of you know if you are heading in the right direction? In this comprehensive yet intensive workshop of transdisciplinary design marathons, the participating students are invited to map out their personal ambitions, dreams and current efforts as the designer of their own life. Once personalised trajectories are set, they will be used as starting points for a series of experimentation through several channels - media-tasting. The participants will start with design sprints and brainstorms and then a brand-new design challenge will be introduced every day. Followed by rapid prototyping sessions and daily presentations, constructive assessments and open discussions will feed into their future practices and help them differentiate their uniqueness among the group. The media we will be tasting includes - but not limited to - fashion design, audio-visual arts, hacking (bio/tech) and food design. The media will be inducted and the participants can play, experiment and design with these new tools to create prototypes and projects. For ages people have been in Motion: Economical transactions. Religious expansions. Wars. Colonisation. Rural exodus. Slavery. Great explorations. Circulation of knowledge. Climatic disruptions. Grand tour. Tourism. No matter the reason, people moved and shaped architectures and territories in response to their mobility. The past century considerably accelerated this phenomenon with the increase of speed and the breakthrough of connectivity. The aim is to analyse these evolutions in relation with the broader notion of urban morphology and mobility in the urban scenario of Antwerp. How humans were moving, are moving, and how they will move in the future? How their forms of motion affected and will affect the city, infrastructures, buildings and bodies? The design process will also investigate precedents of avant-garde architecture and heavily focus on new ways of shaping architecture and bodies in space through movement. The broad range for interpreting what motion means will provide the opportunity to discover and create new forms of spaces and behaviours. We will work by making speculative drawings that propose new forms of organisation, large scale models that explore form. These will be tools that allow the politics of the project to be explored through form, space and materiality.