TRADERS

Speels Betoog! Playful Monstration!

By: Annelies Vaneycken

08-12-2014

A co-designed workshop with children for developing critical thinking on matters of public space

This artistic workshop attempted to develop critical thinking by children on public space matters. The five-day workshop took place in October 2014 and was hosted by WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. It was organized by Annelies Vaneycken (designer/researcher) and accompanied by Michael Kaethler (sociologist/design researcher). Eleven children, aged 6 to 11 years old participated.

What does a child think of public space? What are their opinions, what do they like or dislike, and do they have a voice to articulate this? The 5 day workshop aimed to explore some of these questions by working with children and experimenting with a variety of pedagogical and design techniques such as non-linear structures of adaptability, deconstructing the pedagogue, and radical play. A number of tools were experimented with, most notably a self documenting sculpture collectively christened Mr. Wiels. This sculpture fostered inward and outward reflection on the children’s experience of the public sphere through being constantly co-created vis-à-vis discussions on and experiences of public space. The sculpture was constructed, both physically and ontologically by the children, using common materials, stories, and dialogues, which resulted in a co-constructed character, complete with passport, life story and personal interests. As the children created and subsequently toured Mr. Wiels through the streets of Brussels, they relayed their narratives of city-life, objects, memories, moments, questions and so forth to him, exploring their own lives through the artifact and with each other. The shared artifact mediated the individual and communal experience, taking the attention away from the designer/pedagogue by allowing the artifact to guide the process. This provided a rich experience for the children as well as a repository of data to be used by design researchers looking at child-centred design.

The children touring Mr. Wiels through the streets of Brussels

‘Design, Social Media and Technology to Foster Civic Self-Organisation’ Conference

By: Saba Golchehr

21-11-2014

News

Over the last two decades Europe has been witnessing an increased demand for participation when it comes to decision-making processes. Both citizens, demanding more direct forms of democracy, and governments, e.g the idea of ‘Big Society’ in the UK and the ‘Participation Society’ in the Netherlands, plea for civic self-organisation. The ‘Design, Social Media and Technology to Foster Civic Self Organisation’ conference, hosted by the University of Hasselt in collaboration with TRADERS, is organised around the idea that design and digital technologies play a crucial role in this development.

The conference is structured by the following tracks:

1. How can design, social media and technology encourage and empower citizens to take part in and/ or start up civic self-organisation practices?

2. How can design, social media and technology sustain civic self-organisation practices over longer time periods, and within a diversity of socio-economic contexts?

3. How can the impact of design, social media and technology on civic self-organisation practices be documented and evaluated?

Saba Golchehr (Royal College of Art) and Naomi Bueno de Mesquita (Design Academy Eindhoven) see data-mining and digital mapping technologies as potentially valuable approaches for durable participation. In a jointly written paper they focus on the second track; how design, social media and technology can sustain civic self-organisation practices over longer time periods, and within a diversity of socio-economic contexts. The abstract for this paper can be read here.

Mapping as a Powerful Design Research Tool

By: Naomi Bueno de Mesquita

20-11-2014

News

Co-authored article (David Hamers and Naomi Bueno de Mesquita) about mapping as a powerful design research tool, with a special focus on the use of digital technologies in mapping. This article was written for the Public Space Magazine of Design Academy Eindhoven. Edition 5. Fall 2014.

Problematizing ‘participation’ in ‘public space’ [Summer School results]

By: Pablo Calderón Salazar

14-10-2014

News

The first TRADERS Summer School started with an official Kick-off at Z33, the 31st of September, when the results from the Training Week and first TRADERS exhibition were shown to all the participants.

The 1st of October we had a lecture from Ramia Mazé, who gave many insights and examples of ‘disruptive’ approaches to participatory practices in design, and guided the participants divided into 6 groups on a workshop during the afternoon. The 2nd of October Martijn De Waal gave a lecture on the ‘playful’ approach and guided the groups to finalize their proposals to ‘prototype’ in public space. The 3rd of October we had the morning to finalize our proposals and videos and in the afternoon organized a ‘public forum’ to show the results from the different projects realized and reflect on different issues dealt with during the past days.

First TRADERS Training Week: ‘Intervention’ [Results]

By: Pablo Calderón Salazar

08-10-2014

News

The first training week of TRADERS project developed around the approach of intervention as a participatory practice, discussing and exploring the relation and – on the first sight – opposition between the concepts of intervention and participation. This week took place in the area of Hasselt-Genk, with its host institution being LUCA School of Arts (KULeuven) / KHLim. Throughout five days, we attempted to deconstruct and evaluate the process of producing a ‘participatory’ intervention.

For doing this, we used the expertise of different partners of LUCA through different steps in the process. First, we collected sounds and audio samples from different sites around Genk (Sept 26-27), which we used to produce an audio track with Jeroen D’Hoe (Sept 28), music composer and part of the research unit of the Lemmensinstituut in Leuven. The day after (Sept 29), we had the visit of Sarah Késene, Filip van Dingenen and Roel Kerkhofs, of the research group “Art, Space and Context” of Sint-Lucas Gent, with whom we discussed the way in which ‘artists’ (and designers and researchers) present themselves to the public, and applied it to our ongoing work. The last day (Sept 30), we had with us Annelies Kums, one of the researchers of pyblik, a research unit of Sint-Lucas Brussel, with whom we defined latest details of our interventions.

PUBLIC EVENTS during upcoming TRADERS Training Week and Summer School

By: Pablo Calderón Salazar

19-09-2014

News

From the 27th of September until the 3rd of October, the first TRADERS Training Week and Summer School will take place in Hasselt and Genk. Even though the TW program is only open to the members of the TRADERS network and the SS to different practitioners and researchers (prior application and selection), there are two public events to which we welcome other people to attend. If you wish to attend any of the two events, please send an email to Pablo.Calderon@khlim.be, specifying which one you would like to take part in.

Saturday 27th of September – 14u (@ Hasselt / Z33 Zuivelmarkt 33 – Kapiteelzaal)
Introductory lecture by Liesbeth Huybrechts and Pablo Calderón (Design Interventions as a way to address power relations in public space), and keynote lecture by Thomas Markussen (Disrupt to Engage: Interventions as a Participatory Practice) In this keynote lecture Thomas Markussen will focus on the nature of interventionist practices in design, art and architecture trying to clarify how intervention and participation can be seen not as oppositional to each other but as a conceptual pair that may enter rich alliances and hybridizations. At the end, Selina Schepers will moderate a short discussion.

Co-Creating Realities through Collaborative Mapping in Realtime

By: Naomi Bueno de Mesquita

18-09-2014

News, TRADERS

In a place where tourists make as much as two thirds of the island’s population during summer time I wanted to explore how locals deal with/ demarcate/ protect their public places amongst the violence of tourism. In the three day workshop Co-Creating Realities Through Collaborative Mapping In Realtime, students from Design Academy Eindhoven and Accademia di belle arti Venezia, were asked to map practices of informal use and appropriation of public space in the six Sestieri (the six neighborhoods) of Venice. June 2014

Without giving them a predefined legend the students were not exactly sure about what they had to look for and what could be understood as appropriation practices. By purposely letting them co-create the legend while mapping the students were able to get a grasp on the topic while in action. The students departed from a different point in the city and started walking simultaneously, in which each student was asked to follow the borders of a Sestieri. The idea was to observe and encounter traces or practices of informal use and appropriation of public space en route. When a ‘trace’ or informal practice (such as elephant paths or a street vendors’ selling spot/escape route) was found, an sms was sent to the rest of the group, so that others could add this finding to the legend. It enabled all members of the collective to reflect on their own observations and to co-author the legend. I was interested in the participatory practice of the creation of the legend; the mutual influencing in the making of a physical reality and taxonomy through real-time digital exchange.

student’s walked tracks and in red the streeet vendors escape routes

TRADERS in Digital Methods Initiative (summer school)

By: Naomi Bueno de Mesquita

18-09-2014

News, TRADERS

The Digital Methods Summer School (June 23^rd until July 4^th 2014) was hosted by the University of Amsterdam. Naomi Bueno de Mesquita, TRADERS researcher in multiple performative mapping at Design Academy Eindhoven participated in this summer school. Digital Methods Initiative seeks to learn from the methods built into the devices online, by subtracting the data (links, tags, threads, etc) and repurposing them for social and cultural research. In this summer school with the topic ‘on geolocation’ the focal point was to analyse events as they unfold, by subtracting geo-located embedded data.

The first project explored how twitter data constructs a narrative of the city of Amsterdam, by analyzing the way people (locals and tourists) tweet about the city. Two data sets (geo-tagged data of Amsterdam and keywords about Amsterdam) of one month were used. Some of the findings: the most frequently used words to describe Amsterdam in Chinese were: creative, incredible and confused. A sudden peek of the word #zwerfie (a selfie taken while picking up trash) emerged in a neighborhood in the west, during the three day strike of garbage services in the city. As for the transportation, some individuals always tweet on the same spot while others commuting. Bus 300 had the most active tweeter. In general the bus or tram stops are more frequently used for tweeting than in the trams or buses. The problems/ limitations of this project: a methodological gap between keyword and geolocation-data analyses and the need to obtain more qualitative data. http://www.slideshare.net/naomibueno/201407-summerschool-dmilivability-in-amsterdam

heat map of bus tweets, http://mngroen.nl/dmi/mobility/

TRADERS in ‘Mediating Uncertainties: Information and the Urban’ (LSE Cities Workshop)

By: Saba Golchehr

15-09-2014

News

The Cities lab of the London School of Economics hosted a workshop on Mediating Uncertainties on September 11th, which was attended by Saba Golchehr, TRADERS researcher at the RCA. One of the objectives of the workshop was to ‘examine how advances in technologies of gathering data, communicating, and networking have influenced and shaped the sphere of urban governance and urban political life in cities and with what effects’. And the aim of the discussion was to ‘explore how information relates with uncertainty in the urban sphere’. The workshop was organized and led by Sobia Ahmad Kaker, an interdisciplinary scholar working on issues related to governance and security in the global south. A list of all speakers can be found on the events website.

The topics at the workshop varied from smart cities, and the increasing popularity of ‘city dashboards’ showing real-time information on processes in the city, to the complex political structures and problems in Karachi, Pakistan, which has some negative externalities on, and is simultaneously amplified by, the capitals media channels.

All of the topics were highly relevant to the workshops theme, however within the framework of my research, which focuses on Big Data analytics, two speakers were of ancillary relevance to my work, and are therefore the two talks which I will elaborate on.

TRADERS in ‘Networked Public Space’ (Venice Architecture Biennial)

By: Pablo Calderón Salazar

09-09-2014

News

Pablo Calderón Salazar, TRADERS researcher with Social Spaces (MAD Faculty / LUCA School of the Arts), participated on a discussion about the ‘Networked Public Space’, in the context of the ‘Networked Politics’ weekend special at the Architecture Venice Biennial. The NetPol weekend special, in the words of their organizers, “creates a new confrontation between the concreteness of built space and the immateriality of its operational boundaries. It also intends to challenge the dichotomy between virtual and physical networked communication, between individual and public space, between urbanity and domestic sphere“. The weekend special was coordinated dpr-barcelona (Ethel Baraona Pohl, César Reyes), FOLDER (Marco Ferrari, Elisa Pasqual), MAIO (Anna Puigjaner, Guillermo López) and Space Caviar (Joseph Grima, Tamar Shafrir, Simome C. Niquille).

The discussion took place the 6th of September of 2014, and the panel was also composed by Parasite 2.0 Lab, Silvio Lorusso and Tamar Shafrir, and moderated by César Reyes Nájera (dpr-Barcelona). During the discussion, the FOMO (an algorithmic publishing machine) was printing in real time the tweets and feed derived from the topics spoken in the panel. The artists Helson & Jackets also participated via Skype on the conversation, with their project help me obi, which ‘transports’ people in real-time Skype conversation to their interlocutors place via a hologram.

Speels Betoog! Playful Monstration!

‘Design, Social Media and Technology to Foster Civic Self-Organisation’ Conference

Mapping as a Powerful Design Research Tool

Problematizing ‘participation’ in ‘public space’ [Summer School results]

First TRADERS Training Week: ‘Intervention’ [Results]

PUBLIC EVENTS during upcoming TRADERS Training Week and Summer School

Co-Creating Realities through Collaborative Mapping in Realtime

TRADERS in Digital Methods Initiative (summer school)

TRADERS in ‘Mediating Uncertainties: Information and the Urban’ (LSE Cities Workshop)

TRADERS in ‘Networked Public Space’ (Venice Architecture Biennial)

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