16 March 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2
28 March 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2
24 April 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2
22 May 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2
6 June 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2
20 June 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2 |
Guest Lecture Series 2012 organised by Björn Franke / Department of Design History and Theory University of Applied Arts Vienna / Oskar-Kokoschka- mail@designaspolitics.com
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16 March 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2 Notes on Fields and Forums Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic Architecture—on the place of architecture in international humanitarian law. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett (UCL) in London and the Stadel School in Frankfurt. He lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include The Least of all Possible Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Cabinet and Inflexions. He has worked with a variety of NGOs world wide and was member of B’Tselem board of directors. He is currently on the advisory boards of the ICA in London, the Human Rights Project at Bard in NY, and of other academic and cultural institutions. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006–2007, a co-recipient of the 2010 Prince Claus Prize for Architecture (for DAAR) and has deliver the Rusty Bernstein, Paul Hirst and the Edward Said Memorial Lectures amongst others. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his Ph.D. at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College. | |
28 March 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2 Designing Social Spaces Ruedi Baur was born in 1956 in Paris, spent his childhood in France, then trained as a graphic designer with Michael Baviera in Switzerland, obtaining his diploma in graphic design in 1979 at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. Having created the BBV studio in Lyon in 1983, in 1989 he cofounded the interdisciplinary network Intégral Concept and has since directed the Intégral Ruedi Baur studios in Paris, Zurich, and Berlin. He has taught on a regular basis since 1987. From 1989 to 1996 he coordinated the design department at the École des beaux-arts in Lyon. In 1995 he was appointed a lecturer at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, running its education board from 1997 to 2000. He created the design2context Institute at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, which he has directed with Stefanie-Vera Kockot from 2004 to 2011, then the institute for critical research in design and network Civic City. He also teaches at the École des arts décoratifs in Paris, as well as regularly in China at the Luxun Academy in Shenjang and the Central Academy of Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, and at the Percé international school, linked with the University of Laval in Quebec, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2007. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) since 1992, he participates in many workshops and judging panels, gives regular lectures, and his works are published in various countries and presented at various exhibitions. | |
24 April 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2 Film Screeing In this feature-length documentary, Marilyn Waring demystifies the language of economics by defining it as a value system in which all goods and activities are related only to their monetary value. As a result, unpaid work (usually performed by women) is unrecognized while activities that may be environmentally and socially detrimental are deemed productive. Waring maps out an alternative vision based on the idea of time as the new currency. The film is based on her book Counting for Nothing, is directed by Terre Nash, produced by National Film Board of Canada and released in 1995. Marilyn Waring is known internationally for her groundbreaking work in political economy, development assistance and human rights, the economics of unpaid work, and for her classic work: Counting for Nothing - what men value and what women are worth. She became a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2008 New Year's Honours Lists for her services to women and economics. Marilyn served 3 terms in New Zealand's parliament after election at the age of twenty-three; and was Chair of the Public Expenditure Committee for a three year term. She is professor at the Institute of Public Policy at AUT University. She has been a Member of the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Councils of Creative New Zealand and Massey University, the QEII National Trust and the Institute of Judicial Studies. She is currently a member of the Boards of the Association of Women in Development (AWID) and the Canadian Index of Well Being. | |
22 May 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2 The Art of Activism: Protest Politics as an Aesthetic Practice The first rule of guerilla warfare is to know your terrain and use it to your advantage. Today’s political topography is one of signs and symbols, story and spectacle, and activists have had to learn to navigate this aesthetic terrain. Drawing upon recent examples of global protest, this talk will explore activism as an aesthetic practice and a question of design. Observing protest through a design lens helps make politically intelligible the sometimes curious, but increasingly common, activist tactics like occupying public space, articulating a multiplicity of messages, using communication tools like the “people’s microphone,” and employing props, performance and spectacle. In exploring these practices we might glimpse a new style of activism, and perhaps politics writ large, in the making. Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media Culture and Communications at New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, coauthor of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York, editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and coeditor of White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. He writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral, The Nation, to the prurient, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of the international direct action group, Reclaim the Streets. In 2009 he was a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he helped organize The College of Tactical Culture. With funding from the Open Societies Institute he co-organized and teaches in the School for Creative Activism, and he is presently co-founder and director of the Center for Artistic Activism. Duncombe is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal and an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia. | |
6 June 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2 Communication, Power and Trust The exceptionally rapid adoption of personal communication devices has shown that the division of the private and professional realms is arbitrary and often unwelcome. When given the possibility most people seem to want to be able to keep in touch with their personal social sphere whenever they feel the need for it. Paradoxically in the last century while we developed a culture that elevated the family and intimate life to the main social space of individuals, a space that provides all the comfort, sustenance and happiness that the external world cannot offer, people were made to work and learn in environments that cut them off from their families. From an emotional perspective therefore people are living in a society that overemphasizes the role of intimate relationships, and throws onto the family the ultimate responsibility of caring and nurturing the individual, while spending a large portion of their day, severed from those relationships. It is not surprising that the moment a channel of communication emerged that could be used to reconnect the two realms, this would be immediately adopted. Digital communication services have proven to be revolutionary in two senses: they are allowing people to maintain a personal space within institutions that banned the private sphere from their premises, and they are offering this possibility to people who by status or condition were particularly unlikely to be granted such a privilege. Current debates about attention and the loss of it, must therefore be read in the light of such a transformation. The fear that access to the internet will lead to a loss of focus and ultimately of productivity is to be analysed in socio cultural terms more than cognitive ones, as the issues they raise have more to do with domination and control than with memory, cognitive limitations, or vigilance. Stefana Broadbent is a social scientist who studies people's use of digital technology at home and at work. Stefana is currently Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, she is lecturing in the MSc in Digital Anthropology. Between 2004 and 2008, she was Research Director at Swisscom, the national Swiss Telecom operator where she ran The Observatory of Digital Life to advise the company's strategy on converging media. Previously she was Chief Officer of Human Interaction at IconMedialab/LBi. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh and a degree in Psychology from the University of Geneva. Her book L’Intimite’ au Travail reports the use of digital communication channels to maintain intimate relationships and the impact of these emerging practices on the workplace. | |
20 June 2012, 6.30 pm, Hörsaal 2 The War of Times and Places: How Social Innovation is Generating Disruptive Qualities People are inventing and realizing new ways of living and producing: groups of families sharing services to reduce economic and environmental costs, while also improving neighborhoods; new forms of social interchange and mutual help such as time banks; systems of mobility that present alternatives to the use of individual cars, from car sharing and car pooling to the rediscovery of bicycles; the development of productive activities based on local resources and skills that are linked into wider global networks, for example, certain products typical of a specific place, or the fair and direct trade networks between producers and consumers established around the globe. Looking at such initiatives, we can observe that they challenge traditional ways of doing things and introduce new, different, and more sustainable behaviors. At first glance, in fact, we can recognize that the involved people compensate for a reduction in consumption (in goods and space) with an increase in something else that they consider more valuable. This “something else” are qualities of their physical and social environments that, for them, substitute for the unsustainable ones that have been predominant (in the industrial societies) until now. These qualities and the deeper frameworks may be defined as: the recognition of complexity as a value; the search for dense, deep, and lasting relationships; the redefinition of work and collaboration as central human expressions; and the human scale of the socio-technical systems and its positive role in the definition of a democratic, human-centered, sustainable society. The qualities that these frameworks generate are radically diverse than the ones the mainstream models have spread in the last century worldwide. For this reason, we can refer to them, as a whole, as “disruptive qualities”: qualities that clash with the mainstream ways of thinking and doing. Ezio Manzini is professor at the Politecnico di Milano as well as Honorary Guest Professor at Tongji University in Shanghai, Jiangnan University in Wuxi and COPPE-UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro. Presently he is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Parsons the New School for Design in New York. For more than two decades Manzini has been working in the field of design for sustainability, focusing in particular on social innovation and what design can do to support it. From this perspective he started and currently coordinates DESIS, an international network of schools of design and other design-related organizations. Throughout his professional life, he has taught and carried out research at the Politecnico di Milano where he directed several national and international research projects and where he coordinated the Unit of Research DIS, the Doctorate in Design and DES and the Centre for Service Design in the Indaco Department. Parallel to this, he has also been director and vice-president of Domus Academy and Chair Professor of Design under the Distinguished Scholars Scheme at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2000. For his work he has received two Compasso d'Oro (design award), the Premio per l'innovazione (award for innovation), the 2012 Sir Misha Black Medal (international award for design teaching) and was awarded and honorary doctorates at Parsons The New School for Design in New York as well as Goldsmiths College, University of London. Manzini is member of advisory boards of several design schools, associations and journals, such as The Journal of Design Research, The Design Journal and The International Journal of Design. | |
