Philipp Heidkamp March 6, 2020 7:01 pm *

Cumulus Board Meeting at Parsons / New York City

Once again, this board meeting in mid-February 2020 was absolutely well organized, an efficient use of time and resources and a lot of opportunities to encounter the local scenes and communities.

We kicked-off our 3 days together with a morning visit to the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Kim Robledo-Diga, Deputy Director of Education Cynthia Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design, shared insights with us about the exhibitions, dynamic educational programs and immersive experiences that the museum’s team puts together to expose their audiences — but also many school-age children throughout the US who might never visit the museum’s premises in NYC — to the societal impact of design. Cynthia offered a reflection of the emerging trends she is spotting in how designers continue to practice design at the intersection of social concerns.

With a portfolio of exhibitions such as Design with the 90% (2017) and By the People: Designing a Better America (2016), Cynthia has been extending the work of many of us in the field with shows that bring a new awareness of these critical practices to a broad public of stakeholders. Our conversation with everyone from our board focused on the role of design education today globally and, to quote Cynthia, the ability “designers have … to bring vision to what’s already there. They take what might be seen as a problem and transform it as an asset to the community.” (Cynthia Smith, cited in We are Museums, 2019).

Back at The New School, we worked together on a multiplicity of operational decisions that will continue to shape the growth of our association, ranging from our review of new institutional member applications and future conference hosts for 2021 and 2022; meetings with representatives of prospective partner organizations; budget and financial planning; and last not but least, our ongoing work in strategic planning. Since our first board meeting as a team last October in Medellín, we have organized our board in sub-committees tackling priority areas that will amplify the value our members find in belonging to the Cumulus family.

The NYC board meeting was designed to help us crystallize our goals for the Cumulus Strategic Plan 2019–2022 to be presented to all members in our upcoming General Assembly next June in Rome.

Some of us had and took the chance to attend the new exhibition COUNTRYSIDE, THE FUTURE by OMA at the Guggenheim, an excellent and outstanding exhibition.

And New York offers, of course, the chance to meet different colleagues not only from Parsons, but also from design studios (e.g. IDEO).

Thanks to Mariana Amatullo, our Cumulus President, for summing it up so clear for this month´s new (and new designed) Cumulus Newsletter.

Cumulus 4 board 2 Cooper-Hewitt 1 Countryside 1 Guggenheim 1 New York 1 Smithsonian 1 USA 1

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Philipp Heidkamp February 6, 2020 6:53 pm *

Winter School 2020 at the GSA Forres Campus in the Scottish Highlands

Once again, in its fifth year, the Winter School was growing and a bid success, if not the best up to now. We proceeded with our approach of de-centering the human in design and looking for non-human (centered) approaches.

With more than 160 students from GSA, but also from Audencia in France, KISD in Germany, The Metropolitan University in Tokyo and colleagues from another ten schools worldwide (e.g. attending the Global PhD Symposium) the time in in the countryside was extremely dense and rich, offered a lot of opportunities for exchange, encounter, discussion and reflection.

The first week ended with a panel discussion in the Town Hall of Forres:

In the second week, it was all about “New perspectives: speculative prototyping for the climate crisis. The students worked in about 28 teams on two different future scenarios (short background information about Humans Inc. and Greentocracy). The workshop week was designed and conducted by GSA Alumni with their studio NORD, they created an excellent overview about the project and the outcomes.

In the KISDspace of the Winter School there is more information to be found about the process and the outcome – and, most important, with student voices.

Workshops 3 climate crisis 1 dystopia 1 GSA 1 Konstfack 1 non-human centered design 1 utopia 1 winter school 1

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Philipp Heidkamp December 9, 2019 10:57 am

Shared Campus Inaugural Conference and Launch

The Shared Campus Inaugural Conference and Launch at ZHdK was a good opportunity to share insights and experiences from the transcultural collaboration program that ZHdK is running for some years that now led to the “Shared Campus” platform. As they were announcing, it should be established as a new collaboration platform for international education formats, research networks, joint productions and services.
Shared Campus is based on the idea of sharing interests, competencies, resources and infrastructures, with the aim of building up collective knowledge, discussing relevant issues and enabling long-distance creative exchanges.

The seven participating schools are: City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media // Hong Kong Baptist University, Kyoto Seika University // LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore // Taipei National University of the Arts // University of the Arts London – Central Saint Martins // Zurich University of the Arts. As Lasalle and UAL – Central Saint Martins are also partners in the GDI program co-founded by KISD, it was a good opportunity to exchange meet partners and discuss about different profiles and perspectives for profiles. In the same way it was good to talk to colleagues not only from the Shared Campus platform, but also to colleagues from related disciplines.

The range of the contributions was transdisciplinary at its best. I was in particular impressed by the panel discussion about Co-creating with Nonhuman Others
with Heather Barnett (UK) and Zheng Bo (Taiwan). Heather Barnett Since has been working for more than 10 years with the true slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, observing and influencing its growth patterns, navigational abilities and seemingly human behaviours. Used as a model organism in diverse scientific studies, the single cell organism is attributed with a primitive form of intelligence, problem solving skills and the ability to anticipate events. It is also quite beautiful, the dendritic patterns reminiscent of forms seen at varying scales within nature, from blood vessels to tree branches, from river deltas to lightening flashes.(see also https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/work/the-physarum-experiments/).

She pointed also to a very impressive example (2010) showing that slime mould is able in 26 hours to grow a network just like Tokyo rail system (see https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/).
In her collective experiment “Being Other Than We Are… Playing with Perspective Shifts and Nonhuman Subjectivities” Heather Barnett challenged a group to experience very basic but impressive capacities for communication and cooperation. This allowed very interesting insights and led not only to constructive discussion, but also to the opportunity to feel relations, patterns and aspects of networks of actors.

A keynote of Audrey Tang, Digital Minister of Taiwan (https://twitter.com/audreyt), showed a powerful perspective of Social Innovation supporting democratic process, commoning and sharing.

The exhibition of the student works – currently dealing with the situation in HongKong was discussed during the days with the participants, many of them coming from HK as well. It becomes more and more obvious that working together in teams from different cultures and countries and exposing oneself to local contexts is a prerequisite for critical reflection and the synthesis of own positions and transformations in art and design. Nevertheless, is nearly impossible to understand the powers, axes and agents in the complex systems, so a simple for / against or black/white is not only not sufficient, but may affect the situation in an irreversible progression. Discussing and critically reflecting this is crucial and was possible in the context of the conference.

So this is just an extract and I did not have the opportunity to attend all sessions – but thank you and congratulations to Daniel Späti, Chair Project Team Shared Campus and Nuria Krämer, Program Development!

Conferences 5 CSM 2 GDI 1 lasalle 1 non-human 1 shared campus 1 transcultural 1 zurich 1

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Philipp Heidkamp November 23, 2019 8:29 am

Workshop at SCID with the KISD project Future Cities: Food

Running a full-semester project in winter term 2019 with 13 experienced and passionate students from 8 nations. The project aims at investigating the question how cities (and their dwellers) can be connected to both food and agriculture / farmers using data and information technology. In preparing the workshop, I was really surprised how much technology is already used in smallholder farming in different areas all over the worlds. In the US, Australia and New Zealand all forms of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) evolved to new levels using information about the food on the field, the way the farmers work and strengthen the community of consumers and farmers by different scenarios using remote technology. IBM uses blockchain in large style industrial food tracking – a technology that has not yet unfolded its full potential especially for smallholder farmers reducing the middlemen and allowing consumers and farmers to connect in a new way and thus empowering the farmer thorough better prices as well as increased quality and ecology of the products. In Africa, low-end technology (GSM-based text communication) informs remote and isolated farmers about weather forecast, harvesting and cropping times, diseases as well as possible prices to achieve. The same here: empowering the farmer, encouraging the production of better quality. In China, high-end infrastructure allows live-streaming platforms like Alibaba´s Taobao to engage new stakeholder, connect remotely to the farmers and increasing not only the sales of the products, but also the understanding, the value and closeness of the remote clients in the city – both for products but also for farming. The KISDspace platform is giving a good insight to this project.

In November 2019, we had a workshop with 6 KISD students and 18 students from SCID MA Industrial design. We worked in 6 mixed teams on 6 topics:

Future Consumption: Designing scenarios for a new eating out experience (food stall / pop-up / restaurant / farm to plate …) in a specific location with a specific type of food.
Future Distribution / Retail: Designing scenarios for a specific market / retail (food / agriculture market / pop-up store) experience in a specific location and a specific type of food.
Future Distribution / Sharing: Designing scenarios for a new food sharing experience in urban space creating communities of practice using hybrid platforms (including three specific places).
Future Farming / Agro-Communities: Designing scenarios for new types of Agro-Communities in / around Taipei
Future Farming: Relationships: Designing scenarios for interaction with / accessing information about food and ingredients to establish new (food) values and (key stakeholder) relationships.
Future Food: New Products: Designing scenarios at a specific place to present and experience relevant information as a “food exhibition” by appropriate means and (hybrid) media.

It was quite a challenge to embed this workshop with mixed teams in the process of our semester project with half of the students staying and KISD – and still stay connected. We established COM at KISD spaces to share our process with Video messages and zoom meetings.

In Taipei, it was fascinating to see how many people with very different backgrounds could contribute or relate to the project – and were even excited. It was excellent to be connected to experts like Winston from Taipei and his company AGRIFORWARD working on different levels to use new technology and scientific agricultural knowledge to improve quality and ecology of products like rice – producing excellent products like rice ice receiving highest honours in Taiwan for the outstanding taste due to excellent ingredients and new processes Winston is inventing.

In the final presentations at the end of the week its was once again goo to see how important it is to frame the right questions instead of following immediate assumptions or solutions. The teams did extremely well to come up with (future) scenarios that will be for sure of great value for our work in Cologne until the end of the semester – and it created a shared topic we are planning to proceed our collaboration. More to be seen at the above mentioned KISDspace soon.

And it was an opportunity to connect deeper with our partner school in Taipei and to make plans for the future with the new Chairperson of SCID, Sally Lin.

Workshops 3 agriculture 1 blockchain 1 Cities 2 farm 1 food 1 future 1 SCID 1 taipei 1

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Philipp Heidkamp November 20, 2019 4:20 pm

Integrated Design for Future Environments: Visiting Tainan / Taiwan

In Tainan, I had the chance to meet three colleagues of NCKU being not yet a partner school from KISD, but brings in a very promising thematic aspect of urban sensing / environmental research). I knew Prof. Tzu-Ping Lin, heading the BClab before, as we are working together on an Erasmus+ bid. With a quite impressive research team, he is involved in developing sensing methods for cities in order to better understand climate aspects (temperature, wind etc.) and how insights can be used to better inform planning processes.

Meeting as well Prof. Yang-Chen Lin (middle), Chairman of the Industrial Design Department and Prof. Chung-Ching Huan (left) was a pleasure as he introduced College X, a really visionary approach of redesigning not only design education, but use the power of design to set up a structure for transdisciplinary education and research across all colleges at NCKU. The x.Future curriculum structure with the 4 steps „Thinking Future Workshop“, „Technology Future Workshop“, Innovation Future Studio“ and „Implement Future Studio“ was already implemented successfully with the student cohort 2019. With this concept, the city becomes a successful platform for transdisciplinary collaboration – needless to say that I am more than convinced of this!

Was good to see how strong this was supported by the Dean of the College of Planning & Design, Prof. Taysheng Jeng (above). As I had the meeting with Arnost Marks from Pilsen, who is leading the planned bid for the Erasmus+ call it was really good to understand how they work and to see how ambitious and efficient they are. So I hope that collaborations might emerge in 2020, as we are agreed on working on themes / clusters for our joint program. Looking forward to the next steps!

Here there are some photos from their impressive campus in Tainan:

Visits 3 city 2 Erasmus 1 Joint Master 1 Pilsen 1 Taiwan 1 Transdiciplinary 1

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Philipp Heidkamp November 3, 2019 4:02 pm *

Conference The Design After Bogota October 2019

Conference opening by Cumulus President Mariana Amatullo.

The three days of thee Cumulus Conference The Design After of Universidad de Los Andes, convened by Faculdad de Arquitectura y Disegno (get the proceedings here) were a great opportunity to engage with many different perspectives from Latin America along the key questions raised by the conference:

SENSING THE CITY, SENSING THE RURAL
How can we reinforce connections between rural and urban spaces?
Keynote: Martin Tironi, Chile

SOMEWHERE, NOWHERE, ANYONE, EVERYONE
Keynote: Dori Tunstall, Canada
Is it possible for designers to learn and design along with small communities?

FICTION AND DE-INNOVATION
Can the relationship between design, fiction, architecture and games redefine the role of each specific field?

BIODIVERSITY-DRIVEN DESIGN
Keynote: Daniel Grushkin, United States
Is it possible for science and design to question how their knowledge can be better integrated to solve real world problems

DESIGN AND COUNTERCULTURE
Keynote: Eva de Klerk, Netherlands
What is the role design could play in creating new production models or economic systems?

As part of the conference, there were excellent paper presentations, research tracks and additional Cumulus working groups (CWG) where I had the pleasure to chair the Leadership & Strategy working group.

The University was a perfect host, the Design and Architecture Dean Hernando Baragan and his colleagues were extremely passionate and involved and for sure many opportunities for further collaboration will emerge.

Conferences 5 Cumulus 4 biodesign 1 city 2 counterculture 1 fiction 1 latam 2 sensing 1

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Philipp Heidkamp October 28, 2019 3:28 pm *

Cumulus Board Meeting Medellin / October 2019

Medellin was the place for the first meeting of the new Cumulus board (CEB60).

Being at Medellin, we had the opportunity to emerge in local communities and activities and met people from ruta n, a local hub for supporting transformation processes mostly based on digital technologies. Ruta n fosters innovation ecosystems making an important contribution to the orange economy in Latam.

We also visited Moravia, an area with an outstanding community center and had the opportunity to talk to Cecilia, one of the community leaders not only sharing the story of how the building that was built by Rogelio Salmona in close collaboration with the local community.

We had the chance to meet a lot of people in the barrio and at the Foundation/Food Bank F. Saciar (tropical kitchen) where Cecilia gave an overview of entrepreneurship initiatives of the Foundation and during lunch with community, she introduced the Moravia manifesto to us, a result of the Urban Lab Medellin Berlin.

In afternoon we had a walk through Comuna 13, led by Fredie, a young anthropologist that is deeply connected to this area.

On the second day, we had the opportunity to meet one of the more than 400.000 coffee farmers (organized in 211 cooperatives) and understood the production and distribution processes. I had to think of Dave Eggers book „Monk of Mokkha“ looking for ways to connect to support farmers really focusing on the (organic) quality of their products and connecting them to the customers – a topic we might address in the near future.

This was a wonderful immersion for the new board to start their ambitious work.

After a productive board meeting we had a strategy workshop the whole Monday focusing on the needs we see to proceed the work for Cumulus in addressing future needs and opportunities. We were able to leave Medellin with a sense of shared understanding and were excited to travel to Medellin for the Cumulus Conference The Design After of Universidad de Los Andes, convened by Faculdad de Arquitectura y Disegno.

Being there, we had a pre—conference workshop led by Alok Nandi, President of ixDa about future collaborations between our associations, especially looking at the emerging DERdays (Design Education Research Days) with a conference to come in Beirut in the beginning of 2020.

We had the chance to take the first official picture of the new CEB7 at the terrace of @ArqDisUA @Uniandes #cumulusBogota2019 #thedesignafter

During the conferences we had the opportunity to also work on our relations with the DESIS Labs and sorted out new opportunities – amongst many other conversations we had with colleagues and friends from all over the world.
We left Bogota with a clear roadmap to be prepared for the work until our next board meeting February in New York.

Cumulus 4 board 2 bogota 1 ceb 1 latam 2 medellin 1 moravia 1

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Philipp Heidkamp October 1, 2019 10:09 am *

City Science Summit in Hamburg

Hafen City University Hamburg´s Gesa Ziemer is Vice President Research at HCU and heading the MIT CityScience Lab in Hamburg.The two-day summit „cities without…“ was a very good opportunity to get to know the work of the Hamburg lab, but the other labs as well. The remarkable program offered a lot of opportunities to rethink the impact design and designers can have on cities.

One thing became obvious in the very first moments: city research is a driving force and brings together various disciplines. It is the perfect context for interdisciplinary work. It is supported by a variety of communal, federal and global organizations. It is highly relevant as more than 50% of the population living in cities. And it is for sure a topic to be adressed by design, a topic where design can contribute to interdisciplinary processes and unfold new potentials.

The keynote speech of Lord Norman Foster presents his approach from lightweight and circular economy based architecture – both in his studio but also with his foundation. The foundation works with communities in India and South America to design very specific ways of less formal, in heterogenous practices of informality, settlements with various notions of autonomy (in terms of infrastructure, energy but also political and economical). In his experience the co-creation of the settlements and buildings could build on a high level of visual literacy.

Gesa Ziemer and Kent Larson agreed that the real change will take place where local communities act. The exchange of those practices, their discussion and reflection can then unfold potentials in other communities and potentially a global level.

The following 4mins lightning talks gave insights into (mostly) research practice in different cities of the world and went up to the systems level when for example Joelle Pianzola shared her work about algorithms matching refugees with the cities where the best matching for employment (immigration policy lab Stanford / Zürich).

Kent Larson

Joelle Pianzola

Maja Göppel

All in all it was a very good start to open personal dialogues and prepare for the workshop sessions on the second day.

The second day was designed as a workshop day, with 3 sessions (challenges) in 9 different spaces, and additional spaces or tours outside the building.

At the end of the day, each workshop presented the outcome in a joint session with 4 slides in 2 minutes followed by a closing discussion. All charts were compiled in a publication available – just at the end of the day.

Conferences 5 Cities 2 CityScience Lab 2 HCU 1 MIT 1 Summit 1 Tongji 2

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Philipp Heidkamp September 3, 2019 9:25 am *

Attending Tongji University D&I

6 years after setting up the double degree program between our two Master programs focusing on „Designing Urban Transformations“ it was good to visit Tongji again and to talk to Yonqui LOU as well as some of his colleagues, especially Xiaocun ZHU and of course Kelly making everything happen.

Concerning D&I, I was also particularly interested in the both the DESIS lab and City Science Lab (MIT/Shanghai) LOU set up next door of D&I running projects also in the close neighborhood.

We will meet again at the City Science Summit beginning of October in Hamburg (HCU).

Concerning our Double Degree we discussed opportunities to improve the fitting of the students we are selecting – and I am happy to be in contact with Xiaocun on that since September.

Visits 3 CityScience Lab 2 DESIS 1 Double degree 1 Tongji 2

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Philipp Heidkamp September 2, 2019 10:07 am *

Proceeding partnership with CAA Hangzhou

After years of collaboration of CDK (Chinesisch-Deutsche Kunstakademie) at China Academy of Art (CAA) with UdK Berlin CAA was interested to establish collaborations with KISD

In 2016, we designed a 6-week certificate Programme on Integrated Design, where I was teaching together with Wolfgang Laubersheimer and Jenz Großhans from KISD.

Now I had the chance to meet Claire Qi and the new Director, Prof. Yu Jian. They were sharing their plans about a „Global Common Institute“ of CAA they are currently planning. They are setting up the program with partnerships in Germany and France (Nantes). I was impressed by the ideas about the future-oriented „Boundless Academy“ they were sharing with me. Especially the question-oriented curriculum seemed to be very strong: the new academy will work in ten fields with ten partners in ten studios around topics and questions they are distilling based on the feedback of colleagues and universities from all over the world. Of course I shared the idea of using the Cumulus network to not only address people for the questions, but also to set up a plug—in to an existing conference as we did in Rovaniemi this year.

Visits 3 CAA 1 CDK 1 Hangzhou 1 Shanghai 2

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1 2

I am frequently running workshops abroad in the field of Interface / Interaction Design, Human Environment Interaction, City as Interface as well as Culture of Digitalization

In those domains my focus is on cities, citizen, communities, mobility and food.

Cumulus is the only global association to serve art and design education and research. It is a forum for partnership and transfer of knowledge and best practices. KISD joins Cumulus since 2002, Ans since some years we engage in the work of Cumulus in working groups, through our track „Emerging Formats“ at the 2019 Rovaniemi conference and since then with my Work as Executive Board Member of the 7th Board (2019-2022) and my role as Vice President of the global network. This challenge will give a lot of new opportunities that will be shared here as well.

Global Design Initiative (see also the website under construction).

The Global Design Initiative is founded by the Global Design Faculty driven by five international, globally oriented art and design institutions based in London, Cologne, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo. It brings together like-minded people, mainly global design education leaders who believe in new approaches in dialogue and exchange.

Philipp Heidkamp October 1, 2019 10:09 am *

City Science Summit in Hamburg

Kent Larson

Joelle Pianzola

Maja Göppel

All in all it was a very good start to open personal dialogues and prepare for the workshop sessions on the second day.

The second day was designed as a workshop day, with 3 sessions (challenges) in 9 different spaces, and additional spaces or tours outside the building.

Conferences 5 Cities 2 CityScience Lab 2 HCU 1 MIT 1 Summit 1 Tongji 2

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