About Beyond Social

Beyond Social

Beyond Social is an international and collaborative research and publishing platform on social art and design. It connects professionals and students from different fields of expertise. It is a platform for trial and error, for sharing knowledge, projects, visions and opinions in order to find out what is needed to feed social practices and take them into a next stage. Beyond Social offers a platform for challenging and engaging design and art practices that have a desire to have a transformative impact on society. Accordingly, these practices do not only focus on the development of 'good' pieces of art or design, but, they also propose or realize alternative systems, procedures and processes.

What does it take for artists and designers to deal with today's societal challenges? What different strategies and concepts can we use? What are inspiring examples and what are great failures? And, if we need to collaborate with stakeholders, then how can we maintain our autonomous position? What expertise and added value do we represent as artists or designers? What and how, in fact, do we DESIGN as social designers or DO as social artists?

Let's find out together; Beyond Social connects contributers by a wiki. In this way, it becomes an open and collaborative platform. Please feel free to contribute!

Background

Beyond Social is initiated by WdKA Social Practices and developed by Hybrid Publishing Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy, University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam. Researching and experimenting across a broad range of processes native to digital and analog media, Hybrid Publishing Practices fosters novel approaches to design, writing, reading, dissemination and embraces the plurifomity of publishing made possible through the legacies of Gutenberg's press to present-day technologies.