Titles and abstracts issue 2

Titles and abstracts
Authors: please edit this page, adding your title and abstract in the table below.

contributor	title	abstract (150-300 words)
rootoftwo
Nana Adusei Poku
Harma Staal
Jan Melis
Mark Mulder
Fred Wartna
Bori Feher
Lee Davis
Thomas Ostergard
Becky Slogeris
Anne Seghers	Designers, get beyond ‘raising awareness’	On February 4, the public event Beyond Social Night: redesigning the process took place. Best practices of interdisciplinary student projects on fast fashion, health care, refugees and wheelchair users took center stage. The underlying goal of the night was to investigate the processes behind these projects on social art and design. What is the intention of this generation designers? What are they aiming for? Is their methodology in line with their goals? And is the educational system consistent with their needs? The shown best practices all act on a shared value: empathy. The designers engage with a certain social issue and want to raise awareness of the problems, challenges and opportunities linked with this issue. But ‘raising awareness’ is just the first step of the designers’ intentions. They explicitly want to do more. Their prime goal is to have a transformative impact on society with regard to the issue they’re discussing. Simply put: they want to add value. The intentions of the projects are with no exception honorable. The problem is that almost none of the designers seem to get beyond the first step of ‘raising awareness’. With exception of the project RAID, each of the best practices triggers the question what the follow-up will be. If adding value or transforming (a part of) society is your goal, you need to generate credible proof that your design proposal is provoking the desired implications. Without this proof, the impact of the project is only based on assumptions and, therefore, questionable. So, when ‘having impact’ is the main goal of a social art project, it is import to know what kind of impact is being achieved. Therefore, it is needed that designers apply tools or methodologies that reveal what the impact of a project exactly is. It is not necessary to invent a totally new methodology. Suitable methods and tools can be found in examining working processes of other (academic) research disciplines. In this, the educational system can play an important role.
Jessica Hammerlund Bergmann	Embedded Research	em⋅bed⋅ded /imbedid/ adjective 1 inserted as an integral part of a surrounding whole • confused by the embedded Latin quotations • an embedded subordinate clause 2 enclosed firmly in a surrounding mass • found pebbles embedded in the silt • stone containing many embedded fossils • peach and plum seeds embedded in a sweet edible pulp (WoordBook.com) Why embedded research? Within the Social Practices at the WdKA, we encourage students to go into the reality of the city; with everything that this reality brings along. We want the students to develop through artistic (thus not scientific) research in the local context, to analyze informal networks, build relationships with strangers, collaborate with stakeholders, establish platforms, organize events etc. A mouthful. This is part of the new type of designer that the academy wants to educate; the Creative Pioneer, the Game Changer. Seeking a stronger interaction with society, we need to develop other tools and working methods, than what a student would normally learn at an art academy. What we at the academy call the social practice is far away from the isolation and autonomy of the artists attic. Working embedded you meet ungovernable contexts, with unpredictable dynamics: residents who won’t open the door, who don’t stick to made agreements, who don’t respond how you expected, suddenly turning angry, fearful or extremely intimate - in short; working embedded you become part of something you can not control - and our challenge at the Wdka is to teach the student to position them selves in this dynamic.
Roger Teeuwen
Barbara Alves
Jeanne van Heeswijk
Bruno Setola?
Sikko Cleveringa?
Anne Nigten?