Month: June 2020

#1 Andrey Sudarikov: is a Russian designer doing mainly AR, Interaction and Game Design. He gave some insight about international projects he was doing. In all of his projects you could really engage and it is all about providing experiences.

#2 Astrid Kury: is the director of the »Akademie Graz« and the topic of her talk were »collaborations«. She was pointing out the importance of collaborations in our community. It enables you to create unique solutions and get new insights. As an example she mentions a collaborations between creatives and teenagers with down syndrome. 

#4 Florian Doppel-Prix: was talking about the importance of working with a concept. You should include all aspects of perception when working on a project. Planing can be boring and exhausting, but it can also be a lot of fun as it’s a challenge for everyone involved. 

#5 Burcin Cem Arabacioglu: is a professor based in Istanbul. In his lecture he ist talking about the rapidly increasing population and the fatal consequences of it. He points out that designers have the responsibility to educate others about sustainability. There is enough knowledge about building more sustainable cities, but many people just don’t care or think about it. 

#6 Sylwia Ulicka: is a designer and lecturer from Puebla in Mexico. In her work she focuses on sustainability. She is appealing to us to question our modern material culture since we as designers have the power to make a change. She explains eco-efficiency as an approach that adds more value to goods and services by reducing the resources and decreasing the level of environmental pollution – to produce more with using up and polluting less. 

#7 Ursula Tischner: and her team are looking for better ways to design sustainable systems. She explains that consumption has the biggest impact on global warming. Her goal is to produce more radical sustainable solutions and she is working on a platform that is called »Sustainability Maker«. I think it’s really interesting what she said about eco products: »People can buy eco products but use it in a way that is not eco at all«. (=overconsumption)

Wolfgang Schlag is working as a radio journalist at  Ö1 in Austria. He is also involved in different projects at FH JOANNEUM. In October he is organizing the »Market of the future« festival in the Kunsthaus. 

He started his lecture with the history of radio. In the 1920’s the first radio shows went on air in Pittsburgh. Soon after this radio became a new form of communication all over the world. In America radio started with up to 40.000 listeners, 2/3 years later they had 500.000 – 800.000 listeners, radio was very successful. They started with music, literature, educational programs and commercials. 

In Austria radio started in 1924, it was state owned and called RAVAG. The topics were more or less the same than in America. In 1938 the radio was overtaken by force by the national socialists. Something similar happened also in 2000, when Austria had a right wing government (coalition between ÖVP and FPÖ) and members of the FPÖ took over the radio station in Klagenfurt.

Radio is politically a very important medium, even in times of television and internet. Wolfgang Schlag believes that radio will stay important in the future. 

The history of modern radio started in Austria in 1967 with Ö3 (Pop radio station). Also Ö1 started in 1967. It was meant to play mainly classical music. deliver education in various forms (f. e. Broadcasting) and offer political information. The first political news on the radio came up during the Second World War, since people had to be informed about the ongoing political events. 

1967 was a very interesting time regarding music. The modern Pop music started. Ö3 offered lots of different genres like Jazz and latin American music, but was mainly playing pop music. There was also a format called »Music Box“, which was a one hour program on the radio. It was a little bit radical and provocative and was f. e. playing the same record over and over again for one hour. Wolfgang Schlag joined the »Music Box« in 1986. He was especially interested in features (about social topics, strange guys,..). 

In 1990 radio in Austria changed a lot. Ö3 got more commercial and less critical. There was more easy music and less other content. Ö1 on the other hand became a really colorful, cultural broadcasting station with critical programs about capitalism, globalization, environmental issues, healthcare, traveling and interesting people (not only prominent people, but also quite ordinary people with an interesting life). Ö1 was looking for »color sprinkles« all over Austria to communicate them to their listeners. 

At some point in his life, Wolfgang Schlag wanted more than radio and started to do reportages for the television program »ARTE« for four years. Afterwards, he went back to Ö1, still fascinated about this job. 

Ö1 is sitting in a so called »Funkhaus«, which is the second oldest of it’s kind in Europe. It was built by the Nazis and has a really great architecture. Now, at corona time, he is not working from the »Funkhaus« but doing home office. Everyone is producing their broadcasts at home and then they are put together to 24 hours of program. 

Ö1 is about helping Austrians. With their program they are working on democracy, education but also on fun. Nowadays, it is more and more important to offer really good educational programs. Of course there is a lot of educational content on social media too, but on social media the orientation is missing. There are many fake news around that are hard to distinguish. Many of those fake new come directly from Russia, attempts to destabilize Europe.

Like Wolfgang Schlag I also think that radio will stay important in the future or at least I hope so. 

In diesem Blogbeitrag fasse ich alle Lectures aus „International Design Discourse“ zusammen. Insgesamt habe ich die Lectures sehr gerne angesehen, da sie wertvolle Einblicke in so viele verschiedene Bereiche geben. Besonders die Projekte, die in manchen Lectures vorgestellt wurden, sind sehr inspirierend und beeindruckend.

1. Andrey Sudarikov: was a Russian designer which focussed on AR, Interaction and Game Design. He talked about very big and international design projects. A project which sticked to my mind the most was the one about the museum, where he tried to make exhibitions interesting for everyone.
   
2. Saskia Schmidt: talked about her path of being a graphic designer and at the end about working independently. I loved her style of presentation and the insights and tipps she gave us.
   
3. Astrid Kury: is the director of Akademie Graz and talked about how important it is to collaborate in our community. You can create unique solutions with different expertises, which is also important to me.
   
4. Florian Doppel-Prix: he showed the importance of working with a concept. He gave some interesting insights of his projects and I really like his sentence about „everything is manageable“.
   
5. Burcin Cem Arabacioglu: he made clear that designers have a great impact about presenting sustainability and passing it on to other people. 
   
6. Sylwia Ulicka: this lecture was unfortunately a bit hard to follow and I kinda struggled to get everything she said. But it was interesting to hear her opinion on material culture and that we should think and reflect about it more.
   
7. Ursula Tischner: her talk was about the topic sustainability, and designing sustainable systems and that we as designers should integrate it more in our designs that people can rethink their actions.
   
8. Anastasia and Martin Lesjak: they talked about their interdisciplinary studio in Graz and which projects they made so far. I liked the different fields they work in and how they for example combined architecture, exhibition design and fashion. 
   
9. Wolfgang Schlag: his lecture was about radio work and which was very interesting, because I don’t know a lot about it and its history. He also mentioned that he thinks radio will stay a long time even though there’s the Internet. 

Anastasija und Martin stellen in diesem Video das Architekturbüro Innocad und das Produktdesignstudio 13&9 vor. Die Arbeit der beiden Designer und deren Teams wurde mit vielen Awards ausgezeichnet. Bevor sie uns von drei sehr erfolgreichen Projekten erzählen, stellen sie ihre außergewöhnlichen und erwiesenen Arbeitsmethoden vor: Im der Arbeitsumgebung herrscht eine New Holism Mentalität. Diese zeichnet sich durch den transdisziplinären Zugang zu neuen Aufgabenstellungen aus. Dadurch und auch weil sie immer versuchen, sich auf alle Arten von Ergebnissen einzulassen, erzielen sie sehr innovative Resultate.

Sylwia gave an interesting talk about social responsibility and the consumption culture that we live today. She is a designer, researcher and lecturer. What drives her as a designer and when leading her students is the search for more sustainable ways of living. She dives in into the topic by defining what sustainable development is: 

„Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.“

Saskia Schmidt spricht in ihrer Lecture über ihre Anfänge in der Designbranche. Dabei lernen wir nicht nur sie und ihren Weg kennen sondern auch einige ihrer Projekte.

Angefangen hat alles in einer (für deutsche Maßstäbe) Kleinstadt in Deutschland, wo sie eine Gestalter-Ausbildung abschloss. Leider hatte sie nicht das Gefühl, genug über Kreativität gelernt zu haben und deswegen entschließt sie sich, ein Studium zu beginnen. Der Studiengang IND zeigt ihr Möglichkeiten und Gestaltungsbereiche, in welchen man später tätig sein könnte. Der Bereich, der Saskia am meisten interessiert, ist Branding und Markenbildung.