Lecture #3 – Astrid Kury: Why collaborate?

Astrid Kur, director of Akademie Graz, talks in this lecture about how important collaborations can be, or why we should work more together as designers, artists and cultural institutions.

„In what world we want to life in. In a rather competitive, isolated, egoistic one, or in one where we share our ideas and aim for the best outcome together?“

Thats actually a quite interesting question at the beginning from her and it raises some thoughts. For Astrid Kury collaboration has many benefits:

  • It benefits from sharing ideas and knowledge
  • it increases social relevance and a social impact
  • It creates coherence in complexity
  • you can create unique solutions with different expertises

It’s very difficult today to handle a project alone, we need to work with other people in every region. Also she mentioned interdisciplinary. I think we always need experts in every kind of field to work together in order to realize cool project. Thats crucial for finding new ideas and solutions.

In the project „Linguistic Landscape Graz“ she mentions how important it is, to integrate the audience as well during the process. The learning outcome was much bigger by learning with and through the audience.

Participation is also very important. Engaging the audience is the key for a successful project/exhibition. Participation creates a genuine outcome and play an active role in the project.

To sum it up, the importance of collaboration should be really considered and not underestimated as a designer. The project she showed us wouldn’t be realized by only one person. There is a big team behind every project therefore collaboration with different experts are essential. So I totally agree with her in the benefits of collaboration. I really liked her clear structured presentation too and that we could easily followed her seeing the information when she talks about it.