To curate means to care. Literally. In the case of design, these objects – and the exhibitions they are featured in – talk about the human drive for progress, about creative leadership, about material economies and technological innovations. But what does it mean to curate within the field of design in the 21st century? How can exhibitions and books make a contribution to fostering more just, socially and ecologically sustainable societies? In her lecture, she will provide insights into the hands-on practice of curating, and into the broader issues that may inform how we present, discuss and practice design in the future. 

Viviane Stappmanns is a curator at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. She is interested in exploring the contribution curators can make to rethinking design as a practice concerned with ecological and social sustainability. In her exhibition and teaching work, she experiments with new, collaborative approaches to curating and exhibiting. She has taught at different schools and universities, among them the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia and, most recently the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe.

Prior to working at the Vitra Design Museum, Viviane has worked as an editor and curator within architecture and design contexts in Australia and Germany, and holds degrees in Interior Design and Journalism.

The exhibition “Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today!” (2021) will open at the Barcelona Design Museum in October 2023. Currently, she is working on the international travelling exhibition “Garden Futures”, due to open at the Vitra Design Museum in Spring 2023.

Folch Creative-driven brand ecosystem. Acid House (creative and business innovation hub in Barcelona and Madrid), White Horse (creative production), Avanti Studio (city branding & way finding ), NOW (digital innovation and transformation), Creative Services (fashion and e-commerce), PILLS (digital education), Gallery Studio (New music formats), G.Records (Record label), Gallery (Music Innovation), Eldorado Agency (outdoor creative agency), J.Franc (3D visualization and AR/VR solutions), FFF (Digital type foundry) and Self (talent management).

Introduction to the Enric Bricall Special Collection, a collection of books whose design and typography represent excellence in 20th century editorial design. We will offer a historical review from 1900 to Postmodernism, passing through the interwar avant-garde, the New Typography and Swiss graphics.

We will look at some representative books from each period and analyse their characteristics. We will try to understand where their importance lies and why they have gone down in the history of graphic design as canonical examples of editorial design in the last century.

The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.

We, humans, struggle to build empathy towards large amounts of information. ¿How do we solve these challenges when the problems we face today are so inherently big, interconnected, wicked, and globalized? In this talk, we will explore some humble experiments done to overcome this lack of empathy through art, technology, and participatory experiences.

Pau Garcia is a media designer and the co-founder of Domestic Data Streamers, a 25 people studio that since 2013 has been focused on creating info-experiences. He also leads de Master in Data Design at Elisava. He is a guest lecturer at The New School (NYC), Hong Kong Design Institute, the Royal College of Arts (London), Politecnico di Milano and the Barcelona School of Economics. He built and permanently lives in the Residence for Artists HeyHuman! and is part of the Posttraumatic Collective. Usually, he doesn’t speak in the third person.

Domestic Data Streamers is an award-winning studio exploring how to express data through film, robotics, code, theater, or architecture in schools, prisons, cinemas, the streets of many cities, and even the United Nations Headquarters. They work for commercial brands and all kinds of old-school and new-kinky institutions. They truly believe data can be a real trigger of change and build bridges in a polarized society.

Pràctica: Graphic Hunting

Exploring our reality allows us to understand the creative potential that lies behind everything that surrounds us; In this session we will analyse, through visualising the latest Pràctica case studies, how our environment and surroundings can become an inexhaustible source of inspiration if we really pay attention.

Anna Berbiela

Graphic designer, creative director, and illustrator based in Barcelona. Anna Berbiela is co-founder, together with Javier Arizu, Carlos Bermúdez, and Albert Porta, of the design studio Pràctica. With offices in Barcelona and New York, Pràctica believes that design it’s a process involving researching, thinking, sharing, challenging… then giving all this a definitive shape. 

Pràctica is a design and identity studio based in Barcelona and New York that seeks to reveal the particular truth of each brand. By simplifying complexity and shaping concepts, creates work that makes sense.

Making a book means undertaking a complex task which is eminently collective. In addition to those who create content, design it and print the resulting book, other roles and knowledge must be involved whose participation is not always visible from the outside. This session will review all of the agents involved in editorial publishing, as well as some of the types of balance that can be established between such roles throughout the work process.

In her professional career, Mela Dávila Freire has combined institutional work – at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and Museo Reina Sofía, among others– with research,writing, editing and curating. Her work focuses in particular on artist publications and art archives, spanning topics such as the theoretical and practical overlaps between archives and art collections, the ideological biases in archival structures,and the feminist revision of the genre of artists’ publications.

Her most recent book, Mission and Commission: documenta and the Art Market, 1955 – 1968, deals with the relationship between the early documenta exhibitions and the incipient art market through the publication of multiples and graphic works.

Blanding, The Branding Paradox

Thierry Brunfaut is a creative director and one of the founding partners of Base Design, the international network of branding studios based in Brussels, New York, Geneva, and Melbourne. He is the author of the renowned 5–Minute poster series, a professor, and a regular speaker at design and branding conferences around the world. Thierry bears a striking and seemingly contradictory resemblance both to Moby and Kermit the frog.

Base Design creates brands with cultural impact. Our team of creatives, strategists, and digital experts design and develop simple yet powerful brands, and build unique personalities. Base knows that branding is first and foremost about people, so specializes in helping companies – whether new or established; large or small – to become human-centric brands with vision, clarity, and empathy. Founded in the early ‘90s, the company has evolved continuously over the years and is now steered by partners across all four studios.

Off track

In this lecture Vrints-Kolsteren will take you into their creative process. From their sources of inspiration to the way they build visual systems.

Like a game, a visual identity is build up from a set of rules. How to apply these rules will determine the end result. The trick is to navigate freely within the game, like a traveler that goes off track but has a map to feel safe.

Vrints-Kolsteren is an Antwerp based design studio founded by Vincent Vrints and Naomi Kolsteren in 2015, working both locally and internationally. The bureau’s forte is developing visual identities with a clear and strong focus on typography. When working on an identity, they create a system, a set of rules, which can evolve over time.

Additionally, dealing with the organic opposed to rudimentary shapes and straight lines is a recurring narrative within their practice.

Vrints-Kolsteren puts an emphasis on collaboration and likes to work closely with their clients. They don’t want to view the client as a client, in the strict sense of the word, rather they consider all parties to be equal.

Vrints-Kolsteren is influenced by the modernist period, with clear references to that time, its designers and artists, which can be soon in their attention for form, linework, and most importantly, the use of grids and rulesets.

The work of the designers Muriel Cooper and Irma Boom serves to reflect on the phenomenon of the designer as author. Learning from Las Vegas was one of the seminal texts of postmodern architecture, but the design of the book was the cause of confrontation between its authors and Muriel Cooper due to the lack of adequacy between substance and form. A similar case is that of Irma Boom, who claims her creative autonomy in the process of creating the book. Two very strong personalities that refute the image of the “invisible designer”.

Modernism and Postmodernism are the driving forces that have shaped 20th century architecture, art and design.

The Modern Movement began at the end of the 19th century, ran vigorously through the century and began to be questioned at the beginning of the 1960s, before finally fading away in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and the paradigm shift it brought with it.

The book has been the medium and the message of the diverse movements in the arts during the last century. The book, with its emphatic material presence, takes on a special value now that we are witnessing its dematerialization, reduced to digital data in electronic format.

Over the Bookworm sessions we will explore several iconic books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were designed. We will place the books in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of 20th century book design. The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.