Irma Boom is one of the most influential contemporary book designers, known for her innovative and experimental approach to editorial design. Boom challenges conventions and forces the reader to interact with the book in a different way, reconsidering its function and structure. She works closely with the authors and publishers of the books she designs, influencing not only the aesthetics but also the visual narrative and content. Her work has led to a revaluation of the book as a physical object, an unbeatable experience compared to e-books. We will see some of her most important books, such as the one dedicated to the textile artist Sheila Hicks, the invisible book about Chanel or the tiny catalogues devoted to her own work.

In the Bookworm sessions we will explore iconic magazines and books that capture the spirit of the era in which they were created. The material comes from Elisava’s library collections, especially from its Reserve Fund, which contains publications that, due to their design, constitute a journey through the best of the past and present of modern graphics applied to the field of editorial design.

The Bookworm sessions are guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund.

We will place the publications in their context and try to define what makes them relevant in the history of editorial design in the 20th and 21st centuries. The direct contact with the books and magazines that we will see in each session will allow us to experience the printed document from a material point of view: binding, paper, lay out, illustrations, typography. We will also be able to assess the adequacy between form and content.

Today, we can fabricate anything. Digital fabrication now functions at both the micro and macro scales, combining multiple materials, and using different materialization processes. Complexity and customization are no longer impediments in design. 

While we can fabricate anything, design arguably appears confined by our instruments of design: we can only design what we can directly represent. If one looks at 3D-printed artifacts, there is oftentimes a discrepancy between the wonder of technology, and the conventionalism of design. We appear unable to exploit the new freedom that digital fabrication offers us.  In short: we can currently fabricate more than we can design.

What is needed is a new type of design instrument. We need tools for search and exploration, rather than simply control and execution. As of yet, we have countless tools to increase our efficiency and precision. Why not also create tools that serve as our muse, that inspire us and help us to be creative? Tools to draw the undrawable, and to imagine the unimaginable.

What we stand to gain are entirely new spatial and haptic experiences. A playful design that stimulates the senses, elicits curiosity, and invites interaction. A design environment that simultaneously allows control and surprise, and that embraces and celebrates the unforeseen.

Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who writes algorithms to generate and fabricate architectural form. Recent work includes the design of a 3D printed concrete tower in the Swiss alps, an installation of a forest of columns at Grand Palais in Paris, and the fabrication of a muqarna for Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Michael taught architecture as visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Southeast University in Nanjing, and as a lecturer at the CAAD group at ETH Zurich. He previously worked for Herzog & de Meuron architects, and holds an architecture degree from Columbia University.

In this showcase I will review different projects and experiences that have to do with things that make us happy at the studio. Usually related with creating and thinking with as fewer ingredients as posible. Also about rethinking why are we doing what we do and regenrating the motivation about our profession.

Marc Castellví (Barcelona, 1989) is a motion designer and director. He has co-founded projects such as No Más de Mamá (2012), Outro Studio (2014), and Abuela (2020-present). At Abuela, he specializes in visual narratives, helping clients shape their stories, define a unique visual language, and explore new production languages and formats.

Abuela is a Barcelona-based studio formed by creative directors Kevin Sabariego & Marc Castellví.

Specializing in visual narratives, we help our clients write down their story, create a unique visual language and produce it by any means.
We welcome projects with a flexible, versatile and open-minded approach.

Nobody will talk about you like your Abuela.

Studio Airport works at the intersection of graphic design and film, showcasing a decade of storytelling across various formats, including print publications, feature films, and interactive documentaries. During the lecture we’ll explore what storytelling can mean to New York City’s largest public cemetery but also to the San Quentin prison on the West Coast. We’ll learn about the development of a brand for bio-based materials and the publication of a magazine featuring ecology, design, and science for the London Design Museum.

The studio gives an insight in their design approach and how the team works on larger and small scale projects with the same dedication to detail and embracing artistry, craft and innovation to all aspects of their work. Most of their projects have become in-depth mechanisms of storytelling balancing between the editorial and artistic worlds.

Gravitating around the expressions of art, culture, ecology, and science Studio Airport redefines the relationship between graphic design and film by composing moments into experiences. The studio engages in commissioned projects as well as self-initiated endeavors, always guided by an artistic sensibility.

Founded in 2011 by Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters, Studio Airport comprises a tight-knit team of creatives supported by a network of specialists. Over the past decade, Studio Airport has garnered national and international acclaim for its work with Emergence Magazine, SeeAllThis, Normal Phenomena of Life, the Hart Island Project, Slowness, and Sapiens Magazine, earning numerous awards amongst European Agency of the year 2024. Next to the studio they’re also tutors at the master department of Information Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

[A tool] emphasising that what makes us human — our imperfections

As designers, entrepreneurs and architects of digital culture we feel the urge to refocus how we deal with our digital futures. Technology tries to create seamless experiences, even out all our wrinkles. AI is suggesting us a smooth and predictable future, chatGPT is writing us perfect texts, spelling mistakes getting extinct. This is an investigation in friction and human messiness – imperfection, and how we can revive it. The imperfect human manifesto is a call for resistance and thought of how we can use technology in the opposite way. 

Luna Maurer is a mixed media designer, artist, lecturer and author with a focus on digital technologies’ impact on daily life. She explores human characteristics through installations, performances, web experiences, and films. She co-founded studio Moniker, known for participatory and web-based projects, and co-authored the influential manifesto Conditional Design. Currently, she’s redefining perspectives on digital technology and co-authored the Designing Friction manifesto, advocating friction in digital culture. 

Designing a playful experience with critical board games

Games are a reflection of societal values, aspirations, and struggles—making them powerful tools for critical engagement. This workshop provides an opportunity to develop design skills while tackling contemporary issues through playfulness, storytelling, and interaction. Participants will gain hands-on experience in integrating game mechanics, visual communication, and narrativity into an engaging design project in the form of a board game. 

By the end of the workshop, we aim to inspire participants to recognize the potential of game design as an apparatus for activism. We want them to see games not only as entertainment but as powerful tools for discussion, proposing alternatives, and encouraging collective reimagination of the world we live in.

Tereza Ruller (she/her) identifies as a mother, a communication designer, and an educator. In her practice

—The Rodina— she investigates the performative and critical approach toward communication design. Her transdisciplinary approach emphasizes the power of playfulness, active spectatorship, and relations between human and nonhuman actors. Ruller’s work thrives in the cultural context, weaving together participatory events, spatial installations, virtual environments, and visual identities. 

Engaging with the ecological and social issues of our time, she seeks to foster collective reimagination and to embrace the interdependence that defines our shared world. Tereza Ruller is a professor of Communication Design and Digital Practices at HfG Karlsruhe and Critical Narratives tutor at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Explore how to better apply design and storytelling to shape strategy, systems, and public conversations.

The way we imagine the future shapes how it unfolds. From the worlds of film, media, and entertainment, we’ve seen how visions of the future can shift expectations and inspire action. Design plays a similar role today — not just creating functional solutions, but visualizing paths forward that feel real, relatable, and within reach.

This workshop gives students the opportunity to contribute to this process. By working within the context of a high-speed train, students will create visual narratives that transform broad societal ambitions — like connected infrastructure, collective well-being, and sustainable growth — into clear, actionable ideas. By providing clear parameters for creative exploration, the course encourages deeper thinking, sharper design concepts, and more refined outcomes.

Kaave Pour is a creative entrepreneur and the founder of several ventures focused on reimagining the future through design, policy, and collaboration. Previously, he was the co-founder, CEO, and Creative Director of SPACE10, the acclaimed R&D lab known for its pioneering design explorations in partnership with IKEA, Apple, and MIT.

Kaave also leads Sun-Sun, a venture focused on rethinking the home through thoughtful design and technology. His work spans design, culture, and innovation, with a focus on ideas that create new possibilities for how we live, work, and connect. As Chair of the Danish Design Awards, he advocates for design as a way to create thoughtful, tangible impact on how we live and interact with the world.

Where does “AI” end and “we” begin? Artist and researcher Sougwen Chung’s ever-evolving work in human and machine collaboration builds upon a decade-long international journey. Starting with a simple line, the process has led to interdisciplinary insights, philosophical inquiry, and technological invention through pioneering artistic practice. Intertwining perspectives in art and science, Chung’s practice envisions alternative futures for the relationship of humans and machines. “Embracing contradictions in art and research can pave the way to a third path, inspired by tradition and the development of new hybridities,” Chung says.

Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and (re)searcher based in London. Chung’s work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Chung is a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. Sougwen’s work MEMORY is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is the first AI model to be collected by a major institution. Recently, Chung was recognized as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, one of four recipients of the TIME100 Impact award, and named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI.

Scilicet is a studio exploring collaboration; engaging modes of sensing and mark-making between the human and machine, organic and synthetic, and improvisational and computational.

Founded by artist and researcher Sougwen Chung, Scilicet pioneers interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and robotic technologies, with a focus on experimentation, invention, and care.

By engaging technology not as a tool but as a collaborator, Scilicet develops configurations of human and machine beyond automation. We explore these ideas through installations, performances, experiences, and artefacts.

Five day workshop learning Procedural Thinking and how to develop systems instead of one-off solutions. This course is combining Type Design, Design Processes and Flexible Systems.It does not require any particular software knowledge or experience. The students will learn procedural workflows and develop flexible design systems.

The aim of the workshop is to introduce fundamentals of a procedural design workflow and to apply procedural thinking to develop letterforms and font systems.

Participants will be tasked to come up with processes and systems to create letters and fonts.This course is conceived as a crash course for students interested in acquiring processes and skills to incorporate Procedural Thinking into their workflows in a fun and creative way. This course should spark curiosity and open up new avenues of investigation.

Daniel Wenzel is a German designer and creative technologist based in New York. Specializing in typography and generative processes, he balances at the intersection of art, design, and technology.

He has been part of DIA Studio for seven years and currently operates independently. Throughout his career, he has contributed to projects that utilize procedural thinking for the benefit of coherent systems and technological advancement. He has worked for internationally renowned clients including Apple, Google, Louis Vuitton, MoMA, Nike and The New York Times. His work has been featured in publications and exhibitions worldwide and recognized with awards such as Young Guns 22.

In addition to his professional practice, Daniel teaches at the Pratt Institute and Cooper Union in New York. Previously, he has taught the Master Visual Design, Typography program at ELISAVA in Barcelona, given workshops at HEAD Genève and HS Mainz, and lectured at KABK, Weltformat, TDC Inscript, and the MIT Media Lab, among others.

Procedural Typography Designing programmes and systems for typographic expression. 

Exploring the role of tools in the design process and their influence on aesthetics, efficiency, and scalability—from mastering industry standards, learning new tools as part of a project’s problem solving efforts, misusing or making your own tools, to the influence of AI and its assistive potential.

Providing insights into procedural thinking applied to typography and other design disciplines, emphasizing the development of coherent and flexible visual systems and encouraging a methodical yet creative approach to design challenges.

Daniel Wenzel is a German designer and creative technologist based in New York. Specializing in typography and generative processes, he balances at the intersection of art, design, and technology. 

He has been part of DIA Studio for seven years and currently operates independently. Throughout his career, he has contributed to projects that utilize procedural thinking for the benefit of coherent systems and technological advancement. He has worked for internationally renowned clients including Apple, Google, Louis Vuitton, MoMA, Nike and The New York Times. His work has been featured in publications and exhibitions worldwide and recognized with awards such as Young Guns 22.

In addition to his professional practice, Daniel teaches at the Pratt Institute and Cooper Union in New York. Previously, he has taught the Master Visual Design, Typography program at ELISAVA in Barcelona, given workshops at HEAD Genève and HS Mainz, and lectured at KABK, Weltformat, TDC Inscript, and the MIT Media Lab, among others.

26A1® is an independent type foundry, established in 2022. Our approach is experimental, expressive and with the intent to challenge conventions.

We strive to create typefaces beyond aesthetics but for functionality and innovation. By leveraging technology, we aim to bridge the gap between classical type design and the possibilities of the future.

Our research is about challenging the boundaries of type design. We are searching for a realm where form follows function, where ambition drives innovation, and where the intersection of art, design, and technology becomes a canvas for positive transformation.

We aim to create software to advance the field of design—tools that streamline the design process or offer new frameworks, that open up new vistas of design possibilities. By making these tools accessible, we intend to empower a broader spectrum of designers to innovate and challenge the status quo. While we are driven to make a direct impact through our own work, we also recognize the exponential potential of equipping others with innovative tools, allowing them to effect change in their own unique ways.

Loose Associations explores key moments of NODE’s 22-year journey through the people, ideas, and projects that defined it. Using associative connections, the presentation highlights how collaborations and experiences interlink, building on one another to shape a dynamic practice. NODE invites you to discover how everything—and everyone—is interconnected in their creative process.

Serge Rompza graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and co-founded the graphic design studio NODE in 2003 with his Norwegian partner Anders Hofgaard. Operating between Berlin and Oslo, NODE collaborates with clients like OMA, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, MIT (ACT) and Hermès.
Since 2004, Serge has been actively teaching at universities worldwide, fostering a new generation of designers. He has a long-standing connection with Elisava.

NODE is a Berlin- and Oslo-based design studio founded in 2003 by Anders Hofgaard and Serge Rompza. The studio works collaboratively across various media for a diverse range of clients from individuals to institutions, focusing on print, identity, exhibition and interactive work. Besides studio projects, NODE gives lectures and holds workshops at art & design academies.

The grid has 4 x 4 coordinate points.
The points are alphabetised from A to P, from left to right, top to bottom.
The grid has 16 points.

The grid allows 120 connections of 2 points.

eg.
A to B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (15)
B to C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (14)
C to D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (13)
etc.

The grid allows 560 connections of 3 points.

eg.
A–B to C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (14)
A–C to D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (13)
A–D to E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (12)
etc.

41 combinations with a surface of zero are removed.
The remaining 519 are all the triangles possible on this grid.

For each of these 519 triangles, all the triangles they share a side with are added.

eg.
For the triangle A–B–C (for the sides containing A): A–B–C and A–B–C
side A–B to A–B to C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (14)
side A–C to A–C to C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P (14)

Combinations containing a surface of zero are removed.
Initial triangles and added triangles are distinguished by color, colors do overprint.
Triangles sharing three sides, are part of triangles sharing one side.
These appear twice in a visually identical form, one of them is removed.

There are 12,981 combinations of 2 triangles, sharing 1 side, on a grid of 4 by 4 points.

In geometry, a triangulation is the division of a shape into triangles. In psychology, it is the practice of one person introducing a third person into their relationship in order to maintain control. We may be closer to the second point, though we are introducing a second triangle in order to lose control. It is a simple arrangement, the interaction of the two triangles creates instantly shapes of great dynamism that mock the basic right-angled system. All combinations are similar, all combinations are different, all beautiful and perfect in their complex simplicity and graphic clarity. It was impossible to resist to see them all.