Blanding, The Branding Paradox
I’ve come to believe one thing: Brands are like people. Some are understated. Some are loud. Some funny. Some communicate by exclaiming! Some have terrible grammar. Brands aren’t created in a vacuum; they’re products of the world around them. Formed around the strengths and weaknesses of the competition, a brand is as much about what it isn’t as what it is. The point is differentiation; that’s what branding is. That’s why I’m so baffled by the current epidemic of what I call blanding—branding not to stand out at all, but to blend in. With results that are, in a word, bland.
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.
Only for MED students
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.
Muriel Cooper. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972
Irma Boom. The architecture of the book. Eindhoven: Lecturis, 2013
In this talk, artist and designer, Sarah Boris will talk about her shifting practice from being an in house designer and art director for some of the leading art institutions in the UK, to setting up her own studio in 2015. She will present some of her personal and non commercial projects that have shaped her practice and are informing new directions including self-published projects such as ‘Global Warming Anyone?’, or her artist book ‘Le Théâtre Graphique’ and her latest sculptural heart shaped bench design.
Sarah Boris is an artist and graphic designer based in London. After working for over ten years for organisations such as Phaidon, the Barbican Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, she set up on her own in 2015, with a focus on visual identities, editorial design and developing her personal art practice. Her clients include The Photographers’ Gallery, Tate, The National Gallery and Christie’s to name a few.
In parallel to commissioned projects Sarah creates screenprinted artworks during artist residencies. Her work was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and was exhibited at the Design Museum in London and at Une Saison Graphique, Le Havre, France. She was judge president for D&AD book design in 2016 and is on the graphic design jury for the Latin American Design Awards 2022.
Only for MED students
In the 1960s the modern canon began to be questioned. Social unrest and countercultural movements found their way into graphic design. A new aesthetic far removed from the Swiss grid gave way to playful typographical compositions that connected with the “words in freedom” of the artistic avant-gardes of the early 20th century, especially Futurism and Dadaism. Robert Massin in France and Corita Kent in the USA mastered the use of the printed word in their creations.
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.
Massin. La cantatrice chauve. Paris: Gallimard, 1964
Sister Corita. Footnotes and headlines: a play-pray book. New York: Herder and Herder, 1967
Influenced as much by feminism as Swiss typography, Lucienne will share her graphic design journey from utopian zeal to dystopian dilemma. She has always considered graphic design to be a political act. In the early days this message was greeted with incredulity but when her book Good: An Introduction to Ethics in Graphic Design hit the streets the subject was inching onto the agenda. Since then, she and colleagues have curated / designed exhibitions about graphic design in health and politics:
(Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? and Hope to Nope: Graphic Design and Politics 2008–18), worked on multiple NGO campaigns; helped spread the word about climate change; and most recently developed the installation Perhaps it’s not you, it’s me. in which Lucienne contemplates ‘leaving’ her long-standing partner Graphic Design. Here she explains why divorce was an option, argues for the value of graphic design and ponders on what we all need to do next.
Lucienne Roberts is founder of design studio LR+ and co-founder of advocacy initiative GD&. A graduate of Central Saint Martins, Lucienne’s practice is characterised by her abiding interest in ethical design. LR+ work spans exhibition design, books and corporate identity. GD& creates vivid books and exhibitions that explore how graphic design connects with all other things. Projects include the originating and co-curation of two critically-acclaimed London exhibitions: Can Graphic Design Save Your Life? and Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008–18.
Only for MED students
Lost in Translation
On your way to becoming an editorial designer, you are confronted with exploring and producing common formats such as books, magazines or websites. For some time now, the discipline’s range of work has been steadily expanding; demands are changing. Collaboration with other disciplines, working with new formats is more necessary and exciting today than ever.
How can new things emerge in exchange with other specialists? How do we approach unknown formats and what are their characteristics? This workshop week will give us time to challenge ourselves and explore our skills as authors and producers of unconventional or even unknown formats.
Serge Rompza
After graduating from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Serge Rompza has co-founded the Berlin and Oslo based design studio NODE in 2003, together with Anders Hofgaard.
The two offices collaboratively focus on identity, print, exhibition and interactive work. Clients include Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Vitra, MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), Lithuanian Pavilion / La Biennale di Venezia, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Since 2004, he has regularly been teaching at art and design academies across Europe.
Only for MED students
Swiss graphics led the international scene after the Second World War. In the 1950s and 1960s the Swiss style, a refined version of the New Typography, had become the universal solution to any visual communication need from book design to poster design to advertising and corporate image. Max Bill and Karl Gerstner, among many others, created a sophisticated language rooted in the avant-garde to communicate with the consumer society.
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.
Max Bill. Form. Basel: Karl Werner, 1952
Karl Gerstner. Geigy heute. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1958
Only for MVD students
Systemic Type Design
We live in a (new) golden age of systemic type design. New technologies and easy to use programmes leveled the playfield for emerging designers and gave them the chance to experiment with new ideas. The world of display fonts has witnessed a lot of new impulses in the last years. Type has become more flexible, variable and kinetic as ever, adjusting efficiently and effectively to new communication channels.
Systemic Type Design is more than designing fonts. A type system is an efficient design tool that helps designers to design. If done well, the act of writing is the act of designing without the need to further layout the text. In this course we will develop an experimental type system that almost automatically generates fantastic design applications.
Martin Lorenz
might as well have become a cook, a comic artist or an architect, were it not for an internship at Müller+Volkmann. Lorenz studied Graphic Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt and the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague. After working four years at the design agency Hort, he moved to Barcelona to found TwoPoints.Net with Lupi Asensio and do his MA and PhD in Design Research at the UB. Lorenz has taught since 2006 for Elisava and still likes to cook.
This lecture talks about the diverse trials faced when attempting to expand the range of our capacity within web environments by questioning standard web design templates. The talk features Anti-User-Friendly, an ongoing project that challenges the concept of user-friendliness by creating a content-focused website.
Web tools work as a bridge connecting the user and the device-website to narrow the world wide web down to a ‘village wide web’ and transform the web into an extended space.
Yehwan Song is a graphic web designer. She runs her own independent design studio focusing on the strategic use of technologies. Her work involves projects with multiple cultural organizations, including ifa, LIMA Media Art, Rhizome, Typojanchi, and Seoul Museum of Art.
She has participated in a number of exhibitions—Venice Biennale (Korean pavilion), Seoul Biennale(SBAU), and others; and her works have been featured in such magazines as Étapes, Monthly DESIGN, It’s Nice That, among others.
Yehwan Song Studio is a web design and a web development studio questioning standardized design and interface conventions that frame users’ behavior and the templates that make them lose their content awareness and become accustomed to oversimplification. We construct outside-the-frame devices and interfaces in order to challenge the notion of user-friendliness. We pursue diversity and variety in the web environment above efficiency.
We will reflect from some projects elaborated in 131 during the last years, in which starting from typography we work to recover the local and collective memory.
Esteve Padilla.
Barcelona, 1983
Graphic designer, half of the 131 studio and occasional teacher at various universities. Graduated in graphic design at Eina (UAB).
131
(Pau Llop, Esteve Padilla) is a graphic design office based in Barcelona and Lleida. Typography understood as image, form or letter is a substantial element in all the projects we do. Our work includes art direction, identities, editorial projects, websites and typography.
Pràctica: Process
Pràctica does not have a style, but it follows a process; In this session, we will analyze, through the case studies of the latest studio projects, the process that Pràctica follows to develop its work.
Anna Berbiela
Graphic designer based in Barcelona. Anna founded the studio Pràctica together with Javier Arizu, Carlos Bermúdez and Albert Porta in 2018. With offices in Barcelona and New York, Pràctica is a studio that works for institutional, cultural, and commercial clients, developing communication projects in printed, digital, and environmental matters.
Pràctica is a full-service design studio based in Barcelona and New York. Working for institutional, cultural, and commercial clients, always seeks powerful concepts, bold visual codes, and customized solutions for each project. This is translated into a very eclectic job; Their style is the lack of one, it’s finding the best solution for each project.
The act of making something public
This session addresses the methods, tools and implications of publishing activities.
— What does the publication does/mean? And how is it going to exist/circulate?
— How does it achieve its aspirations through form?
— How do content, editorial concept and design come together?
— How to think publishing as complement and supplement to working practices?
— In which terms can ‘making public’ act as a tool for bringing common shared interests and concerns?
Book Bindery
The BB allows the production of books and publications in small editions and specific manipulations of paper and cardboard. All processes are always done entirely by hand and pushing the limits of what is possible.
Next to being a technical workshop, the BB functions as a cross-departmental point in our institution. We believe the publishing practice is an emancipatory process. We support project such as: PUB.sandberg.nl, Radio Rietveld and Rietveld Journal.
Miquel Hervás Gómez
(Terrassa, 19 April 1985). Handy graphic design freelancer based in the www. Running as a workshop manager at the BB. Tutor for Disarming Design at the Sandberg Instituut and Preparatory Course at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, while being member of fanfare and Carne Kids.
fanfare was established in the observation of a context, a network, within which design and art interactions resulted in projects not suiting within the existing platforms for presentation. fanfare creates a framework to connect already existing structures. What organically happened in this context was the creation of new structures, new networks, new initiatives. We allow ourselves in the context of today to speak about fanfare as framework for (non)physical publishing.
fanfare is a platform and design studio for cross-disciplinary collaboration and visual communication. Through an active programme, fanfare generates, explores, and curates environments for visual interactions.
Since the start in 2014, fanfare has created a unique space for experiments, explorations and collaborations in the realm of graphic design and related disciplines. Through their research and design practice, fanfare sharpens and challenges the notion of visual communication.
Miquel Hervás Gómez
(Terrassa, 19 de abril de 1985). Diseñador gráfico autónomo afincado en la www. Funcionando como jefe de taller en la BB. Tutor de Disarming Design en el Sandberg Instituut y del Curso Preparatorio en la Gerrit Rietveld Academie, a la vez que miembro de fanfare y Carne Kids.
Ruben Pater (1977, NL) (he/him) works between journalism and graphic design. Under the name Untold Stories, Pater creates visual narratives that support solidarity, justice, and equality. Pater finds himself being a designer at a time when design is last thing the world needs. Until more ethical approaches present themselves, he designs, writes, and teaches. He is a tutor at the BA Graphic Design, and the MA Non Linear Narrative at KABK. The Politics of Design, is his first book about cultural bias in graphic design. His second book CAPS LOCK looks at the role of graphic design in capitalism.
CAPS LOCK
Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artefacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources.
CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.
CAPS LOCK is an inspirational book full of sources for design students, educators and visual communicators all over the world, just like Ruben’s first book The Politics of Design.
Only for MED students
Two crucial works of New Typography, the avant-garde movement that revolutionised graphic design in the interwar period. The increasing availability of the photographic image played a fundamental role in this new approach to editorial design. Moholy-Nagy, a member of the legendary Bauhaus, and Jan Tschichold, author of the landmark work Die neue Typographie, radically changed the face of the printed page, producing a lasting impact whose effects continue to this day.
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.
László Moholy-Nagy. Malerei, Fotografie, Film. München: Albert Langen, 1925
Jan Tschichold. Foto-Auge. Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind, 1929
Two hours filled with semantics, politics and graphic design, appropriately illustrated with works by Bendita Gloria.
Santi Fuster
Graphic designer.
50% of Bendita Gloria.
Bendita Gloria is a design studio founded by Alba Rosell and Santi Fuster. Focusing on identity and editorial projects, their work has won certain attention because of its particular conceptual approach. Since 2007, Bendita Gloria strives to turn their projects into interesting reading matter.
MUTUO
Méndez Núñez, 7
08003 Barcelona
Throughout our lives, women, or people with vaginas, will visit the gynecologist multiple times. The Public Health recommendation is to do it every 1-3 years, depending on individual circumstances, however, more than 50% of women will not follow this recommendation. It is not news that almost no woman likes going to the gynecologist. Unfortunately, feeling anxiety, fear, vulnerability, shame, and discomfort are part of the common experience of many women when visiting this specialist. But, why do we experience it this way?
The lack of sensitivity and empathy towards a patient in an extremely vulnerable position, the judgment, infantilization, paternalism, the lack of scientific advancement, misinformation, the taboo or normalization of female pain are some of the subtle forms of patriarchal violence that women suffer in relation to our intimate health. A violence that occurs in a medical context where, apparently, the values of care and attention prevail, and where precisely the opposite of violence is expected.
Gynecological violence affects half the population, it is a complex and systemic problem in which a multitude of factors intervene and in which we all participate more or less consciously. This exhibition seeks to detect and denormalize these situations as an indispensable first step for change.
1. Behaviour
The gynecological visit differs from any other medical examination due to the high level of vulnerability to which patients are exposed. Of course, it is not the same to talk to a doctor while dressed and sitting at a table, than to do it naked, with your legs spread and without seeing how a stranger manipulates tools in your vagina.
Vulnerability awakens in our mind the same response as a physical threat; we interpret the lack of control of the situation as a danger and we become extremely sensitive. For this reason, the gynecological examination requires a high degree of empathy, respect and care on the part of the professionals, to avoid hurting or discomforting the person treated.
However, too often, women experience a lack of sensitivity from their doctors, judicious treatment, contempt and even discriminatory treatment according to their sexual practices or orientation.
The Most Uncomfortable Moment
This first piece invites you to sit down, open your legs in a gynecological-examination position and, from that position, read the testimonies that appear projected.
These are real testimonies collected in an investigation where 82 women participated, who relate some of the most uncomfortable moments they have experienced in a gynecological consultation related to the behaviour of the professionals attending them.
2. The Instrument
The vaginal speculum is an instrument used for gynecological examinations that allows, by dilating the walls of the vagina, to observe the cervix. This characteristic tool, with a look similar to a torture weapon, was invented less than 200 years ago by Marion Sims, known as the “father of modern gynecology”. Despite all its benefits, the speculum has an obscure origin, connected to patriarchal authority and institutional racism, as Sims used black slaves for years to perform experimental surgeries without anesthesia. From the first model used by Sims and later perfected by Thomas Graves in 1870, the instrument has hardly changed.
Currently, regarding its most practical function, the speculum is a tool that does its job and does it well, allowing the pap smear (a test that in recent years has reduced the incidence and mortality from cervix cancer up to 70-80%). However, the speculum has barely changed in its 200-year history and remains a poorly suited design for the patient’s comfort.
Revising the speculum
This chapter of the exhibition focuses on the ideology and politics that objects hide behind their design, beyond their utilitarian character. Through speculative sketches, we reflect on the speculum and how it materializes a patriarchal vision that does not prioritize the comfort of the patient, an object lacking in evolution that, in the hands of doctors, represents authority and power.
Reaction to the speculum
The design and appearance of the speculum, as well as the experience of patients who have used it, make it one of the most hated instruments. This interactive piece displays the most common reactions when viewing this device. When opening the speculum you will see a word accompanied by the number of people who wrote it in response to the open field question: “What word comes to mind when you see this device? (followed by an image of a speculum). “
These are some of the other words indicated:
Anxiety, old-fashioned, self-awareness, open, control, dehumanizing, facilitator, exploration, tool, horror, introspection, invasion, fear, annoyance, monster, mosquito, obsolescence, panic, pap smear, childbirth, pressure, review, noise, tension, violence.
3. The Pill
The contraceptive pill has been one of the most popular and revolutionary drugs of recent decades, as well as one of the most controversial. The first mass-use drug for non-sick people also has a sordid origin linked to colonialism. The first trials of the American pill in the 1950s were carried out in Costa Rica for eugenic purposes of population control in poor women who agreed to take the pill and suffered serious side effects, without being aware that they were part of a pharmacological experiment.
Since then, millions and millions of women have taken this combined progesterone and estrogen hormonal drug, currently 150 million people worldwide. Despite its positive effect on the movements for sexual liberation and female emancipation, the history of this pill continues to be marked by a lack of consent, of full disclosure, of a truly informed choice, as well as a lack of clinically relevant research regarding risks and possible alternatives.
Side effects
According to a study done in the USA, three out of every five women stop taking the pill during the first year of use due to its side effects. Mostly, effects about which patients are not informed. Side effects ignored by everyone, unlike other drugs. For example, the risk of thrombosis of the pill is 0.1% (1 in 1000), which has not been an impediment to its commercialization, on the contrary, the risk of thrombosis in the vaccine against Covid-19 Astra Zeneca, which is only 0.0006% (30 out of 5 million), meant stopping vaccination worldwide for a few weeks.
Reasons to take the pill
Regardless of the virtues or defects of the contraceptive pill, in recent decades it has been massively prescribed by medical professionals, and there is currently a debate about whether in some cases there is an unnecessary over-prescription. However, today, the contraceptive pill remains the only “remedy” or “resource” in Western medicine to treat certain gynecological problems such as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome or Endometriosis. In data, this means that more than half of people (58%) who use hormonal contraceptives do so for purposes other than preventing pregnancy.
The recipe wall displays the following data:
— 42% of people who use a hormonal contraceptive do so exclusively for contraceptive purposes
— 44% of people who use a hormonal contraceptive do so for some other reason additionally to contraception.
— 14% of people who use hormonal contraception do so exclusively for purposes other than contraception
These are the total percentages of people who use hormonal contraceptives by reason:
— Contraceptive: 86%
— Menstrual pain: 31%
— Menstrual regulation: 28%
— Acne: 14%
— Endometriosis: 4%
4. Normalization
Ignoring and normalizing women’s pain is another form of gynecological violence. In a 1974 study medical students reported that they had been instructed by their professors to assume that women’s ailments are psychosomatic until proven otherwise. Unfortunately, today there are still traces of that thought that belittles the pain that comes from a woman.
In the case of menstrual pain, its normalization also extends outside the gynecological consultation, in general society. 51% of women and 52% of men believe that period pain is something that women have to deal with. However, menstruating is a physiological need just like eating, and shouldn’t hurt.
Menstrual pain
Silence, normalization and ignorance of menstrual pain run deep and have serious consequences. Although menstruating should not be painful, the data shows that a high percentage of women suffer periodically from period pain. This piece visualizes and contrasts some real events – the percentages of women suffering from dysmenorrhea and endometriosis – with the normalization of this pain – represented through objects commonly used as a “remedy” for pain. By lifting these objects, we discover the consequences of such normalization.
5. Paternalism
The strong paternalistic tradition of Western medicine is accentuated in gynecology. The fact that the patients are women and the widespread misinformation about our own bodies due to a lack of education, makes this form of authoritarianism very present. To this day, there is still a strong hierarchical relationship between doctor and patient, where many times the former imposes and decides for the latter, without giving explanations. In this way, the figure of the medical savior and the infantilization of the ignorant woman continue to be perpetuated.
This paternalism is a direct consequence of the patriarchal system and extends beyond the individual attitude of medical professionals, as it is also exercised by the State through laws and policies.
Imposed waiting
The sexual and reproductive health law on voluntary termination of pregnancy is a clear example of the paternalism of the system. In Spain, according to this law, every woman who decides to have an abortion during the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy must wait a period of at least three days, from when she goes to the medical center and receives information, until she can have an abortion. This imposed waiting time known as the “reflection period” is a clear questioning of the ethical capacity of women to decide. In Spain, there is no other intervention that, by law, requires something similar.
This piece reflects on paternalism in the field of gynecology through the experience of waiting. The recording shows an experiment in which I sat waiting for three days. The video is accompanied by two bases that expose and oppose a pistol to an abortion medication, referring to the reflection period imposed to abort in Spain and the minimum of 3 days of waiting required in the US to buy a weapon.
Conclusión
La violencia ginecológica es una realidad extendida de formas muy distintas; a través de dinámicas sutiles como el trato juicioso y carente de empatía, la falta de investigación y avance científico, la patologización de procesos naturales, la falta de educación e información, la invisibilización y menosprecio al dolor o la normalización de una sistema sanitario paternalista.
La violencia ginecológica es un problema sistémico, no tiene individuos culpables porque todos formamos parte de este sistema. En gran parte, dicha violencia se ejerce de forma involuntaria o inconsciente y es normalizada por todos y todas: ginecólogos, pacientes, industria y estado. Una consecuencia o materialización más del sistema patriarcal que aún sufrimos a día de hoy. Por lo tanto, todas somos víctimas a la vez que agentes de cambio.
Acabar con la violencia ginecológica pasa por revisar nuestras propias vivencias desde una perspectiva crítica, por contar y hablar de ello y por aprender sobre nuestros propios cuerpos. Detectar, desnormalizar y denunciar situaciones que nos hacen sentir incómodas o violentadas es el primer paso para conseguir una ginecología respetuosa y una reconciliación entre doctores y pacientes.
MUTUO
Méndez Núñez, 7
08003 Barcelona
We live in a “fit” society, where gyms are temples of transformation towards a globalized stereotype. The cult of the body plans and controls our daily routines and ends up shaping our identity, fueling the fitness industry, which is only growing.
At the same time we are in the age of information, of data; it is said that having information is power, and we can apply it to this fitness paradigm as well. We design our body in gyms by entering data (15 repetitions of squats for 3 sets, 100 grams of rice…) para construir el cuerpo ideal and at the same time gain individual power. The beauty acaba siendo algo measured, weighed, equated, and compared.
The bodies that visualize this in the most extreme way are body-builders. Mass body, corporal and data body, representing a bodily ideal of power. We all see this social group as far from our reality, but the body-builders of the past are the fitness followers of the present.
Sport today has become a complex commercial, political and social activity, where the healthy body is confused with the aesthetic body, moulding the canons of beauty and our self-esteem at will. And the way we get entangled is by following these data rituals.
The body on display
We exhibit a body built with effort and sacrifice. And with it, a feeling of self-satisfaction fills us. In the past, cultivating muscular strength had a practical purpose: carrying logs to light fires, defending our homes, etc. The contemporary era works on strength to enlarge muscles with an aesthetic and static objective, whose sole purpose is exhibition.
“How does it feel to get on the platform as a bodybuilder?”
The audio corresponds to the testimony of my own gym trainer.
High extreme power bodypuzzle workout
The body becomes proportions, the classical beauty comes from the balance of the parts, from the perfect measure with which each detail is worked. Therefore, the bodybuilder, like the sculptor, dissects the body into small fragments, which must be perfect in their conception, but also in their assembly. The body-builder is a body-puzzle; but also a “signature body”, since each of its fragments is molded “in the manner of”. The perfect body is sold in “pieces” and bought in “installments”, and some of these will take years to be fulfilled, possibly never even achieved.
We follow body references to transform our body, and most of them end up being the celebrities we see in the media. This routine has been created by collecting data from people who have acquired social power and have become referents thanks to a part of their body. This survey has been conducted on instagram and in gyms where they have given us these answers.
Data body trophies
We live in the society of the constructed body, of the transformed body. Where the media, advertising, and social networks instill in us that there is an inversely proportional relationship between appearance and power.
To achieve power it seems essential to have a strong and muscular body, this has been used as a symbol and therefore as a form of communication. Therefore, when we set out to “improve our physique” or “start operation bikini” we are basically pursuing the self-imposed idea of success in the contemporary era.
We end up in gyms transforming the body from a shapeless mass to a sculpted body and at the same time building an iconography of the supermuscle that means “power”.
From the question “what part of your body makes you feel empowered?” and “what part of your body makes you feel insecure?” These bodies are sculpted and molded. Power answers give volume and insecurity answers deflate it. The survey was conducted digitally and also analogically in different gyms . The separation between sexes responds to the very distinction made in these sports centers.
Community control scale
The fitness body exists because someone else looks at it. This transformation to power is meaningless if it cannot be observed, would we still desire these bodies if we lived alone in the world?
We examine ourselves, we judge and compare, we reflect our body in that of others. Going to the gym means submitting to a bombardment of evaluative gazes, it means entering the new contemporary panopticon.
Health has become a matter of class, where we judge those who do not fit this model by taking superficial values, such as weight and measurements. We control the fitness individual through numbers to such an extent that 3 out of 4 people in Spain recognize that they are not happy with their current weight.
In this social model the body is a symbol of identity, and how we work it reflects what we want to be:
Tell me how you work your body and I will tell you who you are. weigh yourself and so we know each other!
This scale does not give the personal weight, but visualizes the total of all of us who have passed through here, reinforcing the feeling of community and control that is established in gyms.
Viral bench press
But we not only look at ourselves, we also seek external approval. We put ourselves on our own stage on social media, we expose ourselves with poses and we are valued with likes. Our competition translates into the instagram feed. We produce our body to immortalize it in a photo, without this image our sacrifice is meaningless. Gyms have become the centers where we take the most selfies, currently the hashtag #gym has 208,566,606 publications of which 9 out of 10 are selfies. In a world of images, our effort acquires value when it translates into a postable photograph.
Do you want to go viral? With this machine you will get followers tripling in each set of exercises. Increase the weight in relation to the impact on networks you want to achieve, the more weight the more likes!
Narcissus machine
But in gyms we not only observe each other, we spend most of the time looking at ourselves and seeking our own approval: we are in the age of egoism and the continuous cult of the ego.
In the mirrors we design the ego as if we were sculptors, we use the data to know how to gain volume or to reduce it. We gain power in each set, in each repetition, we increase the weight…. We calculate our movements to produce the image we want to be, following the same laws that govern consumption: immediacy and utility.
Currently 30% of Spaniards claim to control the portions they eat, counting calories and 71% follow fitness routines daily from their smartphone. Now, Narciso has not only fallen in love with his image, but has produced it, needing to show it off.
The Narcissus machine allows you to work on the cult of the body and the cult of the ego in unison. Don’t stop looking at yourself while you think about who you want to be!
Prayers for mass fitness
In Spain, there are more than 4,000 sports facilities operating and generating a business of 2,291 million euros. Currently there are more than 5.5 million users registered in gyms, five times the number of users registered in soccer clubs. On youtube there are more than 30 million fitness videos and the #fittok challenge on Tiktok has more than 2 trillion repetitions that not even in 900 thousand years would we finish watching it all. A huge community has been built that communicates through magazines, social networks, blogs and gyms. We have become accustomed to a bombardment of messages that are far from the healthy sense of sport and that we have already normalized, creating a whole moral imaginary. We want to stand out from the crowd and achieve self-confidence, but we actually end up becoming a mass.
This mass inhabits gyms, and they have become the new temples where people go in search of disconnection, peace and pleasure. Places where talking seems to be forbidden and where healthy image has become a divine principle. We follow routines where personal sacrifice translates into sweat and time, with highly programmed rituals with the desire for constant self-improvement; we separate food between “pure”, like tuna rice, and “impure”, like pizza; we look for “high protein” or “no sugar added” as gospels in our supermarkets; and then we end up blinded in a bodily hedonism, but does this effort really produce a more satisfying life? Welcome to the new contemporary religion: We are bodybuilders.
Body cult messages are instilled in us daily as if they were prayers. These 120 are real messages from magazines, instagram accounts, workout websites and gyms that make us question the role of personal freedom over the body.
The exhibition traces the work as art director of Vogue Spain of Óscar Germade, between 2017 and 2021. The space is divided into four parts: Art Direction, linked to the visual part and design direction of the magazine. Covers, with a review of the work on covers of the last four years. “Making of”, where the design process of each part of the magazine is shown, from a technical and specific point of view.
Typography, with a purely visual retrospective of the design of Chamberí, ad-hoc typography designed by Íñigo Jerez for the magazine, which Eugenia de la Torriente, director of the magazine between January 2017 and December 2020, describes “Chamberí is a seemingly irreconcilable combination of rationality and exuberance. It starts from a very Cartesian skeleton, but has a final visual part of a more folkloric spirit, if it can be called that, thanks to a series of details that refer to Spanish tradition such as accents, crossbars and ascending curves. As it grows, it is playful, joyful and warm, and so far removed from its rational base that it is hard to recognize it.”
The sum of these spaces is a complete immersion in the work involved in the art direction of a fashion magazine today, with the complexity of inheriting the history of a masthead like Vogue, linked to figures of enormous transcendence such as Alexander Liberman: “art director of Vogue in the US and editorial director of Condé Nast, and who in his more than 50 years at the company laid the foundations of this masthead and many others. Liberman’s layouts were very simple because he made a very direct use of layout, with few flourishes in the text. In recent decades, the trend in fashion magazines has been precisely the opposite: many elements per page, shaped boxes…” (Eugenia de la Torriente).
This work of design and art direction is not only aware of the historical part but also of the complex moment in which the big publishing houses are living, adapted to a digital reality where they coexist with new visual proposals.
The tour ends with an extensive review of the Vogue covers of the last four years that, in an organic way, shows a definite evolution and a clear direction of the commitment to iconic covers, based on the image and memorable for the audience.
Views of Óscar Germade’s exhibition at the agora in Elisava
MUTUO
Méndez Núñez, 7
08003 Barcelona
Population
The world’s population faced a tremendous change with the industrial revolution: until 1800 it had taken all of human existence for the world population to reach one million. The second billion was reached in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 years (1960), the 4th billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion only 13 years (1987). This means that during the 20th century alone, the population has grown from 1.6 billion, to 6 billion. And only 50 years ago, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.
Our world is made by people. People living in territories. Each human is important and should be equal. Still, we tend to define ourselves, our values and our views by a short sighted perspective, narrowed to our own national context. The world’s flag is a slap in the face of reality. The world itself is this flag, complex and not western at all. Is the reality of the world adapted to its symbolic representation?
Passport Index
In 1920 after WW1, the League of Nations met in France for a meeting that would shape modern travel. Easing border crossings by train was a priority, but the lack of a standardized passport design posed a serious obstacle to the resumption of normal intercourse and to the economic recovery of the world. During the meeting the member came to an agreement on a specified size, layout, and design of travel documents for 42 nations.
Since that moment every “sovereign” nation has designed and created its own Passport.
The passport index shows how powerful your passport can be depending where you’re from. The more visa free countries you can enter, the more powerful your passport is. The passport has become a power representation .
These globes represent how different the free movement can seem depending on where you’re from. While there are countries that may perceive their world as an open and unlimited space, there are others that perceive their available world as just an archipelago of 26 islands.
How open is the world to you?
Passport prices
To have a passport represents a time and economic investment. This investment differs from country to country and if you consider local wages, the process of actually owning a first document required to travel can be a real luxury for certain nationalities.
We are aware that freedom comes at a cost – But can we put a price on it? Passport prices reveal how volatile and valuable freedom and mobility has become in our globalized world. Where do these prices come from? – Are these prices imposed by external factors?
Passport fees should be related to the average income of its citizens, and usually passport offices charge between 2% and 4% for a passport compared to the average income. But there’s cases where the price can be as high as 12%. Passports are a big business. The global e–passport market is valued at 24 billion dollars.
People need passports, but at what cost?
Golden visas – Refugee journey
Golden Visas are programs in which you can pay for citizenships and passports. They are designed to attract money and businesses to countries. 22 countries from all over the world offer these types of programs. Should any passport have a price tag? What’s the real price of your passport? Should millionaires have the right to buy nationalities?
In Portugal, around €2.7 billion has been invested in the country through the golden visa scheme, €2.4 billion of this through the purchase of real estate. In Marvila (Lisbon), more than 600 residents had to move elsewhere after home prices rose 88% in two years.
But while some people can buy nationalities and be welcome in any place, others must leave their own country because of poverty, political unrest or other serious circumstances that exist there. And here comes even a lexicon misconception, why do we call the first ones expats, and the second immigrants?
Airport treatments
As Nationalities, airports customs space is something every traveling citizen of the world has to face. In these transit non–places, people are processed purely in an objectual way. With bureaucratic and prejudiced micro aggressions. Airports customs and security control are not designed to make or welcomed, but powerless and helpless and these situations can intensify depending on your passport’s origin, from divisions, to double and triple checks, to interviews.
What’s your worst experience in airport security control?
Host countries – Refugee countries
Where do migrants go, and why? In 2015, more than a million people fled to Europe, making it a record year for migration. But a lot has changed since then. Today, fewer and fewer people are attempting to get to Europe by irregular means. The main cause of forced migration remains war and violence. Over half of all refugees worldwide come from regions of conflict. Another reason for flight is human rights violations. In at least ten countries worldwide, homosexuality and transsexuality are punishable with the death penalty. In many other countries the sentence is long-term imprisonment. In addition, consequences of climate change – such as a lack of food and water – are forcing people to leave their homes.
Most refugees are not taken in by Europe, developing countries host 85 percent of the world’s refugees. Turkey is the main host country, with a total of 3.5 million migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Pakistan and Uganda have each taken in 1.4 million people. Germany is in sixth place with 930,400.
Type Mistery Tunnel
About Dinamo variable way of working and the use of in-house design tools as a method to explore new aesthetics and the gestural potential of typefaces. We’ll look at what considerations influenced the making of their recent typefaces ABC Arizona or ABC Gravity, or bespoke projects for the SF Symphony, Goat, ON and Rimowa. For the business people amongst us we’ll take a glimpse into 1 year of collected sales statistics that lead to creating and offering a new model to license fonts, and try to fortune-tell where all of this might be going.
Johannes Breyer is a German / Chilean graphic designer based in Berlin. Se habla un poco Español. He studied in Zurich and worked for design studio NORM before graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Together with Fabian Harb, he is running the Swiss type design practice DINAMO.
Dinamo is a Swiss type design platform that offering retail and bespoke typefaces, design software, research, and consultancy. Founded in Basel we operate via a network of satellite members across the globe. Members of Dinamo are visiting teachers at various art academies and have been invited to give workshops and lectures at an international roster of educational institutions. Clients range from the 1 person-run cultural publisher to the International Olympic Committee. Dinamo won the Swiss Design Awards 2017, and are members of the AGI as of 2018.
Job Title: Art Director
In 2017, Vogue Spain took a new editorial direction that brought about a new art direction by the hand of Óscar Germade. This process is still alive today thanks to a project that gives as much importance to the image as to the type. A story in chapters of how, when and where one accepts the challenge of designing a magazine where everything has been said, written, heard, seen, criticized and praised. A visual review of Vogue’s relationship with design and art direction, of the dialogue between fashion and typography, of tradition and novelty.
Óscar Germade
(A Coruña, 1983) founded Solo in 2011, a design studio specialized in brand identity and editorial design. This project allows him to venture into different cultural fields, such as fashion and the media. Perhaps the greatest strength of the project -from which he has collaborated with brands such as Simon Miller, Nike, Oysho and El País- is the precise and forceful use of typography and photography, combining digital and analog techniques.
In 2017, he takes over the art direction of Vogue Spain, a leading magazine in the national editorial market.
Throughout his professional career, he combines the work of design and art direction with various teaching activities: he has been a professor of editorial projects in the Master in editorial design at Elisava, he was thesis director and degree coordinator at IED Barcelona and, since 2020, he has been a professor of typography at IE School of Architecture and Design.
Only for MADD students
Critical Design
How can we be good designers without questioning the world we live in? We strongly believe in the great value of being critical, not in a destructive way but always trying to find the whys behind the certainties and through being obsessed with the constant research of a way to do it better.
Designers observe, adopt a stance, collaborate, engage, adapt, write and debate when creating proposals. Designers with critical thinking, looking for problems, at the service of society, satirical and provocative that makes us think about how the world could be. In this workshop we will work on the positioning of the future designer and his social role as a message issuer.
Raúl Goñi
Navarrese, designer and teacher, in that order. Trained as a graphic designer in Pamplona and Barcelona. Posterist by profession he is a founding member of FestadelGrafisme.org and the new TallersdelaFesta.org in Portbou, a transdisciplinary event that focuses on people and their relationship with design from a playful point of view and a cross-border condition. Teacher since 2006 specialized in Art Direction and in the development of Final Degree Projects in various schools.
Only for MED students
Photobook
Introduction in the world of the photobook from its foundations, history and current situation.
Students will acquire knowledge about their conception and work process developing a project with an author. Narrative, rhythm and sequence when the main content is image.
Jon Uriarte
He studied photography at the Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya and at the International Center of Photography in New York, as well as a master’s degree in Artistic Projects and Theories from PhotoEspaña and the Universidad Europea de Madrid. He has exhibited in various art centers and galleries, both in collective and individual shows, among which are La Casa Encendida in Madrid, the Koldo Mitxelena in Donostia, Studio 304 in New York, the HBC center in Berlin and the Sala d’Art Jove in Barcelona.
He was the founder of Widephoto, an independent platform dedicated to curating and activities around contemporary photography. In addition, he conceptualized and coordinated for 3 years DONE, the project on reflection and visual creation promoted by Foto Colectania. He currently lives in London, from where he combines the curatorship of The Photographers’ Gallery digital programs with the curatorship of the Getxophoto International Image Festival.
The talks may or may not contain: starting a freelance career in the middle of a financial crisis. Reaching out to clients all over the world without previous contacts but with internet. Horses. Showing the budget of every project. Rainbows. The high and lows of an editorial illustration career. Dinosaurs. Establishing healthy habits. Cucumbers. Personal experiments. Two ducks with sunglasses playing tennis with chainsaws. Not knowing what I’m doing. Poodles.
Alvaro Dominguez is an Ilustrator and graphic designer. He has collaborated with The New York Times, Apple, Showtime, Time Magazine y Wired among others. His work has been recognized by American illustration and The New York Times Most Notable Illustrations.
We will reflect on brand-cities and the externalities of this vision. We will see examples of all this through questions to be answered and paths pointed out, explored and to be explored. We will talk about how to cultivate the constancy of failure, about the differences between being a citizen and a client, about the peculiarities of working for the public sector, about not knowing what we do not know. We will look at what creative management can and cannot bring to a public administration.
Nacho Padilla (Madrid, 1970) has a degree in advertising and PR from the UCM. He has worked as a copywriter at McCann Erickson and as creative director at Contrapunto BBDO. In 2010 he founded Viernes, a studio that applies creativity to projects in sustainable mobility, public administration, third sector, CSR and social economy and innovation. In 2016 he left Viernes to take over the creative direction of Madrid City Council. Since May 2020 he has been the creative director of Barcelona City Council.
Open to all Master students
Barcelona 2.0
The aim of this workshop is to come up with a way that could improve Barcelona public life.
Each team will choose an existing item or service to improve—like for example trash collection, the metro, bicing, etc.
At the end of the week, each team will present their “upgraded Barcelona 2.0” idea. The final solution can be as realistic or fantastical as you would like it to be and can be presented and explained in the material or software of your choosing.
We will be getting to the solution by going through a variety of creative thinking exercises that will encourage participants to let their imaginations run wild by dreaming up the most unattainable, extreme, and impractical solutions you can think of in order to come up with a final solution. The goal of the workshop is to dig deep into how we come up with creative solutions, and understand the tools and processes available that are proven to tap into our creativity so you can apply these techniques to solve any kind of design problem you might encounter in the future.
Irene Pereyra
Co-founder of the Brooklyn based design studio “Anton & Irene”. She has led the strategy and UX initiatives for relevant clients for both the web and cross-platform applications. Her work has been recognized by numerous awards.
Irene has been a guest speaker at numerous conferences such as OFFF and FITC, and has lectured at SVA in New York, Hyper Island in Stockholm, Harbour.Space in Barcelona, and the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Her personal projects have been shown around the world.
Projects onesharedhouse.com and onesharedhouse2030.com
Seeds
The aim of the workshop is to develop strategies, objects or actions around the seed element and in relation to issues such as reforestation, gardening, conservation, politics and food.
To understand how design can be with nature and not only against nature.
Martí Guixé comes from the background of every good designer, with an academic curriculum to his credit and work done with famous firms. But as revolutionaries today are born within the institutions that trained them, he revolutionizes design by working on living matter, that can be transformed and decomposed, hybridizing such areas as anthropology, humour, gastronomy, typography, the human sciences, exact sciences, performance, design.
He analyses situations, behaviour and gestures and proposes radically effective solutions with minimal ergonomics, liberated from the image of an idealized body where technocratic perspective tried to create the right form. As a visionary he transforms things with his eyes that observe them and invents the indispensable commodities of the twenty-first century.
Irma Boom is considered the most relevant book designer of the moment. Many art centers and specialized publishers dispute the privilege of having one of their works. When she accepts an assignment, she demands total creative freedom, assuming the role of both the editor and the graphic designer.
Progressively, the work of Irma Boom has been assimilated to what we know as ‘artist’s books’, despite the fact that the designer rejects this typology.
Muriel Cooper (1925-1994) worked for four decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a graphic designer, teacher and researcher. She was art director at the Institute’s publishing house, the famous MIT Press, where she shaped numerous books essential to the history of contemporary art and architecture. In 1974 she founded the Visible Language Workshop, a think tank for new forms of graphic communication. Muriel Cooper was a pioneer in the transition from print to early explorations of digital typography.
Bookworm is a journey through books guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. Students will have the privilege of studying unique copies of the Elisava Library.
The objective of the Reserve Collection is to become a true universal history of modern graphic design applied to the publishing world. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
The French graphic artist Robert Massin revolutionized the editorial design of the 1950s and 1960s with a series of books that have become iconic in the history of 20th century typography. In an era dominated by the austere Swiss graphic language, Massin combined the language of traditional graphic arts with highly innovative expressive elements. In his designs the word becomes visible based on graphic resources that intensify the meaning of the printed text.
Corita Kent, known as Sister Corita, was an unusual figure in the American graphic arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s. A Catholic nun and teacher at an art school in Los Angeles, Corita captured the spirit of her time in a graphic work that combined Christian spirituality and hippie philosophy with a Pop Art-influenced aesthetic. Corita Kent’s language was in tune with the artistic expression of her contemporaries, an art that exalted American popular culture and found beauty and transcendence in the prosaic elements of everyday life.
Bookworm is a journey through books guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. Students will have the privilege of studying unique copies of the Elisava Library.
The objective of the Reserve Collection is to become a true universal history of modern graphic design applied to the publishing world. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
From Screen To Space
On recent years, creative digital media has been experimenting a deep transformation. From the first on-screen graphics to the latest pixel-mapping installations, audiovisual languages have exceeded the square boundaries of traditional screens, and have started colonizing real space.
Light is playing key role on this evolution, and this interlink between engineering, music, design and art is giving birth to innovative approaches in the form of immersive installations. Spectators are no longer a passive subject but integrated inside the creative canvas.
On this lecture, Eloi and Santi from Playmodes will make a deep dive into the process and secrets behind their work, from conceptualization and scripting to algorithm development and visual music contents.
Playmodes
is an audiovisual research studio, a hybrid team of engineers, musicians and designers. Through the development of their own technologies, they bring light and sound instruments to life. This digital luthierism has led them to apply their language to sculptural formats, immersive installations or scenographies, in a journey outside the square limits of traditional screens.
In their projects, data flows generate audio and images with software made by themselves.
Only for MADD students
Only for MED students
Visual Journalism
Data and Visual journalism are an interdisciplinary practice which combines editorial design, UX, web design, data visualization, interaction design, visual storytelling, and narratives to return the complexity of contemporary phenomena to a broader audience in a more engaging and approachable way.
The intensive workshop articulates on a single project development, which starts from a socio-political issue raised by the students group. Once framed that issue, students search for meaningful connected data, map the controversies the topic embeds, and then explores visual languages and metaphors toward the highlighting of a point of view. Finally, the students design the whole digital informative experience combining data and editorial design, to reach a specific audience.
Matteo Moretti
Co-founded Sheldon.studio the first studio that focuses on immersive information-experience-design. Matteo Moretti is a lecturer at the Faculty of Design of the Free University of Bolzano, at the University of San Marino, at the University of Florence, at the SPD Milan.
His design research projects, presented in many academic conferences and events such as TEDx and Visualized.io received the Data Journalism Award 2015, the European Design Award 2016 and 2017.
Only for MVD students
Motion Graphic Systems
We are witnesses of a new way of consuming information. Today digital media are the new information containers. If we look at this from a graphic design prism, we could say that we are in front of new ways of communication.
Through Motion we can explain complex messages in a simple way. We need to understand that the paradigm of traditional design that tries to summarize everything in a single image changes completely. Animation offers us a timeline in which we can explain concepts through a “step by step” storytelling. Because sometimes the “journey“ is more interesting than the final result.
Gimmewings
is a motion design studio specialized in using animation and interaction to communicate concepts through movement.
Gimmewings treat motion as something implicit within design, not as a complementary tool.
The Czech Avantgarde experienced renewed vitality in the inter-war period. A new generation of artists came together in an association called Devětsil which maintained contacts with the European avant-garde. The graphic design of books aroused particular interest among the young creators who were members of this group.Two aesthetic currents coexisted in Devětsil: Poetry, which exalted the subjective essence of the creative act, and Constructivism, which aspired to objectivity and the standardization of mass production.
Alvin Lustig created covers for the American publishing house New Directions between 1945 and 1952 that show a deep knowledge of the artistic movements of the first half of the 20th century. The collection maintains a strong unity, although each book manifests its individual character: subtle, abstract, evocative.
Elaine Lustig Cohen began her career in the studio of Alvin Lustig. After Lustig’s death in 1955, she continued to design book covers on her own for various publishers and other clients in the cultural world.
Bookworm is a journey through books guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. Students will have the privilege of studying unique copies of the Elisava Library.
The objective of the Reserve Collection is to become a true universal history of modern graphic design applied to the publishing world. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
Jan Tschichold experienced one of the most resounding conversions in the history of 20th century graphics. After the revolution brought about by his manual Die Neue Typographie (Berlin, 1928), he reconsidered his theses in the mid-1930s with Typographische Gestaltung (Basel, 1935) and finally experienced an absolute return to classicism from the 1940s until the end of his life. The dynamic and asymmetrical compositions of the first stage, based on dry wood types, gave rise to pages that were perfectly centred, respecting the formal conventions of the historical tradition of printing.
Swiss graphics of the 20th century developed from the precepts of the German “new typeface” established by Jan Tschichold throughout the 1920s. It proposed a new concept of graphics characterized by asymmetric composition, the use of dry-stamp typography and the use of photography. One of the pioneers was Herbert Matter who, with his splendid tourist posters, represented a new vision of visual communication, strongly influenced by Russian constructivism and the interwar photographic avant-garde.
Bookworm is a journey through books guided by Andreu Jansà, librarian and curator of the Enric Bricall Reserve Fund. Students will have the privilege of studying unique copies of the Elisava Library.
The objective of the Reserve Collection is to become a true universal history of modern graphic design applied to the publishing world. The books that make up the collection are documented in the main accounts of the history of 20th century graphic design.
Prof. Vladan Joler
[b. 1977] Is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends data investigations, counter cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualization, critical design, and numerous other disciplines.
He explores and visualizes different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labor exploitation, invisible infrastructures, and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society.
Vladan Joler’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and Design Museum in London and included in the permanent exhibition of Ars Electronica Center.
Aside from his permanent professorship position, i.e. tenure, at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia, where he teaches at the New Media department, he has given lectures at numerous educational and art institutions.
Explorer of Contemporary Phenomena
Three recent works are on display at Elisava: Anatomy of an AI System, 2018, A large-scale map and a long-form essay (in collaboration with Kate Crawford) investigating the human labor, data, and planetary resources required to build and operate an Amazon Echo. Awarded Design of the Year 2019 by the Design Museum, London. And two new works from 2020: The Architecture of a Face Recognition System and New Extractivism. It is the first time these works are exhibited in Barcelona.
Vistas de la exposición de Vladan Joler en el Àgora y Atri de Elisava
Only for MDE students
The transformative Power of AI
Until now AI is not real intelligence. Essentially it is imitation: algorithms that have learned to do really specific things by being trained on thousands or millions of correct examples. Commonly referred to as ‘dumb’ AI, this term ignores the fact that in several fields, like face and speech recognition, it is already more accurate than humans.
Following the principles of Moore’s Law, it is only a matter of time before we are be able to create actual intelligence: conscious machines that can independently think for themselves.
The workshop will be hosted in a custom-built virtual space. Research and critical debate are central components to the project. The aim of the workshop is to develop participants’ research, writing, layout and publishing skills as well as to encourage critical thinking.
Participants will be encouraged to ask themselves the following questions:
Which opportunities will this technological development bring?
Am I aware of the implications it might have?
Patrick Thomas
is a graphic artist, author and educator. He studied at Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London before relocating to Barcelona in 1991. He currently lives and works in Berlin. In 2019 he created Open Collab a self-run workshop format to enable and encourage collaboration, dialogue and experimentation between participants. A free online platform was launched during Covid-19 lockdown to enable remote real-time collaboration. Since October 2013 he is a professor at ABK Stuttgart. He is a member of AGI.
Greetings from Javier Jaén Studio
The talk will be a journey from conceptual development to graphic solution through practical cases.
Environment, technology, love, sex, diversity, art, literature, religion, science, gastronomy, health, sport, wild capitalism, social movements, economy, terrorism, war, politics, justice, archeology, virus, music, theatre, fashion, wine and some design and illustration.
Javier Jaén
(Barcelona, 1983) Studied graphic design and fine arts in Barcelona, New York and Budapest. His professional activity has focused on editorial illustration, book covers, audiovisual projects, advertising, cultural communication and creation of his own work. He translates stories and concepts into images through a symbolic and playful language.
His work has been widely recognized. He has participated in exhibitions in New York, London, Mexico, El Salvador, Tallinn, Seoul, Rotterdam, Paris or Rome. Since 2015 he is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale). In 2020 he has been considered by Forbes as one of the 100 most creative Spaniards. He has taught at IED, BAU, IDEP, and frequently gives workshops and lectures at various international art and design schools.
He has not yet written a child, planted a book or given birth to a tree.
Only for MVD students
Degrow or grow in another way?
The value of a project cannot be measured only in monetary terms. And we are clear about that.
It is important for us to develop ideas and concepts that contribute to society, that help to fulfill an objective and that lead us to think beyond the limits. We call these projects ‘pro-bono’ and they are part of the commitment we have with others and with society, but especially with our community of designers.
How do we organize pro-bono projects? How do we limit collaboration so that it is sustainable for both parties? How do we maintain the client relationship over time?
Pablo Juncadella
Co-founder and creative director at Mucho. Thanks to his constant search for new challenges, Pablo was promoted to the position of Creative Director of the English newspaper The Observer after working as a graphic designer for grafica and Pentagram. His global vision and his great interest in visual knowledge have been fundamental contributions to the growth of the studio. Today, together with his team at Mucho, he works with the purpose of finding solutions that fit in the positioning of the brands by contributing with original ideas.
Only for MVD students
Systemic Type Design
We live in a (new) golden age of systemic type design. New technologies and easy to use programmes leveled the playfield for emerging designers and gave them the chance to experiment with new ideas. The world of display fonts has witnessed a lot of new impulses in the last years. Type has become more flexible, variable and kinetic as ever, adjusting efficiently and effectively to new communication channels.
Systemic Type Design is more than designing fonts. A type system is an efficient design tool that helps designers to design. If done well, the act of writing is the act of designing without the need to further layout the text. In this course we will develop an experimental type system that almost automatically generates fantastic design applications.
Martin Lorenz
might as well have become a cook, a comic artist or an architect, were it not for an internship at Müller+Volkmann. Lorenz studied Graphic Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt and the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK) in The Hague. After working four years at the design agency Hort, he moved to Barcelona to found TwoPoints.Net with Lupi Asensio and do his MA and PhD in Design Research at the UB. Lorenz has taught since 2006 for Elisava and still likes to cook.
Only for MVD students
Latest projects
In an accelerated world, every aspect of our lives is in constant change. At Folch we bring together different disciplines to respond to every brief, always seeking to have an atypical vision. Each project is an opportunity to design concepts, brands, narratives and digital events, reaching and involving audiences to this new liquid paradigm.
Folch
is a Barcelona-based editorial and branding agency, founded in 2004. Creating concepts, brands and narratives, the studio has developed a holistic approach to today’s communications challenges, reaching and engaging audiences with a broad range of graphic, audiovisual and editorial content across a myriad of platforms, according to the new business paradigm.
Prof. Vladan Joler
[b. 1977] Is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends data investigations, counter cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualization, critical design, and numerous other disciplines.
He explores and visualizes different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labor exploitation, invisible infrastructures, and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society.
Vladan Joler’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and Design Museum in London and included in the permanent exhibition of Ars Electronica Center.
Aside from his permanent professorship position, i.e. tenure, at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia, where he teaches at the New Media department, he has given lectures at numerous educational and art institutions.
A dialogue between Vladan Joler and Bani Brusadin
Together they will explore Joler’s rather fascinating character at the intersection of research, data visualization, cartography and art.
Among other topics, they will discuss together on how to visualize different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labor exploitation, invisible infrastructures, and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society.
Only for MADD students
Who is afraid of Technology?
Technology constitutes an essential topic if our duty is to understand how our contemporary society works. Today, more than ever, technology plays an important role not only improving (or not) our daily lives, but also gathering, analyzing and visualizing almost all kinds of information. In this workshop we will learn the basics of programming in Arduino and Raspberry, to detect and automate signals. We will also learn how to choose the best platform to solve a technological project. And we will learn the basics to hack an analog automatism.
We will use various programming boards to detect analog signals and thereby interact with our code. We will learn the operation of the main electronic components to develop customized boards, to finally create our own. Finally we will learn how to hack a bolt opening system with NFC cards.
Technology and automation gives us countless options and power when facing projects. Knowing the capabilities we have and having a base on how to use them will allow us to take our projects much further.
Edgar Pons
Graduated in Industrial Design Engineering created his first company in 2011: The Social Coin, storifying kindness. He has collaborated with DDS giving support in the creation of interactive systems and experiences. He is working now in R&D at Ymaging, creating systems interpretating complex data in sectors such as smart farms, biomedicine and geophysics. In the meantime he is launching Nanoboost, a Startup related to “Smart Pills” with the objective of enhance brain capabilities.
