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.
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.
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.
Only for MVD students
Graphic Rhetoric & Creative Tools
Could we manage to become more creative? Is there a secret to improve this ability?
Constantly we find ourselves out of ideas, it is like if someone had left a tap running – our mind gets empty, we get stuck and the ideas that come to mind do not seem to be enough.
This session tries to offer resources to face this kind of situation working on one specific tool: The rhetorical figures of the language. One more tool to help you understand that the possibilities can always be expanded.
Antonio Nogueira
Graphic designer at Mucho. He works on projects in multiple sectors: Cultural, education, technological, etc. Always with the purpose of generating culture through design, using creativity as a way to create new experiences.
Light sound and visual illusions
Hamill Industries will share the techniques hidden behind their latest projects and collaborations: from sound visualisation processes to commercial work and new creative challenges.
Hamill Industries
is a creative studio specialised in the convergence of technology and the arts. They develop innovation projects thanks to crafted technology, evocative design and visuals, creating new formats of visual communication. The studio, composed of Pablo Barquín and Anna Diaz, carries out artistic and technological research in the field of visual arts and innovation, by combining new media, digital or practical effects and experimental technologies with mechanical inventions.
They work across multiple mediums including advertising, music videos, art installations and live performances. Since 2015, they have been touring worldwide together with Floating Points creating his mesmerising visual shows, and have lectured and presented their work at internationally recognised festivals and institutions such as SONAR Festival, ARS Electronica, Matadero and The Barbican.
Only for MVD students
Enea, Vibia and Delicious & Sons
In this session we will be able to see through Case Studies of real projects from the studio how a brand identity is developed and how it is strategically translated into the different communication elements on and offline to define a recognizable and transversal personality.
Daniel Ayuso
is a partner and creative director at Clase studio. Since 2016 he is President of the Association of Art directors and Graphic Designers ADG FAD. He is an associate professor at the Elisava School and the UPF. His trajectory has expanded from his training in graphic design to the development of more complex Visual Identities in which communication and visual language build a brand discourse through design itself, art direction in photography or audiovisual.
