On 16 May 2025, CARADT hosted this years edition of Studium Generale at St. Joost School of Art & Design in Breda. This gathering within Avans Creative Innovation (ACI) served as a platform for experimentation, reflection, and inspiration at the intersection of art, design, and technology. This year’s theme, Refuse Revive Regenerate, invited students, educators, and researchers to explore regenerative futures and the role education can play in shaping them.
The program included a variety of workshops, masterclasses, and experiences:
Regenerative AI: A masterclass engaging with perspectives such as algorithmic resistance, cosmotechnics, indigenous AI futures, and permacomputing. Facilitated by Eke Rebergen, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, Anna Nazo, and Dr. Eleanor Dare.
Garden Encounters: A workshop exploring the living ecosystem of St. Joost’s academy garden, emphasizing mutual relationships and interconnection. Led by Annemarie Piscaer and Jochem van Laarhoven.
Rewild & Ferment: An excursion and workshop focusing on foraging, indigenous plants, rewilding, and food fermentation practices.
Goodbye, Poverty Jetset!: A masterclass addressing economically regenerative cultural practices, including discussions on the economics of art and culture.
Click here
to read the full recap of Studium Generale 2025 Refuse Revive Regenerate
On 30 March 2023, Studium Generale was held at the EKP-building in ’s-Hertogenbosch. Titled Exercises in Ecosystemic Contamination, Assembly, and Collectivization, the event took the form of a twelve-hour experiment in which students, educators, and researchers from various programmes within Avans Creative Innovation (ACI) collaborated to explore the concept of an educational ecosystem.
The programme included a range of activities—workshops, performances, shared meals, and a closing gathering—designed to foster an active, participatory learning experience. Participants were encouraged to contribute to a collective investigation into the values, structures, and dynamics of learning communities. Click here to check out the full program.
Organized around ten thematic ‘tracks,’ the day addressed a diverse set of perspectives, including:
Movement – exploring embodied communication (facilitated by Annelies Herfst)
Slacken – examining ecological inertia through film and dialogue (Jochem van Laarhoven)
Care – discussing collective care practices in institutional settings (Philippine Hoegen & Laura Oriol)
Innovation – reflecting on the evolution of educational ecosystems (Machiel Wetselaar & Marieke van Dijk)
Space – reimagining the building as a spatial network (Jeroen Doorenweerd)
Other tracks focused on protest, nourishment, non-human relations, and democratic participation, offering a multi-faceted inquiry into collaborative and sustainable modes of learning and making.
This edition marked a shift towards collective authorship and emphasized the potential of academic ecosystems as environments for shared inquiry. The event was organized by researchers Bas van den Hurk, Wander Eikelboom, and Marianne van Bommel of the Cultural and Creative Industries research group.
For a more in-depth reflection on the day’s outcomes, read the article: Does an Ecosystem Have a Director?
Fourth edition of Studium Generale in 2021, Living Artifacts: what if our everyday artefacts were alive: could sense, grow, adapt, and eventually die? How would we live with them? How would we experience and attend to their livingness?
Livingness has long been a literal element in design by inserting instances of nature or natural patterns into artefacts, as like in biophilic design. Hence, many designers purposefully designed for connectivity with nature through living elements like plants and trees. Livingness has also been a resource for inspiration in design for creating alive-like expressions emulating structures and behaviours of living organisms. Alive-like expressions have been achieved through dynamic, kinetic, and responsive features, often by integrating electronic components and actuators.
But what if designers took a more extreme stance on Biophilic design? Instead of inserting living elements into artefacts as we know them, why not collaborate with living things as the building blocks for novel artefacts that synthesise the artificial and biological? In 2020, Prof. dr. Elvin Karana and her colleagues from Delft University of Technology introduced the notion of Living Artefacts where livingness is understood as a biological, ecological, and experiential phenomenon**. As leading professor of the Caradt Biobased Art and Design Group Dr. Karana proposed Living Artifacts as this years theme for Studium Generale. We delve into the notion of Living Artefacts, and we discuss the broader implications of livingness and different life forms for the futures of art and design, and for the design of living artefacts.
For more informatie go to studiumgenerale2021.caradt.nl
During the third edition of Studium Generale in 2019, Out of Order, the order of things was critically challenged by speakers and workshop leaders. By critically questioning the ‘natural order’ of things, in what ways do / can art and design play an important role in the development of society?
For more informatie go to studiumgenerale2019.caradt.nl
In 2018, during the second edition The Defiant Maker, we explored the question of how defiant designers could be more than hip decorators or clever ‘solution monkeys’. And how defiant artists can play a significant role outside their familiar realm of cultural presentation platforms.
For more informatie go to studiumgenerale2018.caradt.nl
During the first edition in 2017, entitled Into the Wild, students together with artists, designers and tutors explored how the context of an academy both imposes limitations and offers opportunities to give meaning to the world outside the academy walls. In interdisciplinary groups, students went on field research or learned from professionals about how they work ‘in the wild’.
For more information go to studiumgenerale2017.caradt.nl
‘People are the product of their relationships with their environment. It’s important to understand how technological developments influence these relationships.’
Michel van Dartel is Research Professor Situated Art, Design and Technology at the Avans Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (CARADT) and was affiliated with V2_Lab for the Unstable Media between 2005-2024. He holds an MSc in cognitive psychology and a PhD in artificial intelligence.
‘Our research group investigates the role artists, designers and cultural producers in general can play in developing the aesthetics and poetics of a desirable future.’
Sebastian Olma is professor Cultural and Creative Industries. He works for the Expertise Centre Art, Design and Technology.
‘The dynamic relationship between humans and living artefacts will continue to evolve reciprocally with mutual care.’
Elvin Karana is Research Professor of Biobased Art and Design at the Avans and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, leading the research group Materializing Futures at TU/Delft.
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