During this annual event, the lectorates of Caradt’s research groups present their research. The day-long programme of lectures and workshops is organised for students of St. Joost School of Art, Design & Technology and the Communication & Multimedia Design programme at Avans University of Applied Sciences in Breda and Den Bosch. Studium Generale has been organised by Caradt since 2017. The programme is structured in such a way that students are introduced to the research that is carried out at Caradt in an active and investigative way.
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
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 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
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
‘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 and Design at the Avans Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt) and Director of V2_Lab for the Unstable Media.
‘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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