This is the second part of my review of the DMY international design festival 2009 in Berlin. The first part took care of the expositions.
All conferences were planned on a symposium day and the whole event lasted about eight hours. The quality and background of the speakers was as motley as it gets. It started with two so called "institutional presentations" by the Taiwan design Center and the "Metropolitan Design Center of Buenos Aires". Promotional videos of both places, a lot of charts and never ending text on the projector. No real talk about design there, even though they repeated the word until it lost its meaning. I suppose they paid to be there…
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Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki at the Symposium
Within the "Alternative strategies" block Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki talked about their "Cybernetic love: future sex project". These people analyze the Japanese society habits from all angles to get to the conclusion that sex practice is integrating elements such as virtual lives and places, electronic pleasure gadgets, robots, etc. till an extent, that a human partner is no longer the preferred alternative. This project is financed by Tenga, a company that develops high quality adult toys. I must say they have a point, check out their promotional video; if this is not user experience design, I don’t what is!
Ronen Kadushin presented "Open Design" and his way for design to evolve if we really want good design to surround us. We all have seen how open source software gives the best results, now here is a way to do basically the same but with product design.
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Ronen Kadushin at the Symposium
Interesting lectures of the block "Sustainability": Ralf Ketelhut from Stoffstromdesign let us know what really happens when products are waste and made us aware how harmful coatings and pigments are in our product. We also saw an example of a very nice nearly 100% environmentally friendly wallpaper. Key to success they said, is to go to the manufacturer, talk to him and find a different way of doing things.
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from left to right: the wallpaper designer from eccellence goods, the roll of wallpaper, Ralf Ketelhut
Probably the best example of good innovative design was given by 2012 Architecten. They presented some realized projects in which they rather than recycling they reused material that was considered waste. They identify a source of large quantities of waste material in good conditions and they find a way to use it.
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Jan Jongert from 2012 Architecten ans a shot of their Villa Welpeloo
One of their requirements when reusing materials is to take them as they are and add no processing to them when possible, this way it is economically and environmentally worthwhile reusing. Some of these projects are an espresso bar made with used PVC windows and the duchi shoe shop, where car windows make the shelves.
Jurgen Bey gave a nice lecture about how we approach design problems and what could be the role of design in the future. A pity that I didn’t record it… there is a good summary of it in design.nl
