MA Collaborative Project: THIRST
Students at DAE are contributing to the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) on the topic THIRST, with the results of a collaborative, trimester-long project bringing together the different programmes within the MA department.
For the last four months of the academic year 2022-2023, Design Academy Eindhoven’s first-year MA students have been participating in a collaborative project, exploring water and its relation to our bodies and our designed environments.
Curated by architect Lada Hršak and commissioned by International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (which is directed by Saskia van Stein, head of DAE's Critical Inquiry Lab), THIRST aims to critically reflect upon existing knowledges around water by positioning the role of design in-between technology, policies, science, and artistic practices.
Working across departments, students from all five of the MA programmes were divided into six transdisciplinary studios, led by seven tutors: Ameneh Solati, Anna Fink, Arthur Roeloffzen, Merve Bedir, Ruben Pater, Nadine Botha and Pete Fung. Each studio was articulated through one of six overarching topics: soaking, silent waters, thirst, immunity, voices from the mud, and hydro fiction.
During the final presentation on 2 June 2023, students questioned the role of design, looking beyond the modernist technological solutions to address our ecological crisis. Many choose to use design as a tool to facilitate and develop new conversations with, provocations to, and interventions around societal urgencies.
The results of the THIRST project can be viewed online. The website is designed by Lina von Jaruntowski with development by Lukas Siemoneit.
Ben Dusserre-Robinson (Geo–Design), Lucas Garvey (Social Design), Marine Bosi (Contextual Design) and Sophia Schullan (Social Design) presented a confronting scenario: what if eco-anxiety became a public health concern? Their proposed eco-therapy as part of a governmental programme reimagined individual agency over these seemingly out-of-reach environmental issues.
Taking a more local approach, Jamie van Duuren (Social Design), Elias Hintermayr (Information Design), Emma Lambaa-Bonde (Social Design) and Tonda Budszus (Geo-Design) reconnected the public with water as a form of energy through a series of mobile and easily-assemble water mills in the waterways around Eindhoven.
Zooming out to the global scale, ‘Stagiates - The Flow of Resistance’, created by Emma Bereau (Social Design), Hanchen Zhang (Geo-Design) and Niki Danai (Critical Inquiry Lab), is a platform that investigates water privatisation in Stagiates, Greece, and its potential impact on reinventing the commons through various social movements.
Moving from facts to fictions, Gordon Yip (Contextual Design), Sophie Chalman (Social Design) and Yichao Wang’s (Contextual Design) project ‘Sphagnum Futures’ takes the Dutch National Park of the Biesbosch as the context and repositions Sphagnum, a plant that was destroyed during industrialisation, as the renewed protagonist. Also exploring fiction is ‘Wetmark,’ the speculative project of Delia Rößer (Geo–Design), Elena Dagg (Contextual Design), Leidy Karina Gómez Montoya (Geo–Design), Marie Tirard (Critical Inquiry Lab) and Sofia Pereira Paz (Information Design) which looks into wetness itself as an indicator of wilderness.
Looking beyond material practicality, Joshua Woo (CD), Orestis Tilemachou (SD), Zuzana Pabisova (CIL) and Guanyan Wu's (SD) installation considers water as a symbol of the ongoing changes and adaptations of our planet. It evinces a cautionary tale of what the future might hold.
New models were tested, new infrastructures were sketched, and new rituals and languages were introduced. While none of the projects produced any definitive position, these alternative narratives provided a glimpse of what could be, in ways that challenge who we are and how we want to live – and even the question of who ‘we’ is in these contexts.
