Studio Silva Systems - Lukas Wegwerth, Moritz Maria Karl
Within the landscape of studios at the Design Academy, we deal with questions of ecology and have established a location outside of the academy, which distinguishes our studio within the school’s curriculum. This is an environment that is close to a forest, a barn in the south of Eindhoven with land around it that our students can work on and with. This aligns with our working method, which explores collaboration and collective practices, and, in that context, is also about self-directed learning initiative by the students, which means that we are very open to students contributing to the changing curriculum of each semester. A winter semester is always very different from a summer semester, which is specific to our studio: it's seasonal.
We use the land and the building there to allow students to envision and execute projects that don't fit into any categories of other workshop environments that the school offers, that might just be too large and too dirty to be worked on indoors. We started working there when this land was handed over by a conventional farmer, which meant that the land was, from an ecological point of view, in a very poor condition. Over the years, we can observe the land regenerating, and we also invite scientists to probe the ground and to give us more insight into the geology. On the one hand, it’s an observational place, but then it’s also just a place that gives possibilities to explore typologies that don't fit in the rest of the setup of the Design Academy, which offers possibilities for longer term thinking and long-term practices that might go beyond the semester structure.
We call our approach ‘design practice with ecological accountability’, which means that we aim to raise awareness about what it means to interact with an ecosystem, what it means to use materials as a resource, to challenge where those come from. We do this by offering field research as a method–we go outside, offer walks or go camping–which always stands in dialogue with experts from fields of design, art and architecture, but also biology, forestry, local farming and local ecology, in order to bring in knowledge that designers might otherwise not have. We guide our students in a way that leads to individual observations which they can then work from. For example, this semester, we looked at questions of biodiversity and designing with non-human life forms in a way that deals with and enhances ecosystems. With our themes, we look into the proximity of the ecology around us and aim for a design practice that is working with the environment rather than against it.
The studio aims to contribute to the students’ professional development in a way that goes beyond the realm of the educational institution. Our goal is to educate professionals that are able to go out there and solve problems that they might not have encountered before. One way of approaching this is by not giving assignments but to encourage students to engage with projects. We begin from a common starting point with an overarching topic and look at different methods and collective moments. From there, the students formulate the questions they find interesting and they have the possibility to experiment with different formats and typologies of design. We encourage an attitude that embraces exploration and making mistakes and being okay with failing or testing something in order to come to realisations. That's something we want to build further on.
Besides working with students to develop individual projects, every semester there’s a group project that is focused on collective self-directed learning. We also have a lecture series that we organise together with the students, which invites peers that talk about the topics we engage with. We also collaborate with a partner of the Design Academy, for instance, the Dutch department that manages the state-owned forests. To stay up to date, we also try to always keep different collaborations with actors in the field that are working on contemporary issues. We still find it challenging to incorporate our understanding of the high importance of collaboration for future design practices into the studio curriculum. We tackle this in dialogue with the students, which is not always easy. It could be interesting to avoid individual projects altogether and to encourage collaborations instead. In any case, we are eager to work further on this intersection of ecology and its materiality towards more systemic and wider perspectives onto our engagement with material and societies.
