Lectures in 2011 | Signs & Sense – Shapeshifters inves­ti­gates how designers use signs and sign sys­tems to achieve sen­si­tivity which goes beyond ori­en­ta­tion, infor­ma­tion or expla­na­tion. When do signs become links to expe­ri­ences and thoughts? How can imma­te­rial infor­ma­tion become tan­gible or read­able? When do signs start making sense?

2 March: Karsten Schmidt and Petr van Blokland

6 April: Andréas Uebele and Peter Crnokrak

29 April: Lizá Ramalho + Artur Rebelo

Karsten Schmidt (UK) | 2 March 2011

Karsten Schmidt is a London based com­pu­ta­tional designer merging code, design, art & craft skills. Originally from East Germany and starting in the deep end of the early 8-bit demo scene, for the past 2 decades he’s been adopting a trans­dis­ci­pli­nary way of working and been lat­er­ally involved in a wide range of dig­ital dis­ci­plines. With his studio PostSpectacular, he is actively exploring cur­rent pos­si­bil­i­ties at the inter­sec­tion of design, art, soft­ware devel­op­ment and edu­ca­tion and applying these in a variety of fields. A strong con­cep­tual thinker and always striving for max­imum cre­ative freedom, Karsten’s design approach is based on treating ideas as soft­ware at the heart, which in turn informs all other facets of each project.When not cre­ating, he travels the world con­sulting and teaching work­shops about the gen­er­a­tive design approach, open source and employing code as cre­ative tool. He’s been an early con­trib­utor to the Processing.org project and to var­ious books about pro­gram­ming and graphic design, and his work has been fea­tured in the press and exhib­ited inter­na­tion­ally, including the MoMA, New York and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

www.postspectacular.com

Petr van Blokland (NL) | 2 March 2011

Petr van Blokland studied at the Graphic and Typographic Design Department of the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague, Netherlands. In 1979 he grad­u­ated cum laude and worked as an intern at Total Design in Amsterdam and Studio Dumbar in The Hague. From 1980 until today he was designer and partner in Buro Petr van Blokland + Claudia Mens in Delft. To spe­cialize him­self he studied for sev­eral years at the TU-Delft depart­ment Industrial Design. From 1984 until 1989 he taught at the Academy for Visual Arts in Arnhem. Since 1988 he is a teacher at the Graphic and Typographic Design Department and later also at the post-graduate course Type & Media of the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in The Hague. With Claudia Mens he was co-founder of the Health Agency (pub­lisher of on-line med­ical infor­ma­tion) which he/they left in 2006. His type designs are released by The Font Bureau. His work brought him ATypI’s cov­eted Charles Peignot Prize in 1988. He spe­cial­izes in sys­tem­atic design – typ­i­cally cor­po­rate iden­tity pro­grams, com­plex typo­graphic assign­ments, web appli­ca­tions and the devel­op­ment of algo­rithms and models to (par­tially) auto­mate design processes.

www.petr.com

Andréas Uebele (D) | 6 April 2011

Andréas Uebele studied archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning at the University of Stuttgart, and graphic design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. Since 1996 he has man­aged his own visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions agency in Stuttgart, Büro Uebele Visuelle Kommunikation, and since 1998 has been a pro­fessor for com­mu­ni­ca­tions design at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Andreas Uebele has been a member of the Type Directors Club of New York, the Art Directors Club of New York and the Art Directors Club Deutschland since 2002, a member of the German Design Council since 2005 and a member of AGI, Alliance Graphique Internationale, since 2007.

The agency is active in all areas of visual com­mu­ni­ca­tions, with the focus on visual iden­tity, sig­nage and wayfinding sys­tems, cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions and exhi­bi­tions.

www.uebele.com

Peter Crnokrak (UK) | 6 April 2011

The Luxury of Protest is a com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tancy and exper­i­mental design plat-form. The studio was formed in 2008 by Peter Crnokrak as a prac­tice to develop both com­mer­cial and crit­ical design projects that tran­scend tra­di­tional ref­er­ence points of pur­pose and design author­ship within the pro­fes­sion. Their work is the result of a con­tinual crossover between art, design and new tech­nolo­gies. Work is con­tent and con­cept driven, with an obses­sive focus on detail.

The Luxury of Protest has been fea­tured in over 70 books and mag­a­zines, has had work exhib­ited in London, Tokyo and New York, and has won a number of inter­na­tional design com­pe­ti­tions including AIGA 365 and the European Design Awards. In 2010, Peter was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in recog­ni­tion of award win­ning exper­tise in design and data visu­al­iza­tion.

www.theluxuryofprotest.com

Lizá Ramalho + Artur Rebelo (PT) | 29 April 2011

Lizá Defossez Ramalho and Artur Rebelo founded the design studio R2 in 1995. Based in Porto, Portugal, R2 works on projects for a wide range of cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions, con­tem­po­rary artists and archi­tects in areas such as visual iden­tity, poster, book, sign system, graphic instal­la­tion and exhi­bi­tion design. They both have B.A. Hons. degrees from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and Master’s degrees in Design Research from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona. Lizá and Artur have lec­tured in Graphic Design since 1999 and coor­di­nated var­ious work­shops and par­tic­i­pated as speakers and jury mem­bers in numerous national and inter­na­tional events. Currently, they are invited pro­fes­sors at Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra. They have been invited to a wide array of inter­na­tional exhi­bi­tions. Their projects have won sev­eral inter­na­tional awards and have been pub­lished in var­ious spe­cial­ized books and design mag­a­zines. Lizá and Artur are both mem­bers of Alliance Graphique Internationale.

www.r2design.pt