Workshop 03 – 2020

The workshop showed that design teams can develop concepts to make life better, or, problems easier to deal with, in a very short time. The future will show if the overall product development will get faster and easier and many of the available solutions will find their way onto the market. The students came up with concepts which are completely new and would make life easier for some people.

—   Can the SDGs help us governing the city? 

Yes of course! Sustainability is one of the key issues of the coming decade. We share what we have and the keep what we can keep. For Design this is an issue since years.

— What are local governments doing to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable? 

I cannot answer this question.

— How can we “visualize” the local SDG action? 

Do it. People experiencing the change will make them understand and supportive. Just the change need to be made an experience so that the people are able to see the change.

—  How is SDG implementation in the spatial dimension of the city happen? How can we communicate on it? 

Do not talk about it – do it! Whatever change there is people will only realize it one they feel that things are getting better. No words can describe how a change would feel. To convince people of the good thing about changes, they need to feel it. The change will come anyway, better we are the ones who can somehow control it.

— How are other city stakeholders such architects and developers contributing? 

In the best case there is a collaboration between all stakeholders to make life for all lives better.

—What can we do better? What is needed for this Decade of Action ahead? 

Everything! CoVID showed us something: Change can happen fast and whatever the change is: some industries will die but others will pop up. The change will be everywhere. But either we do it now or it will be done to us..(like the virus)

want to feel the freedom to go wherever we want to go.

So here we are, thinking huge or thinking big, making the life of people around us better or making the life on this planet better, using the space and the technology we have. We want to give people tools and methods to collaborate and to communicate, building a robot together or making music together, with someone living in Iraq, in the west of the US, with somewhere in Siberia or with the neighbour right next to me.

This is what we did: To understand first what is needed, to analyse these needs and to build a concept how to deal with it. The end was defined but a visualization of the concept.

One week is not much time. Nevertheless, this workshop showed what we as designer can do if we detect the desires and secret wishes around us. This is something no machine can ever do, and this is what gives a designer a possible future: Empathy.