Open Lectures

Open Design Lecture: “Go Hack Yourself!” by Jordi Closa / Adidas Maker Lab

In the dynamic world of arts and design, where innovation is the heartbeat of progress, we often find ourselves facing complex challenges that demand fresh perspectives and out-of-the-box thinking. That’s where hacking steps in—a powerful and transformative problem-solving tool that can revolutionize the way we approach creativity, adaptability, and sustainable design.

With over two decades of experience as an influential product designer and a fervent advocate for hacking as a means of problem-solving, Jordi Closa has redefined what it means for him to create and innovate.

From his explorations in furniture, lighting, sports gear, and even food design, Jordi demonstrates a deep commitment to pushing the boundaries of conventionality. Drawing inspiration from the very ingredients that fuel our bodies and excite our senses, he has harnessed the transformative potential of materials in ways that captivate and leave an indelible mark on our experiences.

It is his passion for upcycling, his efforts to repurpose and reinvent materials and objects, that truly sets him apart. By extending the life of discarded products, Jordi boasts an unwavering commitment to diverting waste from landfills, protecting our precious oceans, and cultivating a more sustainable future.

Together, let us delve into the captivating realm of the Adidas MakerLab Network, a vibrant community of creatives, inventors, and problem solvers united by their insatiable curiosity and shared dedication to pushing the boundaries of design. Here, Jordi’s vision of hacking as a problem-solving tool has flourished. Through collaboration and experimentation, he has uncovered unique and thought-provoking solutions to even the most complex design challenges.

Let us embrace the power of hacking as a catalyst for creativity, innovation, and sustainable progress.

The lecture is in English and will be recorded for EKA TV. Everyone is welcome to join!

Morning Coffee: “From Numbers to Sneakers – Unconventional Design Story” by Thomas Ayme / Adidas Originals

Thomas Ayme is a French footwear color-and-material designer currently working at adidas Originals. However, his journey as a designer was not straightforward and began in a very different field.

After graduating in Mathematics, Economics, and Finance, Thomas joined Adidas, initiating his ten-year tenure at the brand as a business analyst. Realizing that analytics was not his true calling, he embarked on a journey toward becoming a footwear designer, navigating through multiple countries and jobs along the way. His unique background now informs his approach to design and has become one of his greatest assets.

Learn more about Thomas’ journey and his advice on how to reach your personal goals and ambition.

We invite everyone to the Narva Art Residency’s third open lecture that takes place next Thursday.

In autumn of 2023, international artists from the Narva Art Residency give three lectures at the Estonian Academy of Arts. The last lecture will be by two artists:

Elke Renate Steiner is a comics creator living and working in Berlin, Germany. She is creating comics and illustrations, drawing live at events and process documentations for communities. In Narva she will have workshops for adults with the aim of translating their experiences into comics.

Uwe Lützen is a swiss screenwriter based in Zurich and Berlin. During his residency he created a performance “28 questions (no answers needed)” about home, places, and identity.

They will talk about the practicalities of being a professional artist, what the daily life of an art residency is like, and how to get involved in the opportunities offered to artists. Of course, they will also introduce their own creative work.

The lecture is free of charge and open to all! It will be held in English.

We are delighted to invite you for a thought-provoking and inspiring lecture on “Embracing Purpose through Art and Design for a Future We Want.”

In an era marked by rapid change and global challenges, the role of art and design becomes increasingly crucial in shaping a future that aligns with our aspirations and values.

Mariana Amatullo (PhD) is Vice Provost and Academic Dean of Continuing and Professional Education (CPE) and Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons, The New School. Mariana publishes and lectures internationally about design and social innovation, serving on various executive, editorial, and advisory boards in design and the arts. Her latest publication, Design for Social Innovation: Case Studies from around the World (Routledge, 2021), presents an overview of the design field for social innovation through 45 global case studies. Her upcoming monograph positions design as a leadership capability for the 21st century.

Mariana has a twenty-year-long trajectory in senior executive administration positions in art and design education. She is an experienced strategist, award-winning educator, and practitioner-scholar. Mariana’s research and teaching bridge the art and design education and management disciplines and examine the role of a design attitude as a cognitive approach to social innovation and organizational learning. Initially trained as an art historian and curator, she has been a pioneer in developing the design for social innovation field, where she remains an active scholar globally. Before joining The New School in 2017, Mariana co-founded and was at the helm of the social impact award-winning program Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.

Q&A session after the lecture is an opportunity for participants to seek insights directly from the expert.

We kindly ask you register here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScZB4FDJKMc31UNTp30It-tszhsBl3DyzwA72zpzlnxfMN8Dw/viewform

Within the framework of the Open Lectures Series of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA, Birgitte Svarre will take the stage in the hall of EKA on 30th November at 6:15 pm with lecture “Public space / public life – an interaction – how to study and make room for it.” She talks about her work studying public life and creating space for it.

The lecture is preceded by public presentation of the book “How to Study Public Life” at 5:30 pm in EKA lobby.

Birgitte Svarre is the co-author of the book “How to Study Public Life”. She has a MA on Modern Culture, a PhD in Architecture and is CEO at BARK, Copenhagen, a consultancy focused on strategic development of places with a focus on both people and places. BARK is owned by the Building Heritage Foundation. Until 2022, Birgitte Svarre has been with Gehl Architects for more than 14 years consulting cities mainly in Northern Europe on human centered planning, public space and public life, including as head of Gehl’s Cities team. She is currently part of the advisory board for lively city centers for the Danish Foundation Realdania.

Architect Jan Gehl is an Adjunct Professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture, Professor (ret.) of Urban Design, The Royal Danish Academy and Founding Partner, Gehl Architects. In 1971 Jan Gehl published the seminal book Life Between Buildings launching a whole new thinking about the design and development of cities. Gehl’s first book and subsequent publications sparked a showdown with the car-centric cities and began mapping and describing people-friendly interventions in the infrastructure of cities. His books include Life Between Buildings, Public Spaces – Public Life, New City Spaces, New City Life, Cities for People.

The open lectures are intended for students and professionals of all disciplines, not just the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge and open to all interested parties. Be there!

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA brings to the audience in Tallinn every academic year about a dozen unique practitioners and valued theoreticians of the field. You can watch previous lectures from www.avatudloengud.ee

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Open Lecture:

Gustav Kalm
The Look of States as Investment Vehicles:
A Snapshot from Millennial Capitalism

Tuesday, Dec 5, 17.30
EKA, A501

India is open for business. Guinea is open for business. Promoting Bulgaria as a successful investment destination. Choose France. Welcome to Estonia. Advertisements of this kind litter the pages of Financial Times, The Economist, Äripäev and other business outlets. What do they do? Is it insignificant blabber or do they actually change something?

Promoting states as investment destinations took off in the 1990s after the liberalization of international capital flows. Typically associated with peak neoliberalism, in the 1990s policy circles came to think of states as competing with one another on a variety of metrics. Attracting foreign investment now came to be considered central political aim for most states. By the 2000s, most countries in the world had opened investment promotion agencies. By the 2020s, this millennial vision of capitalist globalization seems to be receding. As dusk is setting over the “end of history,” Minerva’s owl can take flight and we can look back and analyze millennial capitalism that we are leaving behind.

This talk untangles how that form of statehood operated and how it reconfigured politics in most countries in the world. It is grounded in a study of one of the crucial visual forms of this era—advertising states as investment destinations. No longer heraldry of throned heads, nor glass palace fantasies of colonialism, the millennial representation of the state was an advertisement proclaiming the state to be open for foreign investment. What is or was this political form?

Gustav Kalm is an Anthropologist of Law and Economy. He is currently Fondation Bruno Latour postdoctoral fellow at Sciences Po Law School. His research studies how the legal techniques that undergird world economy operate as a form of power and structure international inequalities. In his doctoral dissertation, he studied how the legal forms of foreign investment have recalibrated statehood. He also writes cultural and political commentary and has pursued multiple collaborations with artists and curators. Gustav Kalm received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2023) and previously trained as a lawyer at Sciences Po (2014).

Everyone is welcome to join!

In autumn 2023, the open architectural lectures will take place under the title Mobile Masters. The theme brings architects and theorists to Tallinn, who analyse architecture’s flexibility and the mobile practices of architects, spatial designers and artists.

Gregor Taul, the curator of the autumn lectures, introduces the program with the following words: “Architecture stands at a significant crossroads. Ten-year-old buildings are demolished and taken to the landfill. The lifespan of an interior design project is five years at best, if that. These bleak facts do not inspire confidence in a discipline that requires so many resources in light of such a short time perspective. What does ‘better not do anything’ mean for spatial design? What might ‘mobile architecture’ refer to or who is a ‘mobile designer’? How can moving people or things be a positive spatial practice?”

On December 7, Brussels-based Laurens Bekemans and co-founder of Brussels-based BC architects & studies, will be on the EKA main hall stage in Tallinn with the lecture The Act of Building.

BC is BC architects, studies and materials. BC stands for Brussels Cooperation and points to how BC grew – embedded within place and people. Started in 2012 as a hybrid office, BC is manoeuvring the boundaries of architecture in a doers manner. With three different legal entities, the team engages in a variety of experimental projects through which it designs bioregional and circular architecture, researches educational and construction processes and produces new building materials using local waste streams such as excavated earth

Laurens introduces his lecture in the following words:

From the first fieldtrips for the design of a library in Burundi to involving over 150 workshop participants in the construction of a public building in Belgium, these stories tell how BC engages in acts of building. The act of building is act and discourse.It is the complex effort of a temporary association to create an infrastructure of its own. In order to have a positive impact on our society, BC believes that architects need to intervene beyond the narrow definition of the professional who designs and controls the execution of buildings. 

Hence, BC ventures into material production, contracting, storytelling, knowledge transfer, community organization, which all influence BC’s design approach. The act of building has an impact and is at the same time a manifestation of values and ideas, which grew out of a broad network around a specific project. Building has a transformative power, driven by action, narrative and result. The lecture will guide you through key moments and key projects, which helped transform BC into the hybrid practice it is today. 

*

The open lectures are intended for students and professionals of all disciplines, not just the field of architecture. All lectures take place in the large auditorium of EKA, are in English, free of charge and open to all interested parties. Be there!

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA brings to the audience in Tallinn every academic year about a dozen unique practitioners and valued theoreticians of the field. You can watch lectures from previous years on YouTube or www.avatudloengud.ee

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Curator: Gregor Taul

The department of Interaction Design MA at EKA will contribute to the World Usability Day Estonia (WUD) with a public talk and workshop.

Conference FB event

Nesli Hazal Oktay’s Talk

Tanel Kärp’s Workshop

Conference LinkedIn event

World Usability Day Estonia (WUD) is an annual UX-, web- and interaction design conference, the largest in the Baltics. WUD 2023 topic is Collaboration and Cooperation.

This year’s WUD theme encompasses the essence of effective teamwork and smooth interaction in the realm of User Experience (UX). We aim to shed light on the significance of synergy and collective effort in driving innovation and fostering a cohesive UX community.

The event is in English and this year we will continue with the hybrid format which combines a live event (Kultuurikatel) with an online event.

November 21-23rd – workshop days
November 23rd – pre-event at Tallinn University (Narva mnt 25, Tallinn)
November 24th – conference day – the hybrid format – combines a live event (Kultuurikatel, Põhja puiestee 27a, Tallinn, ESTONIA) with an online event

You can watch the conference till the end of the year 2023!

More information on the event website

#wud2023 #ux #conference

NB! Viewing/listening to festival installations during the day is free, tickets are available only for evening concerts.

Video games

The Estonian Academy of Arts and Videogames in Arts Lab presents:
Experimental Art Landscapes

Discover the experimental world envisioned by students from the Estonian Academy of Arts — an immersive blend of visual and sound art that offers a unique interactive experience. The Showcase is a new project from EKA that experiments with video games as a medium for artistic expression. It is a unique opportunity to see how the next wave of artists blurs the lines between game design and art.

Course supervisors:
Taavi Varm, Camille Laurelli and Sten Saarits

Students:
Anette Jaaniso, Caroline Pajusaar, Daria Luchinina Gregor Ojaveer, Hans Ermast, Kadi Rebane, Kirke Mari Päll, Léo Mourey, Mariia Koloskova, Ramas Ramales, Sander Klein

Video Mapping 

The Estonian Academy of Arts and “Spatial Motion Design” course presents: 

EKA’s fourth-year Visual Communication students are creating a unique video mapping installation in the basement of the Vene Theater. A unique feature of the installation is that the architectural details of the room – be it wall ornaments or window arches – have become part of the artwork’s narrative. The video is not simply projected onto the surface, but it follows and interacts with the specific features of the space, giving the viewer the impression that the moving video image and the physical space merge seamlessly. This guides and inspires the students’ creative process and provides an extraordinary experience for the audience.

Course supervisor:
Taavi Varm

Students:
Mariliis Haljasorg, Anita Juga, Hedy Lehtmets, Kristin Made, Eva Pogoretski, Annaliisa Roots, Rait Sohkin, Anna Maria Toss, Silver Tõnisson, Artjom Šõšov, Karolina Kapinus

Music:
Stonefromthesky albumilt Zero Origin – Ground Zero (Ukraine)