Hospitable City An effective, sharing, experience for GIDE group

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1 Hospitable City An effective, sharing, experience for GIDE group Davide Fassi PhD, Contract Professor Politecnico di Milano - Relé (International Relations Office) davide.fassi@polimi.it Elena Enrica Giunta PhD student (Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication) Politecnico di Milano - INDACO department elena.giunta@mail.polimi.it The topic of the paper is to present didactic results referred to an international experience developed during 2007/08 academic year, from five different European schools involved in GIDE (Group for International Design Education). It would go deep into latter experience, whose topic was concerning contemporary cities and their liveable qualities, i.e. hospitality. Students are asked to investigate characteristics of current needs in local context and provide design solution according to their specific approach and specialization. Teaching staff and guest professor (specially invited) work, in parallel to students, to focus on a theoretical framework in which to fit students projects and to create a scenario for the following academic year topic to be investigated. Keywords: Hospitality in cities, International exchange, Design schools cooperation 1. Defining GIDE Group for International Design Education GIDE is the acronym for Group for International Design Education. It was established late in the 90 s and today it is composed by several european design school such as: Politecnico di Milano School of Design, Milan, Italy; Leeds College of Art & Design,School of Design, Leeds, United Kingdom; Mechelen University College (KHM), interior & design department, Mechelen, Belgium; The Netherlands, Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal (FH), Institut für Industrial Design, Germany; SUPSI Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana DACD, Dipartimento Ambiente Costruzioni e Design. GIDE purpose is to promote the exchange of design education with an ethical dimension, as well as intercultural competences, working practices and multidisciplinary experiences across the European Union and beyond. To raise this aim GIDE organises the following activities: mobility of students and staff, curriculum development, academic recognition, workshops, dissemination of results and activities (exhibitions, participation in conferences etc.), editing media. The proposed activities will involve the following: teaching staff, students and administrative staff (partly aided by the LLP/Erasmus programme), PhD students and visiting professionals. 1

2 The consortium of the schools gives academic recognition to the activities within the GIDE programme, and shared evaluation of added value. The GIDE activities are developed in an academic semester as part of a rolling programme, as follows: staff coordination meetings, shared programme on a global theme developed by teaching staff and students, an annual event that brings teaching staff and students together in one of the partner schools (workshops, lectures, exhibitions, for example), evaluation and dissemination of the GIDE network and outcomes. 2. GIDE activities 2007/ 08: The Hospitable City theme and specificity of each school Each year GIDE network reflects and operates, separately, around a specific and shared topic; the one of the academic year 2007/08 was The Hospitable city. The term hospitable is here referred to the capability of a city to be a device able to be open, accessible, sustainable; able to manage people mobility, to regenerate public spaces, to offer an intelligent variety of services. Each school approached it according to their cultural and specific design background. In add, common framework needed to be situated and fitted in local contests, in order to answer properly to expectations. At the Politecnico di Milano the theme of the hospitable city was approached by the students during the Final Design Studio at 3rd year of BSc in Interior Design. Fifty students were presented with the specific terms of the theme, as identified in the specific subtheme of health tourism, regarding the City of Milan, and a specific container, that means an existing building having a certain historical and architectural relevance. After the presentation of the context and of the author (both through images and biographical and historical-architectural indications), the students were asked to run an accurate inspection, guided by their teachers, in order to gather all data necessary to study the architectonic object (measurements, photos, data gathering regarding the whole context and the single manufacture). Moreover, before concept elaboration and the projects development, a complete and attentive analysis regarding the users was developed. BA (Hons) Interior Architecture & Design and BA (Hons) 3D Design (Furniture) courses at Leeds College of Art & Design, School of Design worked together, carrying out initial research in ten mixed groups. Related titles were provided to use as a starting point. Students then had to identify a site in Leeds and develop their own interpretation. The ten themes were: growing space, inside-out, quiet, seeing, meeting & greasing, space between, wandering, education, entertainment. After a presentation of the group s interpretation of their theme, individual students were asked to identify typical users and develop an idea of their 2

3 own, establishing aims and objectives and producing a sketch-scheme of their concept proposal [1]. Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal (FH) assumed that towns and regions are evidently in search of a distinctive regional identity, and increasingly pitted against one another in competition. How is Magdeburg rising to the new challenges? Where in Magdeburg are the changes most keenly felt? In one district of Magdeburg, the urban architectural structure is particularly severely affected the area where the major mechanical engineering plants were based up until the political watershed of German reunification. The closure of these industrial plants had far-reaching consequences: large- scale derelict industrial sites and, as a consequence of migration, numerous empty houses, apartments and commercial premises. In the Buckau district of Magdeburg, strategies were found to manage the transformation processes of shrinking cities, including structural improvements and redevelopment of vacant industrial sites as locations for innovative enterprises, using targeted investment in urban neighborhoods and some co-funding from the European Union (URBAN 21). Some spaces within the new industrial park have been taken on by sustainable businesses. Sites where heavy machinery was once built are now manufacturing masts for wind turbine for green energy generation. [2] Hence the Hospitable City project involving students of the Institute of Industrial Design at Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences concentrates on the Buckau district. In the course of the semester, students devised strategies and concepts which open up a creative, positive approach to the new situation in a diversity of ways for different users and agegroups. The proposals for Buckau - Hospitable City range from innovative urban design and artistic interventions, to the design of street furniture and additional landmarks for public spaces, to interactive audio-guides to Buckau. At Mechelen University College (KHM), students involved in Hospitable City programme were from Interior design and Furniture design. They could choose between two assignments in the interior design course and two in furniture design. One of the assignments was the interior design of the library and meditation room in Leuven prison. The possible paradox between prison and hospitality was well explained during the first phase of the project: No place within the city is as unknown as a prison; at least for most of us this is true. Still, the prison is open to everybody; it is enough to have committed a sufficiently serious criminal offence to be condemned to prison. Therefore, paradoxically, it may be the most hospitable place in the city as the parameters to be admitted are not determined by the host, but by the guest. For obvious reasons nobody is likely to stay in prison out of choice, apart maybe from the homeless looking for a warm place to spend the night. The self-evident reason is that deprivation of liberty is a terrible human condition. It is not 3

4 uncommon that people convicted to lifelong imprisonment choose death sentence above prison, which explains why all possible precautions are taken to prevent suicide in prison [3]. A more humane prison policy is in the centre of an international debate. Therefore the layout of a prison can try to relieve the temporary but sad stay in this place that we still cannot do without. A second site was the botanic garden in Mechelen. Students were asked to give a new and contemporary interpretation to the park pavilion, bearing in mind the context (history and landscape), and the needs of contemporary visitors to the park. The City of Mechelen commissioned a study of the historical-cultural value of the park and its immediate surroundings. This task was undertaken by Bureau lantschap, a consultancy for landscape and cultural history, in cooperation with Albers Adviezen. Students plead for a new spatial construction that preserve the role of focal point and that can be seen from different angles of the park (in view of the key to Fuch s design, based on visual lines) and which can moreover fulfil a public function. [4] SUPSI (CH) students interpreted the waiting condition, which is linked to public transport as a reflection and mirror of the social break in the city. Lugano has a disproportionate series of structures and services, if compared to the number of citizens (50,000) and to its surface (50kmq), which would more than fine for a daily passage of workers and of international tourists. Autosilo Balestra in the centre of Lugano is the place where students did their own project experimentation. It is a large building of 10 floors and 2 basement floors with different functions: city public parking area, commercial space and Central Station of Autopostali, that is the buses connecting Lugano with the rest of the Ticino Region. The Autosilo has a direct relation with the city; at the ground-floor, horizontal lines which provide access to the commercial activities and shops cross and intersect with the vertical lines of the 10 floor parkings and station of Autopostali at the basement floor. This crossing and people flow within a public space, which is urban but at the same time inserted in a building, where all gets overlapped without hierarchies and recognition, seemed a perfect testing subject for the theme of the hospitable city. Students worked on the floor level and on the basement level of Balestra, with an area of sqm, which have not the main bearing structure or the technical and circulation elements necessary for its right functioning. The first five weeks were used to conduct a preliminary research useful to identify good proposals for the space and functions for a new vision of this public place and for the elaboration of a personal point of view. 4

5 By analysing flows and behaviours, the meaning of transit and the waiting moments, students have looked at the theme of the public transport and of its relationship with the city, of the hospitality as a common use of the public space which creates a temporary community. They worked on the sense of belonging to this place by observing the elements of space and its functions of relationship and of behaviour. During the nine weeks after the first phase, they analysed the themes linked to the specific context: the project of an open-space for the public at the base of the 10 floor building, the research of an immediate interpretation of the vertical links, the possible direct relation between the different levels: cuts, volumes with double height, ground movements, new relationships between what is the open space and what is the closed space, between volumes with commercial activities and their immediate context, the definition of the spaces where people usually are standing and waiting and of their relationships with the surrounding context. 3. Creativity towards innovation: GIDE workshop The next best thing Students works were exhibited during the annual GIDE event, this time held in Mechelen (B), in February During the event all the schools of the network are involved in the workshop The Next Best Thing which aim is to explore and define a new topic for the following academic year. The teaching staff decided to activate a process of creating ideas with an umbrella-theme, a scenario, based on sustainability. The goal was to generate propositions (from the higher macro scale of strategic design down to the idea of advanced design and concept) to be used as working theme in didactic laboratories for next academic year. An important scenery work and a first creative phase had already been worked out by the hosting team. The student were organised in mixed groups, according to their geographical origin, and they were asked to make their reflections on the role of design as an active and propositional discipline in relation to a series of sustainable oriented themes: the work, the food, sport and leisure time, teaching models, the public system, the welfare concept, the mobility of people and goods around our planet. In order to use the lateral thinking we need to gradually train our brains: creativity techniques (or formal techniques) can help; there are various types of techniques and they are based on the principles of the lateral use of information. During "The Next Best Thing" workshop we have decided to organised eight brainstorming parallel sessions on the above mentioned themes: the brainstorming techniques, is based on the principle that ideas generate one from the other. Each group developed a creative session of brainstorming, trying to build up an order between the divergent and the convergent phase: we have observed how data gathered during the analysis phase create a series of a priori concept bonds, which will necessarily drive the following perspective of 5

6 development and evolution. The process is a kind of double funnel where at first the highest number of ideas is produced and then they are deeply analysed. Brainstorming allows apparently non-sense solutions, following the certainty that all proposals are interesting and useful to find a final coherent solution. All results depend on a more and more refined re-elaboration process by the team; participants refer continually to ideas proposed by others and they harmonise the different inputs shared. Each participant is asked to suspend the judgement and the general need of classifying, renouncing to any kind of evaluation on in progress ideas. According to this particular creative technique, problem solving develops through the problem setting, that is by ways that allow to re-design the problem, to analyse it from a new point of view, to re-define it within connections and different frame sets metched in between the diverse schools of GIDE. "The Next Best Thing" agenda was based on three working days: the first two, primarily dedicated to the exercise of the lateral thinking, have evolved into a synthesis convergent phase, whose goal is to provide a collective presentation to be done on the third day. During the two creative days, the team activities were accompanied and stimulated by a series of preliminary exercises, thought on purpose by the hosting team. Each group had one or more tutors; the goal was of managing conflicts and overcoming physiological stall moments emerging from the process. In Mechelen, students tried to co-build a definition of sustainability, associating it to the specific theme assigned to each team; e.g. the footprint concept was analysed, with the related estimate methodology; starting from the observation of the model Product lifecycle we have got to a methodological abstract which allowed us to associate the idea of sustainability with the system vision. With this knowledge and didactic equipment, each team has identified a working strategy. In any case, among the materials gathered, three main proposals will certainly emerge: _Clusters of immediately useful and applicable ideas _Clusters of ideas/areas to be later on analysed more in depth (meant for a longer period of time analysis) _New approach to the theme In conclusion, we can say that the application of creative methodology, due to produce innovation, is a common didactic model: each team of students was guided in a process whose output was a structured vision or the birth of a concept cluster. Vertical thinking is started only if there is a direction towards which we can move, lateral thinking generates a direction [6]. Once common horizons have been defined, a further project elaboration is destined to the didactic exercise and will thus be our theory object in a very near future. 6

7 [1] Savage, G., Hospitable Cities The Leeds Approach, in Fassi, D., Scullica, F. (edit by), (2008) The hospitable city, Maggioli editore, Milano, pp [2] Lohss, A., Buackau Hospitable city, in ibidem, pp [3] De Rujiter, L., Hospitable City an international project in ibidem, p.123 [4] Ibidem p.124 [5] Mari, E. (2001) Project and passion, Bollati Boringhieri Torino, p.103. [6] De Bono, E. (1998) Creativity and lateral thinking. Practical Guide to fantasy, BUR, Milan, ed., p.39. 7