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Until now, action to improve the lives of children and young people has tended to focus on the institutional spheres of home and school. Yet quality of life also depends on the access to and quality of shared resources such as streets, parks, town centres and playgrounds. And here, in the everyday spaces of our towns and cities, we increasingly exclude and marginalise the young. In the pursuit of sustainable communities and urban renaissance, children and young people are too often left out of the script.
This is the point thinktank Demos makes in their latest report 'Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the public realm with children and young people'. To launch this report, Demos organised an event with Lord Richard Rogers and the Rt Hon Beverly Hughes MP, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families.
I was asked to make the content of this report more tangible. Working in collaboration with Revital Cohen, we made a subtle intervention in the street in front of the event. Based on the way the lines drawn on the street tell us how to behave in a public space, we created an abstract pattern of more playful lines. By mixing different game-structures, words and objects, the installation still prompts playful behaviour but doesn't impose a closed set of rules.
During my internship at Demos, a London based thinktank, I worked on the Bristol Urban Beach project. With the help of 800 tons of sand, some deckchairs and a stage, a ran-down carpark got transformed in a temporary urban beach. The beach was an experiment after the publication "People make places". More than a place, the beach was a platform: access was free and there were a lot of events going on, both organised by Demos and the people of Bristol. To support this, we created a website where people could announce their yoga-classes or exchange pictures.
The beach made all of us think about the value and possibilities of public space, putting pressure on the developer of the site to focus more on the public realm. The Architect’s Journal, a leading independent architecture magazine, wrote an article on the Bristol Urban Beach. It praised the influence of the Urban Beach project on the future development of Redcliffe Wharf, an iconic site steeped in history.
bar at Heineken Music HallWhen KPN, the former Dutch national phone company, started operating as an internet and television provider, Fabrique helped design their services in these new domains and build a new and consistent identity. We ran workshops with part of the management, as a starting point of designing the new television service and designed the products as touch-points for this service: the set-top box, the remote control, the interface.
At Fabrique, I also helped launching a new music-service across these three media, called MusicStream. Again both the framework for the service as it's touch-points. One of the main touch-points was a physical home base in the Heineken Music Hall, one of Amsterdam's biggest indoor concert halls. I was partly responsible for the interaction between the visitors and the music service: from the way people buy music, the way they take it home to the experience of the space. Based on this, we designed music vending machines, a bar, stairs, a stage, lighting and other interior elements. Most of these have been produced, others will follow later.
UGS makes software. Software that transforms the process of innovation. From process management software to 3D modelling and manufacturing software. Despite the widespread use of their products amongst design en production companies, the brand-name has yet to become a household name. To improve the reputation of the brand, design office Fabrique in Delft was asked to design a innovative exhibition-stand on a major industry-fair in the Netherlands. The result was a radical yet simple concept, communicating the complexity of process-management through a jungle of blinking LED's.
At Fabrique, I worked on the branding of Giant bicycles for the BeNeLux market. Fabrique proved Giant BeNeLux that it is worth producing local variants of it's bikes and brand interactions instead of using the global versions. We designed the graphics and colours on several models of bikes and made the decals. The bikes, produced in Taiwan, were then finished of for a more local market in the Netherlands. We also designed some of Giant's concept stores and in-store communication, along with the catalogue. It was a really interesting experience as the whole process had to happen fast and went into production immediately.
This is my MSc graduation project at the Delft University of Technology for Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, the national museum of art and history in the Netherlands. The outcome of this 8 months research and concept design project was the creation of a new relationship between the museum and it's visitors and a concept invoking new interaction. It is presented in a book, models and a movie showing the concept in the museum.
mobilityKVD is an amsterdam based design studio using VIP, vision in product design, a specific design-approach. This approach is developed by Prof. P. Hekkert and Prof. M. van Dijk, founding Director of KVD. VIP is about designing from context. The research and creation of a context is the start of every design project, where the context is a set of factors relevant for the project and his domain. These factors can be cultural, psychological, philosophical, sociological or technical. Based on his position taken towards the context, the designer can create a user-product interaction and eventually design the product itself.
edit suiteCluster Lef is a new-media-art-collective. They’re building their home-base in an industrial barrack on the old “NDSM- wharf” in Amsterdam-Nord. The building consists of 10 “sea-containers” and will be a pilot for “Mobile Playgrounds”, a project for mobile living/working spaces in those containers.
Design team KL NK designed two of those spaces for Cluster Lef:
_edit-suite: space for video-editing
_presentation-room for all this multimedia-violence
Both spaces fitting each in one container (2.6x2.6x12m)
