Growing Sensecapes

With the event and exhibition »Growing Sensecapes«, the students of the »Open Design« Master Program wanted to bring forward the numerous dilemmas and challenges they face, not only as students but also as individuals, when it comes to designing a better tomorrow.

A permanent flow of people engaged with the students in their reflections at the Humboldt Labor on July 25th 2022. Visitors encountered the six projects that were developed during the Seminar »Laboratory Projects« led by Cluster members Frank Bauer, Bastian Beyer, Maxime Le Calvé, José D. Cojál Gonzalez, the lecturers from the Universidad de Buenos Aires Rodrigo Martin Iglesias, José Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin and the support of Brazilian artist Rejane Cantoni.

H.E.A.T. focuses on heat as an energetic actuator and aims to make the invisibility of temperature a visible element. Through a sensor that detects a temperature change in the environment and sends a signal to an air compressor to start impulsing or vacuuming air into the structure, this unfolds in space. H.E.A.T is growing architecture for awareness and at the same time, contemplation.

Project members: Agustina Creta, Magdalena Gonzalez, Alexandre Nicolet, Lucila Sarasola

Growing Mycelium Made Us Grow explores the dynamics of mycelium as an active matter and the effects it can have on society. The first goal of this project was to experiment as amateurs of soil, fungi, and science in a professional lab, a community lab, and a domestic lab. The second one was to question the lack of accessibility to these types of knowledge, hopefully working as connectors to bridge the gaps among scientific laboratories and regular people.

Project members: Javier Deyheralde, Cintia Guerrero, Barbara Niveyro, Ilkin Taşdelen

Treebound perceptions proposes an immersive and meditative experience to reflect upon our own imprint in nature, asking the question: how does it feel to be a tree?

Through an artifact contextualized by a speculative future community in an inhospitable setting based on NASA's Mars exploration program, visitors will be able to see how they are perceived by a non-human other. The terrarium is not only a means of measuring the senses but is also reactive to touch and breathing, giving a haptic, tangible response to them, therefore giving its inhabitant a voice it lacks in the Western world. The feedback experience with a plant inverts anthropocentric perspectives, placing visitors in a non-hierarchical matrix of mutually dependent human and non-human actors. This makes the encounter itself an aesthetic practice, evoking an experience of interconnection. The more time they spend together, the more the tree and visitors’ senses align.

Project members: Joaquin Jamilis, Jean-Maxime Rivière, Izem Yilmaz

Sensing Terri(s)tories follows the idea of territory as a result of layering processes of human and natural traces. The complex term »territory« is confronted with a focus on emotion, movement and sedimentation. »Sensing terri(s)tories« moves between theory and interactive narrative and is at the same time process, product and project.

Project members: Pilar Cebey, Daniel Disitzer, Dominique Esterl, Sofia Orti

Inspired by the therapeutic insights of divinatory practices, the Embodied Knots project acknowledges the importance of sharing insights to alleviate loneliness and the feeling of being lost. The project proposes a community-based practice, inviting individuals to reflect in a space where they may not normally interact with one another. By writing messages and tying them to the garment, these individuals share their wisdom and woes while transforming a handmade knitwear into the embodiment of their collective existence. The garment continues to grow as an active material, becoming a heavier system of overlapping fibers and knots as the physical embodiment of care and connection.

Project members: June Audirac, Elizabeth Davis, Anthony Thottungal

External Body Consciousness aims to help the user to be more present and aware of its body.

It consists of a device that measures cardiac rhythm and according to it regulates the volume and flow of vapor and air that a container receives. Depending on whether the pulse is slow or fast, a dense cloud-like shape will be able to form in it. The aim of this design is for the user to be able to witness outside its own body what is happening internally. The more aware you are of what happens inside your body, the more conscious you become about your physicality.

Project members: Juan Pablo Ceresa, Margarita Díaz, Camilo Rico

Cloud Traces is a site-sensing process and a participatory exhibition experience which invites visitors to encounter the weak radioactive materialities around us. By tracing the biographies of these particles, we bear witness to the legacies of distant supernovas, explore our relationship with radiation and, what it means to use radionuclides as the anthropogenic marker to mark the onset of the Anthropocene.

Project members: Wendy Chua, Andrés Gatto, Julia Kostyra, Belen Palacios

The exhibition at Humboldt Labor itself was a project that emerged during the seminar process. Although it is common for what is developed during a seminar to become a product that is presented to the outside, it is generally the seminar lecturers who receive this process and evaluate it, both that product and its process.
Presenting the Laboratory Final Projects in a public exhibition space, it´s an appealing opportunity that also brings along a new set of challenges asking to be solved. It becomes a parallel instance of group dynamics, project thematic problems and administrative requirements that those involved must face and in the best possible scenario learn from. That is definitely the case for this cohort of Master Open Design Students, who took on this opportunity and offered the visitors to the Humboldt Labor, bridges to their disciplines and areas of interest.

Both the elaboration of the open design projects and the organization of the exhibition was a meaningful learning experience, where the master students learned not only how to manage teamwork in the creative sphere, but also how to collaborate with professionals from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. For some students, it was also the first experience of participating in an exhibition, whereas for others it was an opportunity to share and put their previous experience into action.

Exhibiting in Humboldt Labor represented an opportunity to show the world the ideas, discoveries and utopies envisioned throughout one year of the open design master. To curate, organize and setup the exhibition was in itself a challenge, because of the unique aspect of open design. Growing Sensecapes was not an art, a design nor a science exhibition but a combination of all of these together, a proposal to imagine new interdisciplinary possibilities

«Open Design» is a joint interdisciplinary and international Master's Program of Universidad de Buenos Aires and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

If you would like to learn more about the program contact Carmen Gloria Cuello Quintana and follow the Master on Instagram @opendesignmaster.