MAKING Material Move with Heidi Jalkh. Copyright: Matters of Activity (with a special thanks to Max Planck Gesellschaft for the ice plant footage)
The New Episode with Heidi Jalkh Explores Auxetic Materials
Just a single drop of water and the ice plants’ leaves spring to life! No muscles, no motors. What's the secret? It’s all in the plant’s structure. Researchers like Heidi Jalkh are diving deep into how plants move to design smarter materials for the future. From everyday stuff like EVA foam, she creates bioinspired, so-called auxetic materials that can even lift rocks. »My aim was to make it be alive«, Heidi says. Unlocking nature’s magic recipe book to motion could change the way we build, create, and design.
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Still »¡Aquí Estoy!« with Heidi Jalkh (left) and Pía Castro (right). Copyright: DW
Heidi Jalkh Interviewed for DW Format »¡Aquí Estoy!«
Industrial designer and MoA Associated Member Heidi Jalkh has lived in Buenos Aires for 20 years, but has been traveling to Berlin for extended periods for the past 5 years. She combines experimental design, research and teaching around sustainable and nature-inspired materials. Her work explores how fungi, marine debris and other natural elements can transform the relationship between design and ecosystems. Her work has now been featured in Spanish in the Deutsche Welle format »¡Aquí Estoy!«, moderated by Pía Castro.
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The Symbiosis Keeper, Carolina Valivieso & Ana Belén Palacios. Illustration: Nashely Lascano
Master Student Ana Belén Palacios Earns 2nd Place in this Year’s THESys Award for her Thesis
We're happy to congratulate former Master Open Design student Ana Belén Palacios on winning 2nd place of this year’s THESys Award for her Thesis »The Mestiza Ways: Ontologically Oriented Speculative Design of Mestizo Women«. Belén continues her work in her PhD project »WomenAmasamientoNature: A Historicization of Ecuadorian Women’s Socionatural Ontological Design Practices« as part of the MAKE/SENSE program at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW in partnership with the University of the Arts Linz supervised by Cluster Co-Director Claudia Mareis.
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Heidi Jalkh Presents her Research in Argentinian TV
In the interview that was aired on a National television show about Science Communication in November, MoA member Heidi Jalkh presented her research on bio-inspired materials and reports on her work at »Matters of Activity« at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which began with her participation in the »Open Design« program. The full interview can be seen on the La Liga della Ciencia Channel on YouTube.
Layout: Pilar Cebey. Photo: Javier Deyheralde
Hands-on Workshop on 18 July 2023
Platonic solids are regular polyhedra, whose faces are congruent regular polygons and vertices connecting the same number of faces. In the 3D Euclidian space, there exist only five such solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. Plato theorized that all mater was composed of small polyhedra and related them to Earth’s elements. In this hands-on workshop, the participants are going to immerse themselves in the mindful activity of working with their hands, explore body-to-body transitions when modelling with clay and water, comprehend topological ideas and its dematerialization when modelling real materials, and collectively reflect about the experience of modelling Platonic solids.
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Presenting the Humboldt Award to Heidi Jalkh. Photo: Phil Dera. Copyright: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Cluster member Heidi Jalkh has been awarded for her master thesis »Making matter active through form. Fabricating bio-inspired behavior with auxetic structures« with the Humboldt Award 2022 in the category »Research to Innovation«. Our warmest congratulations! The thesis at the department of Cultural History and Theory and is part of the Master »Open Design« and shows how the use of geometry and spatial arrangement can be used to provide a conventional elastic material with unconventional behavior and functionality. Thus, through interdisciplinary research, Heidi Jalkh has succeeded in weaving concepts from biology, materials science, and engineering from a designer's perspective to create new »active materials«.
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Flyer MOD at Humboldt Lab Event. Copyright: June Audirac
Open Design Master's Students' Projects Exhibited at Humboldt Lab
Our ever-so-evolving world presents us with numerous dilemmas and challenges when it comes to designing a better tomorrow. A new sensibility is required, gathering and collaborating with intelligences within nature, and thus fundamentally shifting away from obsolete and destructive routines.
The students of the Open Design Master Program are facing those challenges by radical unlearning, creating new strategies focused on the necessity of »growing sensescapes«. We are happy to invite you to a day full of the growth of sensescapes on July 25th at Humboldt Lab.
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Master Students and Visitors at the »Growing Sensecapes« event in the Humboldt Lab. Photo: Carmen Gloria Cuello Quintana.
Open Design Master's Students' Projects Exhibited at Humboldt Lab
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, Jose D. Cojal Gonzaléz, the lecturers from the Universidad de Buenos Aires Rodrigo Martin Iglesias, José Ignacio Alvarez-Hamelin and the support of Brazilian artist Rejane Cantoni.
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Students during a visit to HNE Eberswalde/ Seminar Spatial Structures with Karola Dierichs and Michaela Eder. Copyright: Carmen Gloria Cuello Quintana
3rd Semester in Berlin is Almost Over
After two semesters of online interactions, 27 students came together in Berlin for their third semester of the international interdisciplinary Master’s program »Open Design« While having focused in the themes Elements and Experiments during previous semesters, Projects has been the key word guiding the student’s work during these weeks. Their focus has been on analyzing specific interdisciplinary design processes and applying design strategies for the development of innovative projects, bringing together the various elements of Gestaltung and empirical methods.
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Copyright: Ilkin Taşdelen, Ana Vila, Master Open Design
Cohort 2021-2023 Virtual Semester Kick-Off
In April 2021, the first virtual semester of the international interdisciplinary Master's Program »Open Design« kicked-off. In the opening week, 40 students from all over the world accompanied each other on virtual walks in their study locations, interchanging visual impressions and audio files discussing different topics, ranging from ecological and sustainable design, the philosophy of the Anthropocene to emergency design and DIY.
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Matters of Writing. Copyright: Matters of Activity
3rd Open Design – Academic Encounters Online
Do you see yourself as an author? This question was asked by Laura (Violeta) Colombo, lecturer in the Master's Degree in Open Design at the Universidad de Buenos Aires during the third meeting of »Open Design - Academic Encounters Online«.
A short silence, heads shaking, followed by shy hand signals. Why do we find it difficult to consider and also identify ourselves as authors? What makes for good writing? Why do we write, what do we write and how do we write it? These were some of the key questions of this week's online encounter held by Maxime Le Calvé, Research Associate at Matters of Activity in collaboration with Laura (Violeta) Colombo, Research Assistant at CONICET (National Council for Scientific and Technological Research of Argentina).
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Open Design – Academic Encounters Online. Copyright: Matters of Activity
Academic Encounters Online
Announcing the deferral of »Open Design« to the summer term 2021 was a very difficult decision. We were all so much looking forward to start the program with a fantastically diverse group of 32 international students from all over the world. But only few days after the arrival of some of the students to Buenos Aires it became clear to us that we would not be able to start as expected. Borders were being closed, travel authorizations withdrawn, and flights cancelled. Both universities, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Universidad de Buenos Aires, operated in emergency presence mode and peoples’ everyday mobility everywhere became limited
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Deadline October 30 2019
The master’s degree program »Open Design/Diseño Abierto para la Innovación« is jointly organized by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU) and the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) since 2015. It is an international and interdisciplinary double-degree program that focuses on the »design turn« in interdisciplinary research.
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