Re-Program was an intense three-week international graphic design residency that connected me with some of the best design thinkers in the Netherlands. While the sessions focus on making, building, coding, animating, writing, photographing, videoing, and other forms of articulating an idea, this is not a final product-centric experience; instead, it was an exploration of the design process and what was created around it.
● 2018 residency
● Exploration of process
Dutch Designer Rob van de Nieuwenhuizen of studio Drawswords led our second project. In this stage, I expanded on my ideas around perception and exploration from Project One. Now that my peers and I had spent much time taking in The Hague, we were tasked with returning to somewhere we had been and finding a common theme to design around. Additionally, whatever we decided to produce from our exploration would soon be showcased in a gallery exhibit that we were to curate on our own. After a short discussion, we decided our investigations would be based on a loose theme: "Fuck the Internet.”
Open to interpretation, we set off to find inspiration. Many took the prompt as avoiding the internet entirely, opting to visit a nude beach to further disconnect from any aspect of technology. I personally decided to visit Leiden University, a Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, hoping to visit their expansive library and learn about the school’s history. Instead, I found the school and its students in flux, frantically finishing their final projects for the school’s soon-to-be public showcase of its graduating master’s students’ work.
Opting to learn about the school by talking to its students, I befriended two students, Malou Bumbum and Anna Kieblesz. Following my intuition, I spoke with them about their experiences with the school while assisting them in setting up their work.
Malou nearing her graduation with a master’s in photography, expressed her disinterest in the reality of her craft’s industry. "I've used it as a form of therapy for myself... I really want to work as an art therapist later on". Having just graduated from the College for Creative Studies the month prior, I empathized with that sentiment; kinship between two unsure college graduates.
My talk with Malou grounded my thought process in photography and self-expression. Why do we take pictures of ourselves? Why do we visually document the world around us? What do the pictures we take say about ourselves? What do they say about the people or places they depict? Inspired by Malou while avoiding the internet in my exploration, I sought further insight into the school and its students through photography.
I decided to create a platform for the students to express their frantic thoughts. This led me to utilize Instagram, disrupting the website’s usual status quo of personal accounts run by individuals by making it accessible to potentially infinite people, embracing the theme of “Fuck the Internet” around my other experiences.
I printed a mountain of flyers to post throughout the academy, displaying the login for a sacrificial Instagram. Anyone could log in, edit the account and post whatever they pleased. After the posters went up and the account was now in the hands of the public, things got weird.
My experience during Re-Program changed my perception of what it means to think through a design problem. The most expressive ideas can often be found where least expected, and engaging with those ideas and the people or culture they exist around can often lead to the most exciting results. It’s a process that’s both natural and precise; creations made from a perception informed by everything but myself, speaking on their own merit.
