Winter is soon over and so is our Winter Blues workshop serie. Join us for a night at Backa Kåken to listen to a presentation and an interesting conversation about place based design.
It’s 3 degrees today in Malmö and I would say that winter is finally letting go of its hold over us. If you’ve never experienced a winter in Scania I can tell you that it can be very harsh. It’s wet, windy and dark and you would rather hide under a blanket than stick your head out of the door and meet people. To be new in Malmö in the winter can be very lonely, and as research has shown social interaction isn’t just important for our mental health but for our overall health. One of our intentions with the studio is to be a space for connection through creativity between people, therefore we were very excited when Laura Reitze approached us as part of her studies in the master course World making at Linnaeus University.
Me and Laura met every Wednesday for a two month period to discuss different options and possible outcomes. Laura also decided to take part of every Community studio as a situated presence, a design method for increasing the feeling of participation for the members (Laura is a member herself). During the initial meetings with Laura we discussed if we could work more in depth with our Community studio for members but we decided that our main focus should be on another audience we wanted to reach – people in the nearby area who wanted to do something fun and creative in their spare time while meeting new people. It was when Laura talked about her own experience of being new in a new city but also in a new country we defined a need for reaching people in the same setting.
Laura made thorough research and a set of workshop inspiration for us to discuss further. Together we created the Winter Blues Series, a set of community workshops hosted at the Riso Community Studio, created to bring people together during the darker months. Each session combined creativity, conversation, and connection, a way to warm up the winter through collective making. You can read more about the workshops in the Winter blues serie here.
To work with Laura and learn more about place based design have really helped us developed the studio further. It wasn’t very long ago we moved the studio to our current studio and one of the reason we moved to Kirseberg was that we needed space to develop our riso printing studio and start the Community but also to be part in a local community and thereby be able to contribute at large.
The project has come to an end but our work will continue. If you have been part of the workshop serie or is interested in how to work with placed based design yourself please join us for a night at Backa Kåken.
The event is part of the course World Making – Local histories and global futures Linnaeus University. The evening will include a presentation of the students projects and findings, a conversation and release of the anthology (printed at our studio!) Four stories of worldmaking – local histories and global futures by students Anna Réka Gyihor, Gina Geoghegan, Laura Reitze, Semra Gürüstüner and teacher Christina Zetterlund, senior lecturer at departement of design).
When: Start 18.00-18.30 for food and drinks, 18.30–20.00 presentation, conversation and release of anthology.
Where: Backa Kåken, Direktörsvillan, Lundavägen 51, Malmö
Hope to meet you there!
Li
