How can we shed light on the ruins of surplus without having them lose their peculiarity? Can we, in the ruins of surplus, promote different values and behaviours that foster kinship, conviviality, and equality between all beings? How can we do that by revising what we already have produced?

When I came across the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) everything started to come together. Written in 1948 the UDHR failed to address the definition of “human” and since then the boundary between what is “human” and what is not became a tool to legitimize violence against other non-humans, as well as some non-normative humans.

The Universal Non-Authoritarian Declaration of Human & More-Than-Human Rights (UN-ADH&M-T-HR) IS based on the UDHR, AND AIMS to eradicate the concept of “otherness” by using the re-inscription of meaning, hope and acts of togetherness as powerful tools. The UN-ADH&M-T- HR wants to recognize the inherent dignity and equality of all beings as the foundation of freedom, kinship and peace in the world.

I have invited, and I am still inviting other fragile living beings to be readers/ friends/ and/or critics/ of the UN-ADH&M-T-HR. Together we are establishing Human & More-Than-Human Rights Relations between Common Spaces, Friends, Neglected Seats, Plastic Bags and Anyone and Anything Interested. They are a continuous online and offline collaboration promoting the development of Human and More-Than Human Rights Everywhere. An exchange of information on what constitutes Humans and More-Than-Humans, living and non-living beings. The primary objective is to develop relations between open-equal-different minded living and non-living beings who can expand their knowledge and share their experiences. Re-learning how to treat each other by collectively testing and proposing alternative practices and behaviours leaving no one and no thing behind.

Find out more on: elisapiazzi.nl Personal website: elisapiazzi.nl/portfolio.html

Susirna is a vision of new social and cultural traditions for future generations in the Czech countryside triggered by current spatial developments in the rural areas.

My graduation project has a personal trajectory as it is focused on a place where I intend to work and live one day - a village called Libejovicke Svobodne Hory in South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. What was once the core of daily life in the village - non-materialistic values, community relations, local traditions, openness and rural architecture - has disappeared and no new activities are undertaken to support its social structure. Especially the loss of collective places for occasional and daily meetings estranged the villagers from one another.

To base my design on the real-life situation, I did field work in the village, went door to door with self-made physical research tools, to connect with my future neighbours and learn from them about the village’s spatial qualities and challenges. Based on this social experiment, I learnt that the accessible agricultural landscape with its multiple openings has been replaced by enclosed private property where the villagers withdraw from public life. With my project Susirna* I aim to oppose these privatisation trends and to create a transitional space that is privately owned but accessible for community use.

Susirna is a fruit drying kiln that combines the community needs for a meeting space and permaculture farming to run a business. Following old traditions, the drying of fruit is a social event where people can meet, talk and produce wonderfully tasting dried fruit in the process. Everyone in the village has gardens with fruit trees and large amounts of fruit that cannot be processed all and partly ends up as waste. The drying kiln will be open for the community drying days when the villagers can bring their fruit to dry, simultaneously it will also serve as one of the enterprises in my partners and mine farming business. Susirna is an ongoing project that will be realised in the village in 2022.

(* Susirna is the Czech word for drying kiln)

Throughout all the centuries, humans developed their communication and technology to express, in various ways, their presence and values on the planet; caves' hand-stencils, shells as primordial spoons, standardized alphabets, machines et cetera. Humans continuously reorganized their existence, habitats and reciprocal power relations. Along such path they reached the model of a dominant capitalistic mass-society. But within this model, are humans still aligned with the radical meaning embedded in their marks, gestures and languages? Does undertaking an exodus from this status quo mean to radicalise their existence by inhabiting life differently? Would humans, by reconnecting with the origin of their presence, embrace new alternative relationships and collective dreams?

I perceive as an urgency turning this mass-society into a mass of decentralized societies, organized as a network of spontaneous collective aggregations. My graduation project, Primordi, is the first chapter of an imaginary society, part of this open network. An attempt to glimpse an alternative base of existence embracing values such as self-sufficiency, open-source, collective joy and emancipation.

Through an eclectic installation of drawings, poems, clothes, models and videos, the habitat of Primordi is revealed: from daily use utensils to prototypes of convivial shelters over values, stories and rituals. Could the Primordi characters be recognized as future nomadic hunter-gatherers? Do they already inhabit the margins of the current surroundings? On the threshold between tangible and speculative, subversive and unifying, futuristic and nostalgic, Primordi intends to be a catalyst vision to trigger collective awareness and imagination; a bridge to question contemporary gestures, words and values towards a “not-yet” other society.

This project is based on my personal exploration of the street markets in the city of Poznan (Poland), and the unique role they play within the life of the city and their surrounding communities. Aside from my own fascination about the topic, the project is also driven by the urgency of this very moment. The city’s authorities are seeking for a renewal of its market’s sites, but because they were neglected over the years, the proposals are lacking proper understanding of the space and its complex structures.

Through my research process, I discovered one of the oldest market sites, called Rynek Jeżycki. Like many other markets in Poznan, it is a permanent site, being present seven days a week. I analysed the market from various perspectives in order to get an insight of its daily use, needs and potentials for the future from which both the traders from the market and people living in the neighbourhood can benefit.

My goal is to define a new purpose for the market to serve local tendencies and the mentality of the people, considering that this is the only public square in the neighbourhood. My proposal is a stage for continues adaptation divided into phases which allows me to include people in the process of reshaping their own square and neighbourhood. I find it important to introduce firstly activities based on the resources of the market. And secondly, to participate with local inhabitants in the creation process in order to finally provide them with suitable spaces for everyday use.

I regard this project as a start for understanding the community and giving them space they might actually need. It is not about providing defined solutions, but about including the community in the process, giving them room to meet, discuss and exchange. It is a project which can continuously grow and respond to further local and global needs and tendencies.

" Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”

Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now, 1963

What does solitude mean to you? What are we afraid of when we are alone? Can you truly enjoy a solitary moment?

“ENOLA” (written backwards of the word “ALONE”) expresses the idea of a different perspective on loneliness that can hold a positive connotation. It generates complex feelings and experiences in different spatial conditions; a celebration of freedom, a quiet moment for inner peace, a chance to meet ourselves and emotionally (re)connect...

I am striving for the emancipation of being alone in the city. ENOLA provides multiple articulated spaces where being alone can be enjoyed, as an escape from the omnipresent urban noise and crowds. I use my daily routine in Guangzhou, the capital and most populous city of the province of Guangdong in southern China, as an example to show the fast-paced and overwhelming life I’ve had and how solitary moments could be involved.

ENOLA is an alternative for people to slow down and enjoy the moment with themselves in the city. I am inspired by nature scenes I experienced when I was traveling alone and to bring these back to the city life. Combining the certain urban context, ENOLA will provide a series of new perspectives of the urban experience.

In cities, we live individualistic lives, I consider this as one of the great advantages of living in the city. However, there is also a downside being a lack of interaction and togetherness between neighbours in urban public spaces. In my neighbourhood in Rotterdam, there is little variety of types of public spaces and the ones present, leave little room for imagination by the users. I miss a level of adventure and playfulness that trigger citizens to use public spaces according to their own nee. I believe this will generate a more diverse group of people to come together and explore their local neighbourhood.

I developed a series of design principles by researching a very distinct, yet common type of residential area in the 1970s and ’80s in the Netherlands; Bloemkoolwijken, (in English: cauliflower neighbourhoods). Cauliflower neighbourhoods are characterised by low-rise living environments designed in maze-like grouping of intimate courtyards. Every fibre of these neighbourhoods was designed to stage social settings in which interaction between neighbours could easily flourish, although with variating success. By studying both the successes and the failures of cauliflower neighbourhood I could extract design principles that can offer new insights and possibilities for the way we deal with public space in the city.

Instructed by these design principles, I designed a series of urban interventions that spark peoples’ imagination and invite them to explore their immediate surroundings. The urban interventions aim at connecting different parts of the neighbourhood by puncturing boundaries, while provoking the use op public space at specific locations. By re-approach the notion of public space, I hope the present a new ideal on how a complex urban fabric like het Oude Noorden can benefit social interaction and new relationships where public and private meet.

I am interested in the personal fragments of the items that contribute to one’s identity within the domestic and private space. Through self-reflection in the process phase, I discovered having moved and relocated 29 times in my life, due to the choice of my parents, my studies, or the lack of long- term contracts. Therefore, the choice to move this often was not initiated on my behalf, rather it became a must and consequence of choices by others, my occupation, and situation at that specific time. The spaces I have inhabited, have often already been furnished before I inhabited them.

Because of certain limitations such as transportation, duration, vessels, finance and quantity, I could not bring most of my personal items I would have liked to obtain throughout my moves. I am exploring how to claim these anonymous spaces, focusing on how to feel at home within a space that has already been inhabited. How to live in the shadow of someone else’s previous interior choices which left traces in the space? I am longing for the possibility to establish my own identity in temporary spaces I inhabit, and through that, having a personal relation and connection with the items around me.

The magical cosmos is a worldview and has nothing to do with card tricks nor a wizard school. Magic facilitates the experience of meaning beyond rationality by activating the individual’s imagination. Opposite to the magical cosmos is what the Italian philosopher Federico Campagna calls the “Technical cosmos” – today’s hegemonic system of reality – especially in central Europe. Technic operates through separating and automating, while magic acts by integrating and transforming.

As a society we are currently facing highly complex challenges. I believe what is needed to answer those challenges are imagination and the willingness to transform; qualities central to the magical cosmos. I share Campagna’s sentiment and feel a cultural imbalance towards technical thinking aiming to create safety and stability which suspends imaginative transformation.

Nature is incredibly complex and is experienced deeply. In the magical cosmos, nature is the life force which connects everything, while technic regards nature as a factor to protect against. Nature’s complexity engages our imagination and all our senses are evolved to perceive its metamorphoses. Therefore, I argue that nature is the ideal threshold between the technical and the magical cosmos. Cities are manifestations of culture and what is present at its center is recognized as culturally important. The city center of The Hague is almost exclusively commercial. It is there, where the threshold should be located.

What I am proposing is a new tradition: the annual sacrifice of one building. Every year one empty or commercial building is selected and acquired by the municipality. The building is broken down, the construction materials and the ground are rearranged on site, inviting nature to take over and establish itself. The façade is the only part left behind as a porous boundary facing the street. However, it is sealed off and only after 10 years the entrance to the new ecosystem is opened to humans.

This tradition is intended to last beyond a century. At first, the center will host a handful of green spaces; later on, they will form connections and clusters. Eventually the structure of the city will transform, from one restricting nature to fragments, into a structure which interlaces the natural ecosystem.

Within the project titled City Metamorphosis: Living Archive for a cinematic experience in space, I take a look into the relationship between film and architecture. I investigate the imaginary concept of the city of Łódź based on the archival materials of the image-making industry and express my fascination with the phenomenon of metamorphosis taking place in the urban fabric. The city is my personal archive - a living platform by which I test the boundary between facts and fiction in documentary art. As a designer, I investigate the visual tools that contribute to a better understanding of urban space and create new stories as an archivist.

Driven by the topographic fascination of mine – topophilia in the sense of the love of place, I develop the methodology which allows me to collect, describe and analyze the cinematic space in one fictional framework. This framework I call urban cinematic mapping which serves as the base of further exploration of the topic.

The city I expose is fragmented and it only represents truth to a certain extend. Therefore, every exploratory participant of my visual research should be critical to what is presented on the image, and the best way to confront the information with its context is to explore the city personally.

The main target group of my project is every person who lives in the city or to wants to get to know the city better. It can be as a temporal user of the city, tourist, architect, cinema lover, a filmmaker, as an ordinary inhabitant interested in the visual history of Łódź. All of these people have the potential to become a living archivist who primarily explores the past image of the city and ultimately creates a new future out of the preselected past.

The Nourishing network is an agency of analysts specialized in understanding and reveling the social essence of neighborhoods. For the research of 2020-2021 the agency focused on Stationsbuurt, The Hague, being a lively neighborhood, whose public space is used by diverse communities and where rich interactions have been glimpsed.

The work starts with observing and trying to get the social glue of the location; how people live together, what community lives there, who belongs to which groups. The second step is to interact with the locals. Our agents travel to other ways of life, to other habits, customs... They open themselves up to the loals in order to be able to portray the specificity of the neighborhood.

Our agents develop a set of tools that they perform in public space. The tools are innocent, everyday objects that everyone can recognize. They are endowed with a surprising character which generates curiosity in the passer-by. Triggered by the tools and the action, they engaged a discussion with the agent. The passer-by feel at ease in this moment, and are themselves which allow the agent to share an emotional synergy and collect information about the neighborhood.

Those spontaneous encounters allow us to collect informal information that many entities would need to better build in accordance with the environment, with the real understanding of the essence of the area. Those ephemeral confidence are documented in a report that will be transmitted to the stakeholders and the locals. So if you want to build in a specific location and you want to know more the social sparks, contact us!

dnaneighborhoodanalyst@gmail.com

How to interact with heritage we are not really proud of?

My project Hibernating Matter researches unused or even unfinished public buildings that are peculiar and controversial landmarks in the Lithuanian urban landscape. Or, perhaps, anti-landmarks? These buildings did not pass the test of political changes and were lost in transition between the past and the present. Their story began with huge ambitions but got stuck in abandonment. Is there more failure or potential? The consensus has not been reached yet. Consequently, these buildings drown in passive waiting and are craving for a different kind of treatment.

That is why I suggest to establish a new agency for dealing with vacant and controversial structures: Agency of Hibernating Matter. A fictional organisation that operates in the field of abandoned heritage and addresses societal, historical, political issues surrounding anti-landmarks.

The Agency of Hibernating Matter incorporates two streams of activity: archiving and generating strategies how to revive vacant buildings. An open-source virtual guide of anti-landmarks could act not only as an archive, but also reveal the phenomenon of abandonment, its extent, and its peculiarities. This archive will lead to the creation of anti-landmark reactivation scenarios. Combining openness as a tool and historical paradoxes as resources, the agency strives to create unconventional encounters with buildings and their story. Spatial interventions provoke critical questioning and add a contemporary dimension to these distinctive buildings. Experimental scenarios provide momentum to experience and accept abandoned places. Anti-landmarks could become more visible, accessible and tangible.

Agency of Hibernating Matter advocates for anti-landmarks and their endless (anti)-possibilities. Abandoned buildings can accommodate activities that have no space in others public places. Failures, paradoxes, experimentations and confrontations are welcome here. Through endless questioning and explorations hibernating heritage can be re-discovered over and over again.

Explore more on www.himatter.com

This project aims to reconsider public spaces and rise up awareness on their new possibilities. Looking back at history, public spaces are loosing the meaning of their original purpose. In the ancient greek times they were used as gathering point to create discussions and meeting within the habitants of cities. Today in this difficult times and with the rise of technology, we are getting detached from those spaces, avoiding and forgetting what it means to be outside surrounded by people.

The project researches new methods about re-experience public spaces, by using scaffoldings as mediums. Largely placed around the city, they are structural elements, whiten elementary construction process, which allows to easily design on them. They are temporarily used. Built by workers, placed between the public ground and the facade of private houses, seen by everyone.

“In use: scaffoldings” intervenes in this scenario, questioning a different use of them, in the time they are unused by the workers. It creates a platform to facilitate communication between the main character of scaffoldings: the worker - owner of the scaffolding -, the tenant - the owner of the house -, and the pedestrian. The aim is to create a network where citizens are aware of the possibilities in public spaces in order to generate and stimulate interactions and promulgate different approaches. The first one tested, an exchange of letters placed on the scaffolding to be picked up by everyone passing by. The idea is to set an open dialogue and collect opinions around the main topic of public spaces.

It’s an interdisciplinary installation, mainly discusses how the interior objects interfere human’s state of mind, when respectively regarded as materials, symbols, container of gestures or a hybrid combination of all above.

Based on the research of working method of myself – decisions are always made by stacked debate of my outside personality who always feel incomplete and my inside personality who dares not to complete. In the presentation, ‘Complete’ is metaphorically compared as ‘going out of the room’.

Motivated by sensibility of interior design background, It is preferable to use interior objects as communication technique to accommodate controversial emotion and thoughts, which can be seen as the result of instant but barren efficiency of spoken languages when it especially comes to self-care.

Reflecting the result, hopefully I will discover the possible prototype for human desire and built environment in both intuitive and conscious way.

Sitting in between the four walls in my workspace. The essential element to provide space and the essential element to separate. Suddenly I get distracted, looking through my semi-transparent curtains, I see the outside view changing every day, every hour, and every minute. Being surrounded by this active and moving environment, it triggers me, but I get inspired by new perspective and my space becomes alive, but only between these walls. The wall becomes my barrier.

I can see outside, but the outside cannot see me. This form of privacy makes me feel at ease in my workspace. While I also become curious about what is happening outside my workspace. Are the people outside also curious about me?

By rescaling the walls to a more tangible size it becomes a friendly object. Materials containing translucent qualities change how we perceive our environment, filters, and frames out on what is behind. Combining these qualities together, the wall disappears as a barrier and becomes a trusting and reliable object in a workspace.

Field of walls is a project that is focused on rethinking and rescaling our barriers in a workspace. Theatrical elements filled with tangible and transparent materials that frames your view. Encourages to play around, change perceptions, and builds a trusting landscape that is surrounding you.

The main purpose of this project is to investigate if we can create an outdoor workspace that we feel as free and comfortable to work as we are in our personal space. The basic fragments of the research consist of feelings towards comfort, clearness, organization, space economy, seating positions, focus, experimentation and exploration of our imagination limits. Composing all the above, a new way of approaching the work process is generated that goes beyond the borders of ordinary and provides the possibility to work anywhere.

Incorporating the mentioned elements in to space, the connection with the ground is intimate. Like children, we used to play with toys on the floor, wearing pajamas and without worrying about the time. Likewise, the floor is inviting and challenging us to restart our imagination and then get to work. Each time a new place is chosen, new images from our surroundings enrich our personal imagination, creating a ceremonial vibe that is completed when our limits are known.

With our main reference the Japanese tatami mats and influenced by the Japanese tea ceremonies, we start to build our construction that eventually will travel in various places. Using as main material the rope that symbolizes the limit, an extra surface is created that provide comfort and protection. Moreover, a special toolbox is created to store our personal items that contribute in the work ceremony.

Either alone or sometimes with a guest, the imagination process is initiated and the work is starting.

Architecture and design are open to a universe of meanings thanks to their inner property of constituting elements of the social culture, as well as of creating them. Nevertheless when thinking about the social aspect of architecture, one easily runs into the encounter between private and public. To what realm does sociality belong? Is it defined by communication?

The project evaluates to what extent architecture and design help create connection. It seeks to be a crossroad between elements of the public and private realm and deals with isolation, interaction and privacy, investigating the creation of spaces through connection.

Driven by the need of music within my workspace, this project uses sound as a tangible connection to create interactions. Its nature is based on dialogue: the necessity to intervene in the musicians’ workspace is necessary to design mine. The result is a series of scenarios which narrate isolation as a form of connection between me and others. By looking for interactions and testing physicality within the space, the project develops also new forms of proximities between the inside and the outside. Indeed, using tubes attached to the facade of the conservatory and entering into the building, not only allows me to hear the music happening inside, while being outside, but challenges the spatial behaviour of the building itself, creating a bridge between physical and non physical connections.
Can we use such kinds of engagements to re-look at our architectures and to set new possibilities of connections and use?

I am a sensitive individual who wants to transform the ordinary into remarkable tangible memories.

As a designer I strive to collect wherever I am. Stones, shells, caps, moments. They amaze me. Collections form compositions. Perhaps the most beautiful compositions are created by accident. By collecting all kinds of materials my interest in this continues to grow and ensures that I continue to develop my knowledge.

What is collecting? Bringing/gathering something together, arranged or arbitrary, but close together. For me collecting is organizing in a thoughtful way. I give value by arranging.

My design is a foldable display of my collections of the small space. Since I travel from place to place, I decided to design something that is foldable and easy to display everywhere.

My collections are a set for conversation. It’s not only valuable for me, it’s a sharing proces. Together they form a capturing of places, moments and/or people. It’s a learning process, a system of generating knowledge.

To make the space feel more tangible, I combine larger spatial elements - my photographic prints with my much smaller collections.

My role as a designer is to simulate people’s senses by accentuating the very small instances of materiality that are often minute or even close to invisible.

I want to let you observe. I want to let you experience. I want to freeze time. I want to make the inconspicuous stand out. I want you to stop now and then. Hold onto moments. Making the ordinary special.

This Project has the aim to draw attention to the many structures the Built Environment provides in urban space and to use them as corner stones for flexible objects, temporarily created between them. The comfort of a hammock and the playfulness of a swing are premises for a repeated performative act in building, using, and rebuilding said objects in different architectural, social and public surroundings.

Thereby not only the designer is confronted with the effect of the delivered furniture on space, the change of perception and the used structures: Questions are drawn for the residents passing by, an audience is created by the performing act and its unusual and often impractical form.

What is this?

Is this allowed?

What purpose does it follow?

These interactions provoked by attaching to Public Space and thereby common good lead to encounters. The resulting dialogues motivate further questioning of the aggregations of said structural premises.

The goal is to repeat the discussion on how much of the Built Environment we as the Public have to accept as given, unchangeable and finished. Within this discussion the Right to the City and the collective responsibility to create change are brought up.

Leaving no mark on the structures used and being spontaneous and temporary these interventions follow the idea of tactical urbanism, in which the main impact remains in a change of perspective for those confronted with it.

The “Humantank” is a heavy game played on the beach. The idea is to let people work together as a team and achieve the goal of bringing the object from a flag to another, even if they fail because of some external and unexpected events like the wind. The patterns, or mess, left behind in the sand is a two-dimensional representation of the act that took place. Showing the different, and sometimes failed, attempts. After leaving the beach, the intervention remains present for a short time until the people and the wind slowly erase it and make their own mess.

Working in a team means to appreciate differences and be able to match it in a way that makes the team stronger, more positive and fun. It should also make it easier to like the work, even if it's hard to do. Being part of a team, gives you a sense of belongingness, which nowadays is something that more and more people need.

We failed, made a mess, tried again, failed again, worked together, scraped ideas, have been helped, and felt lost. But that’s the point: new ideas emerge by interesting collaborations and combinations. Interesting combinations arise when things are out of place like in a mess or when things do not go like you expected.

By working with a high activism, moved by the chaos, the mess, the instincts and without being scared to fail, we just tried and “had fun while doing it”. The project is a result of this.

My project is about a selfsufficient place consisting more atmospheres that coexist in dependence of one another.

I believe that every place has a unique identity and is thus different from other places.

In this particular case I'm using the word *hetero*places, instead of the original heterotopia, that Foucalt wrote about, to make it more understandable for the user, which brings up another important aspect of my work - carity and understanding.

Architects are in my opinion diplomats between people and places. The role of the architect is to show the intended purpose of the place with clarity.

I believe the optimal way of living consists of a combination of several different spaces, each of which has its own unique function. This is why on my project I would like to focus on the relations between these spaces and how they enhance one another and create together balance and harmony. With each space, I want to create an environment that makes people in tune with the purpose of the space and thus makes them behave in a certain manner.

The empty rooms of the luxuriously decorated House Dedel tell a story of former power and wealth. Their slightly deteriorated condition shows the age and history of the wallpaper, the carvings and marble, in which this project aims to expose another side: the servants’ reality.

Between astonishment and admiration, one thing is easily overlooked — the movements and living conditions of the house's inhabitants, their hierarchy and their strict division into two groups. A path, designed with transparent curtains, divides servants and masters’ areas. It recreates the narrow, dark and unpleasant atmospheres, in contrast with the bright, warm and open spaces of the masters.

The project emphasises the degrading distribution of rights and space the former servants head to endure, while leading the visitors to the treasure of knowledge in the servants’ former hidden rooms. It aims to draw attention to a history marked by the contrasts official and unofficial and hidden or visible. Their traces can still be found in the architecture of the house today, which is carefully researched and catalogued in the publication House Dedel Atlas.

I remember when I stepped into Huis Dedel, all the patterns, the light, the stucco were completely in front of me and the illusions I once had about it grew thinner and thinner until they disappeared altogether.

Huis Dedel was once a house steeped in centuries of historical treasures, and now it has been transformed into a design museum. I felt that its historical value also needed to be an important part of the museum, so I decided to use the architectural traces as exhibits to show the public the history of the building.

Based on my personal experience, I think that exposing all the precious traces nakedly to everyone would lead to neglect. So I created a "barren room" in this precious room: you can be aware that you are in the midst of a treasure, but you cannot immediately see anything. You need to experience the process of forming each fragment yourself through your own practice: tapping for sound, squeezing for bruise, tearing for scar, etc. After the visit, you will have a collage of every precious fragment in your mind, which leaves room for your imagination.

Using this method, I hope to create a new method to cherish historic buildings by visiting and imagining.

Entering the House Dedel, I stepped foot in the hall where I was greeted by doors. This is where the journey of the house starts and my journey wandering through the spaces. I opened all the doors in the hall and those in the adjacent rooms. I kept going until I reached outside again. I unveiled a new perspective, a perspective that reveals the depth of the house, a new layer inside the House Dedel.

The hall and passage are spaces where you meet behind closed doors. Only being reached by moving to other rooms. A space not appreciated enough, left alone in the middle of the house. The structure is falling apart because the heart is not operating anymore. We should spend more time in the hall and passage to let the space breath again.

‘’Do you see me when you pass?’’ A project focused on freeing the hall and passage in House Dedel. An oval shaped structure extenuating the middle of the house, hugging the space and the surrounded rooms acting as the core of the house. Mirrored doors behaving as frames that stages the view of the rooms. Inside the center, a new experience starts. Different heights going up or down creating special spaces to admire the details of the space.

Converting into a space that is both a conclusion and a beginning. Unfolding a new layer stimulating our imagination and adding new narratives to the house.

The main purpose of this project is to investigate if an indoor spatial experience can be created based on a previous interior space reality, but with a new identity and use. The quest starts in the location of the Dining room of Dedel House, now after many years, an exhibited place for the public. Inspired by Plato’s Symposium and through the method of adaptive reuse, the dining place acquires again its lost glory. I emphasize in the past of this place (the history and the short-memory from our recent visit as students) and try to mix it with the present through a semi-transparent veil that creates a specific path inside the room and drives the participants into new, contemporary symposium which belongs to the future.

The symposium concerns the people who are interested to participate not only in a dinner with unknown people, but also in an interactive installation inside the room, whereas they can experience the connection between past, present and future through this symbolic path. This path is inextricably linked with the interior qualities of that space. Focusing on the green flowers of old wall tapestries, I would like to create a parallelism from the distances of the wall to the table with the memory distances between past and future. By this way, a new surface with a representation of that wall pattern is created inside the room and limit the path to the dining table. Finally, by this symbolic journey, the participants will be drifting from the past, live in the present and be ready to welcome the future.

Spatial design doesn't always go along with strong architectural interventions. The nature of a space can be modified, changed or evaluated in many subtle ways. This is how Liquid Light approaches the magnificent interiors of House Dedel.

Aiming to preserve, evaluate, testify the story of intimacy behind the craft of the Stucco in the house, the project traces its boundaries within the staircases (leading from the first to the second floor) and the fifteen meters void up to them. I consider that space to be the core of the house from a symbolic point of view. The walls of the void are carrying the story of Dedel's family. Figures, expressions, memories of the family are reliefs visitors can admire from the staircases. Liquid Light intervenes in this scenario proposing a new experience people can encounter when going to the upper floor.

Inspired by the lantern at the top of the void, the project seeks to manipulate light and create projections on elements of the Stucco to create a narrative behind them. To highlight that particular experience, the entrance of the staircases has been closed with a curtain, so to have people perceiving it only as they walk the first step. The void and the stair become then a set of a theatrical scene where Stucco constitutes a new kind of interior landscape. Beams of light point figures on the walls with a precise sequence, to manipulate visitors' observations while a voice is narrating the story. Particular seats are integrated with the steps to allow participants to sit and fully immerse themselves in the experience. To convey the intimacy behind the monumentaity of the Stucco, the seats design pursues the idea recreating the domestic comfort of home.

House Dedel is a building where, when one walks through, one feels the urge to touch everything and admire it up close. Understandably, since this house and its effects are very valuable, this is not possible. Reassuringly, however, touching the doorknobs is permitted. “Doorknobs are the handshake of a building.”(Juhani Pallasmaa, 2005)1 They are the sincerest form of touching a building.

This is why I have chosen the doorknobs as a tool for my sensory research throughout House Dedel. The doorknob represents touch. A sense underexposed when investigating architecture, where the visual sense in particular plays a significant role.

By using the doorknob as starting point in my research, I intend to allow the importance of touch grow throughout the building. What are you allowed to touch and what not? These “touches” represent first meetings. Like meeting a person for the first time, their handshake, limp or firm, will shape your initial impression of them.

I find House Dedel an exciting example of where touch can play a meaningful role. Touching the building allows you to discover more - its condition, sentiment and materiality. House Dedel should become a space that is appreciated for its current state and its narratives. But where secrets also will remain and to be given their own interpretation by those who walk though it whilst being able to touch and feel the house.

1 “The eyes of the skin”, Juhani Pallasmaa, 2005, JOHN WILEY & SONS, p.56 part 2 - The shape of touch.

It has no shape of its own, but fills its surroundings; it has no colour, but it is always a wonder to look at it; it has no sound of its own, but its touch creates infinite melodies; it has no temperature of its own but adapts itself to what is there.

Inspired by an old, forgotten water collector on the roof, the project proposes a ritual path through the forest of the attic to rediscover the wonders of water so that we will not forget it and then, who knows, love it again.

An exhibition is a way of storytelling and distinguishes itself from other kinds of mediums by allowing the visitors to move through the space. Because of this you can use routing as a design tool to guide people and tell a story. In my project I used two opposite types of routing, the linear- like IKEA uses in their stores and the labyrinth form like Aldo van Eijck uses in his sonsbeek pavilion to create two installations. The linear routing gives visitors a clear path to take and can help to tell a story from beginning to end or to sketch a timeline. The labyrinth route gives the visitor more freedom and the visitor is able to experience the space in many different ways.

The project consists of a collaboration between sand and latex that forms an installation in the house. The walls in both installations are made of latex moulds of different parts of the house. People can touch and see parts more closely in this way. The installation highlights parts of the house that visitors otherwise might overlook. This could be a collection of doors to display a collection of all the architectural elements of the house. or parts of the stucco staircase to highlight and tell the story of the stucco. This subject changes over time and the mold will be exchanged. The sand on the floor of the exhibition shows, in the linear route the routing that the museum has in mind. In the labyrinthic exhibition, the sand shows the routing people take themselves and the routing of their predecessors. And just like on the beach, the footsteps in the sand disappear after an indeterminate time and a blank canvas for a new route emerges.

Having a school project for a real assignment to a historical monument House Dedel in the centre of The Hague was for me a very attractive assignment, though for me personally also very challenging.

House Dedel as a monument and a former residence of the former mayor of The Hague Jan Hudde Dedel is a historical icon for the Prinsegracht, therefore any design in the building should have in my opinion a strong reason that rather enhances the qualities of the house. The actual graphic design museum nowadays taking place in the object, is for most of us an irrelevant function and perhaps not directly in harmony with the building.

My first image of the house after visit was an empty hybrid of two identities that ask for their attention. How can I enhance the old qualities of the house?

Can I bring back the identity of the house that it used to have?

Researching through history 400 years old must say it's rather overwhelming and maybe very optimistic to hope a design will come out of that, as we always deal with the actual time. Therefore I hoped the hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer might help me, that speak about interpretation of history in the present time.

My first considerations for the project I already had in Flows programme with Jillian, before even seeing the building. Here I considered how to make as much as functional spaces in the museum so the small scale has most visitors.

With Studio II guided by Ira Koers, after first attempts, I came back to the conclusion that the house needs more vibrance, more visitors. Therefor I've chosen the living room that has a fireplace. Nowadays the fireplace is replaced by a gas stove that stands in front of the marble fireplace.With the historical research I would like to bring people back to the fireplace as they've used to gather around for the heat and social needs. I want to give people back a warm place in a house where they can relax, socialize and feel home.

For creating the environment for the fireplace, I've considered the elements already present at the place (wallpapers, ceiling, marble fireplace) which can be found back in the design. In terms of composition, I was thinking how I can extend the fireplace as a place to gather and socialize, and took among others Frank Lloyd Wright's fireplaces as an inspiration. In terms of material, I chose the marble, as it's a bright hard noble material that also has a warm memory, that can glow heat, and it's clean surface is better for public needs. I hope to make people take their jackets off, lay down, on comfortable landscape structures and feel free to observe the room they're taking place in while being warm and public.

With the feeling of home and more crowd, the house will become more visible to people and with that the house will turn back to life.

Is it possible to include archaeology as a method to investigate the social and urban potentiality of a built environment? Archaeology on the Move aims to investigate this question using the Marine Terrein as an angle of exploration. Thanks to its possibilities to work as a connector and as creator of narratives, archaeology combines in one precise place different times, stories, and paths. It represents a network that conveys many different aspects of an urban environment. The Marine terrein works exactly in this way but its times, stories and places are not known by its users. The urgency of disclosing them is the core of Archaeology on the Move . This project uses walking and storytelling as research methods. This not only provides interaction between users, but creates a process of regeneration and understanding of the local identities of the Marine Terrein.

The final outcome is a new vision on archaeology as follows: a study of the historic, present and future of mankind based on artefacts, found underground as well as above ground. Artefacts being objects, stories, systems and traces of the development of the city. Archaeology is about preserving, telling and creating narratives. Opening up opportunities to think ahead for the future.

What is needed to create a space of your own? A space you belong? The project Rituals to Claim recreates domestic rituals in public space in order to explore the answers to these questions. The aim is to develop toolkits that motivate different people in different ways to temporarily claim parts of public space. It’s not only about the process of occupation, but also about changing the personal relationship to the respective space through ritualised uses. In this way, the public space becomes a playground for individuals and groups alike, who expand its spectrum of possibilities through reflection and communication.

With our toolset, we invite people to stay and spend time on the Marineterrein and around its obstacles, have a cup of our free coffee and observe. The invitation contains a manual and a variety of options to claim the different areas. It differs from day to day and from person to person. It serves as an enabler for the temporary domestication of space and as a set to slow down urban pase and support a moment of dwelling and retreat.

Have you ever felt observed by the public? Or more accurately, felt the anxiety of being observed? 'Undiscovered Refuge' is a series of attempts to diminish the anxiety of being observed in public spaces.

Through ‘undiscovered refuges’ installations, people are invited to practice the possibility of being mentally hidden in a public space. Two installations are placed respectively on a tiny hill and along a tree in the helicopter field of Marineterrein, interacting with people by letting them imitate animalistic actions. I attempt to inspire people to use animalistic instinct to discover refuges in public spaces without creating artificial facilities.

Through the results of this experiment, I aim to explore the impact of public facilities on people’s mental feelings. Whether the placement of public facilities and the way they interact with people has an impact on people’s mental comfort.

The main purpose of this project is to investigate if we can create an outdoor workspace that we feel as free and comfortable to work as we are in our personal space. The basic fragments of the research consist of feelings towards comfort, clearness, organization, space economy, seating positions, focus, experimentation and exploration of our imagination limits. Composing all the above, a new way of approaching the work process is generated that goes beyond the borders of ordinary and provides the possibility to work anywhere.

Incorporating the mentioned elements in to space, the connection with the ground is intimate. Like children, we used to play with toys on the floor, wearing pajamas and without worrying about the time. Likewise, the floor is inviting and challenging us to restart our imagination and then get to work. Each time a new place is chosen, new images from our surroundings enrich our personal imagination, creating a ceremonial vibe that is completed when our limits are known.

With our main reference the Japanese tatami mats and influenced by the Japanese tea ceremonies, we start to build our construction that eventually will travel in various places. Using as main material the rope that symbolizes the limit, an extra surface is created that provide comfort and protection. Moreover, a special toolbox is created to store our personal items that contribute in the work ceremony.

Either alone or sometimes with a guest, the imagination process is initiated and the work is starting.

Since almost no people live in the Marineterrein, most people in the location are either visitors enjoying free time activites or people coming to work there. In my research I discovered that the soil of Marineterrein is infertile, and the frequent visitors further deteriorate the soil's condition.

Since many people use Marineterrein for excercising, I propose to make an excercise machine that turns kinetic energy into electricity and accelerates the process of composting though excercising.

This way people can use Marineterrein as they're used to, but simultaneously have a positive impact on the location itself. Marinterrein hosts many restaurants, some of which don't compost their biowaste. This biomaterial can be used for the "Machines of Awareness" which will turn biowaste into soil in 24 hours. In addition, these give them their invested energy back in form of electricity.

Hello.

My name is Action and I know nothing about your past. If you see me around, come and play with me.

The “if, witchcraft realities” (2021 edition) is a role-playing game based on 7 different characters who try to create an alternative map of Marineterrein following seven stages. The characters’ names are Dream, Idea, Space, Object, Look and Feeling and each player choose one. In the first stage every player gets one witchcraft bag with his 7 cards, the tools for building the map, and the rules card. Each card corresponds to one of the seven stages of the route starting from the Escape stage. Action will drive you to next stages which are the Possibility, Listening, Choice, Voice, Door and Orientation stage. Also keep that Action is the key character. During the stages you have to speak out the cards and/or to perform the words. In the final stage, you have to use the tools of the bag in order to build your own image on the common map. Each player who imprints his perspective according also the rules during the game, wins his access to the real world.

Players: 1-6

Age range: 0+, feels like 5-6

Playing time: 45 min

This history and the still present military creates an atmosphere that is dominated by a feeling of control. A site made for obedient bodies. The fences, dressed military walking around, cameras, obstacles, the large guarded entrance and the wall with barbed wire attached gives a feeling that there is a need for obedience. The subject of my research is the act of disobedience to manifest citizens’ right of altering the city. My goal of the week in the field was to react to what I would find there and make interventions.

one of the interventions was a raft. The idea for this raft originated after seeing the interrupted jetty. The scaffolding in the water on the site was missing a piece so that the continuous route across the water was no longer possible. Some projects including mine had to be redesigned because of this. The choice for the break was made to better regulate how many people are in the front yard. Other paths to the front yard were also closed. The raft makes it possible to cross again and there is again a continuous route on the site.

After I put the raft in the water, it was used extensively by several people on the property itself. Some even wearing clothes and with their phones. Mostly the raft served as a play object in the water. Nice conversations arose between people about the raft and between people with me following the raft. When I wanted to take the raft out of the water people begged me to please leave it.

The other intervention was to build and place a ladder to the Navy fence. It is a provocative act that wants to test how this is handled. It asks why the fence and who encloses it? Is this perceived as a threat and how is it dealt with? The presence of the staircase makes the fence almost meaningless.

This project all started when I first entered the Marineterrein. I was sucked in another world. Everything behind me was gone and nobody knew where I was. I stood still in the entrance of the wall, closed my eyes, listened to the sound of the water and the voice of the wall. Through my conversations with the wall, I discovered the value of this element. The wall is the element that makes the Marineterrein the Marineterrein, the wall became the protector and creator of the mysterious land that exists behind the wall today. This presents a positive presence of a wall but in most circumstances, walls are seen with its negative character because it’s used as a physical and emotional barrier that controls and limits.


‘Dear Wall’ presents the different characters of the wall and their ability to influence our behaviour in the built environment. Showing different sides of the wall and opening up a discussion on one of the main elements in architecture.

If these walls could talk, what would you like to say?


Selfportrait of Shripal Shah('s feet)

Shripal Shah, from India and a 2020 graduate, volunteered for an interview himself after receiving the invitation to the INSIDE Questionnaire. He had more suggestions than he could put in the questionnaire. His main suggestion comes from his observation that several students at INSIDE, leave a spatial site out when it comes to research. Shripal thinks that it is a mistake: "I think that having the space inform your research is crucial. Than you can get beyond books and speculative thinking and that helps you to inform your overall position as well".

Shripal's graduation in 2020 was seriously challenged by the corona restrictions. After explorations in "multicultural streets" in Rotterdam, Antwerp and Paris, he had come to focus entirely on the Transvaal neighborhood in The Hague. The mixture of cultures within it, and especially the elements of the Indian culture familiar to him that were visible there via immigrants from Suriname, stimulated his curiosity. Even before he could properly start working on it on the site after completing his thesis, the world went into lockdown because of the covid-19 pandemic. Despite this, Shripal managed to ground his graduation project on the Transvaal district.

After graduation, Shripal's plan was to spend at least another year gaining experience in the Netherlands, in order to add a perspective to his palette of observations that would benefit him in his later professional practice. However, he did not succeed in finding work in architecture. Even when he was willing to accept a job in the hospitality industry, it closed. This situation made him decide to return to Ahmedabad, he started working as a junior architect at KSA Design Planning Services where he heads the interior architecture department. The firm he works for is mainly concerned with health and education buildings and is currently working on an offer to the government for rural scale health care that is non existant in inda. In drawing up the plans for this, his Flows knowledge of INSIDE comes in handy. He is currently working on the design of two hospitals in Alanpur and Jaisalmer that will be specially equipped for covid-19 patients because of the pandemic that has gotten out of hand in India. "Don't expect beautiful architectural design from it", warns Shripal, "it's mostly 'necessary' architecture". In this design, he applies many skills he acquired during his bachelor program but also his Flows knowledge. The covid-19 hospitals have special safety requirements because of the major role of oxygen in the treatment. The knowledge for this is still lacking and will be formulated during the design process. In contrast to the application of the Flows approach during his master's program, which he described as rather studious and often focused on causing social cohesion, the way he now applies Flows is hardcore systems driven and surrounded by rock-hard safety expectations.

He describes his work now mainly as 'putting out fires'. There are not many agencies in India yet that explore the intersections between Research, Design and Architecture to create paths for meaningful Futures. As an example, he mentions Design Studio The Busride Lab from Goa, from which the description given above comes. But even that relatively established studio, in addition to working on meaningful futures, must do many well-paid 'standard' projects in order to afford such an approach at all. Despite this current situation, Shripal sees a lot of potential for the approach to 'design thinking' that he has mastered during his time at INSIDE. He is convinced that when the corona crisis is over, there will again be room for the coherent design of system and space. But currently there is little opportunity for reflection on what is actually going on, let alone for new opportunities.

In addition to his work in the architectural firm, he is currently renovating his own home. There too he is applying Flows' knowledge, such as the principles of reuse and sustainability. Moreover, he is realizing it entirely himself, something he would never have considered before INSIDE. It is an endeavour to try out the relevance of what he learned in The Hague in his own context. A try-out of whether he can also let engineering become design and not have one be subordinate to the other. He is doing this to see if he can start his own practice from there. However, he is planning anyway to leave India for, say, a country like Canada. He sees that country as a place with space and less urbane saturation as Europe. A country moreover with strict gun laws and a good education system. A country where his wish to combine work in the practice of architecture with an academic practice could take shape.

He is currently thinking a lot about the future of the interior architecture profession. He also still feels strongly about INSIDE and studied all of this year's graduation proposals. First of all, he noticed a big difference in the gravity of the issues addressed in the projects. In the mostly European contexts, for example, design is used to 'create community', while in India he sees a greater need for involvement to 'save lives'. Real world challenges like how to make cities safer for women. Challenges where design thinking is badly needed because the Indian culture is still extremely top-down and architects are hired to do exactly what the client wants. At the same time, according to Shripal, anyone with access to Pinterest has now become an interior architect themselves. And that's just fine, "everyone who designs their own space also has the right to their own aesthetic," Shripal said. Spatial design should also not be a "vanity profession" at all. Instead, Shripal sees an urgent need to relocate the profession. The profession now faces the decision of either facilitating people who want to make their own design or of democratically designing with and for the user. Shripal chooses to make honest designs instead of focusing on the design of 'instagrammable spaces'.

Shripal's stay at INSIDE has greatly stimulated his curiosity about his living environment. He now looks critically at grotesque building projects for the glory of those in power, the negative effects of neoliberalization on the housing market and also at the absurdity of huge studios in India where wedding videos can be made as if walking through the streets of Paris, Venice or Amsterdam. He himself sees that INSIDE has changed his perception of the social role of architecture. But he also sees a missing link: there is too little overlap between theory and practice. He says he has learned great things but now lacks the tools to adequately translate these insights into action. "A little more overlap between industry and academia would have been helpful to me". Thus the Travel program, an exercise to abstract observations into applicable design principles, could be brought closer to practice.

Indispensable to the relationship with practice, for Shripal, is the role of the actual site within which the graduation projects at INSIDE are formulated: "I noticed that when it comes to research than a spatial site is being left out. Students are talking about some great things like utopia, but I don't see that space is informing that research. I think that having the space inform your research is crucial. Than you can get beyond books and speculative thinking and that helps you to inform your overall position as well". According to Shripal, even the fictional approaches at INSIDE should eventually be defined as spatial strategies, "otherwise they become artistic performances and you lose accountability as a designer. If projects are not grounded in a place, then accountability is compromised. When you design an artistic installation, you don't owe someone more than a certain amount of justification. That's OK for an art program but not if you want to be an interior architecture program." That's why Shripal recommends that INSIDE have students start their graduation research with a place, a spatial context, and not exclusively with an idea. If you start from a spatial context, i.e. add a Where to the Why-How-What question that graduating students are asked each year, then positions on the entire bandwidth can be relevant within the program. Moreover, according to Shripal, you can then also change your thesis setup. You then don't have to complete your research before you start applying its results spatially. Instead, you start with a combination of space and research and you can continue to reflect on it until the end of your graduation. He concludes by saying that he himself would like to go back to his graduation to be able to set it up that way. But at the same time he admits "maybe that would be a nightmare for the students".

Camilla Casiccia is from Italy where she did a bachelor's degree in design in Milan and specialised in Interior architecture in her final year. Although she did not study at Polytechnic University, the subject of her 2016 graduation at INSIDE was an architectural one with an interesting technical background: a study of the reuse of the Ockenburg Youth Hostel by architect Frank van Klingeren. The building is a modular flexible building that has been stored since 2010 to be rebuilt somewhere in the future.

Shortly after graduating, Camilla put together a portfolio of her work, which she sent to a number of architectural firms in and outside the Netherlands. The firm Architecten van Mourik in The Hague invited her for an interview and hired her. After five months, her temporary contract was changed to a one year contract and after 2 contracts of 1 year, she got the permanent one. A colleague interested her in participating in the Professional Experience Period of the Architects Register. Her boss became the mentor for the course that took 2 years and about 3 hours a week. The office paid but the cost was not too bad, about €1000. The BEP asked her to document mainly what she was doing. It was divided into three phases where she had to demonstrate involvement in all phases of the design and construction process. For the things she couldn't do herself, she accompanied a colleague and documented that. It was a lot of writing and documenting and not designing at all. After the third exam, she was registered in the Architectural Register. That registration is not an absolute necessity to do the work she does, but she can now sign off on projects as the responsible architect herself. In addition, her salary was slightly increased.

She likes the work at architecten van Mourik. The office works mainly on office buildings, schools and government buildings. These are usually large-scale projects where Camilla, responsible for the interior, is an integral part of the design and implementation team. After one year working in the office she participated in a research project about Noise in cities, called “Public Silence". For the office she applied to the Stimuleringsfonds for a starting grant to continue the research and received it. Every project has interesting facets but she looks forward to working on the smaller scale, as she was able to do at the 2017 Young Architects Prize entry where she and Jasper Spigt won a third prize with [Natuurlijk Welkom], the design for a visitor center for the Dutch Forestry Commission. She is looking forward to being able to work on transformation projects, housing developments, or in other words more small-scale and personal projects. But first, her ambition is to become a project architect, to oversee and manage the whole construction project, and thus have more control over the transformation from idea to realization.
When asked if INSIDE prepared her for her current position, she does not immediately answer yes. She looks back with pleasure on the topics of the Studios at INSIDE, such as integrating Flows or designing with bacteria, all of which were very relevant. She also found the context of INSIDE, the small but very diverse international group of students, the personal responsibility for the design of your study and studio space, the relaxed informal relationship with the tutors and the experimental character of the Studios, inspiring. But in practice she is mainly confronted with working methods that her current employer has developed in its decades of existence and to which they stick. There is little room for a different approach. Initially she tried to apply the methods that INSIDE uses, but there was little interest. Especially Flows' approach is difficult to implement. There is certainly interest in sustainability, but in a different way. Whether that should be a reason for INSIDE to adapt the curriculum to this design practice she does not believe. The bureaus she has met all had their own self-developed and ingrained way of working. The freedom at INSIDE was challenging but confusing at the same time. How much of my study could I really put together myself, and how could I deal with the different design cultures? That required a lot of energy, which is what broke Camilla up in her graduation year in particular. She had great difficulty getting a grip on her research and design process and looks back on it as a real struggle. In her eyes, that year had too little structure and the program offered too little other input to enrich her knowledge and sharpen her thinking. So her advice is to provide more structure within the program for those who need it and give freedom to those who can do without. And to offer more program in the graduation year such as workshops and lectures. To "let go of the responsibility for your own research for a while and get acquainted with the possibilities after the academy. Get your orientation on the Dutch design field, for example, so that you are better prepared for the time after the study." In short: "offer everything that can make creativity spark".

The skills she obtained in her bachelor education mainly prepared Camilla practically for her later professional practice. INSIDE however did make her aware of particular approaches and multiple perspectives in spatial design. The program offered her an experimental approach to interior architecture that was very new and at the same time very specific in its creative thinking. Camilla suggests INSIDE to try to combine the different design cultures in the studios, to let alternative and classical approaches to architecture reinforce each other, for example. But it is very clear what INSIDE wants and does: the balance is good, the diversity is good, the subjects are good. Change is only recommended by Camilla if INSIDE would like to transform its identity, but why would you do that?

Aušra Česnauskytė (graduated in 2020) grew up in Lithuania where she completed a bachelor of architecture at Vilnius Technical University. She experienced that education as extremely technical and describes it as: "technical-basic-render-presentation-based portfolio". After graduation, she was able to work at architectural firms but she felt disconnected from the specific interpretation of the architectural profession she met within them. She wanted to find new ways to discover her personal position as a designer in the built environment, she wanted to experiment and came to INSIDE.

INSIDE was an excellent match for her ambition to experiment because of its availability of "digested knowledge of different spatial design approaches." She really appreciated the setup of the first year, with 3 different approaches to spatial design and meeting the professionals behind them. One studio a little more than the other, but nevertheless she still sees the value of confronting the three different design cultures. "If I had to organize all those experiences myself, it would have cost me a lot more time. At INSIDE, I was compactly offered it". She certainly wouldn't change anything about that format, but she does see room for improvement in the workshops. She looks back with most pleasure on the workshops where practical skills were offered. She also experienced travel as an important program, not only because of the places she visited. But certainly also for traveling together and the positive effect that had on the sense of community between the students. But according to Aušra, it is always good to be open to change, "because the same good things of today might not stay good for a long time."

In 2020, Aušra graduated from INSIDE with a project that she is using to stimulate "The emergence of a new society in reply to overdesigned sterile city landscapes." In this project she initiated a new 'urban tribe' of what she called 'Hello everyone people', for which she designed an organizational structure aswell as unique uniforms. One of the ways she presented the project in was a childrens book. After her graduation she stayed in The Hague because she saw better possibilities there to survive financially and at the same time to stay in touch with her friends and network. For her income she works in a bakery, which she also sees as a research place. She likes to observe this specific environment and its users.

Despite her positive experiences during her studies, Aušra felt somewhat lost after graduation. She had found a good direction for her work and wanted to continue with her graduation project. She was eager to work with others on "strategy based urban design approaches" but discovered that for the 'real world' challenges she encountered, she lacked the knowledge and skills. "During my studies, I had written a lot about my position, but those texts were often experimental and modest and, after the study, didn't seem to work for the applications I was doing with them. I felt knowledgeless about how to make those kinds of grant applications and project proposals and gathered people around me who had experience with that and incorporated their experiences into my descriptions." This led to the inevitable disappointment of rejections but Aušra also had success. She is now working with another Lithuanian alumna of INSIDE on a project in Vilnius and London. "We were asked to write a proposal for the Architecture Fund in Lithuania. We merged some principles from our graduate projects and proposed a 'Future Walk': an urban event to read the future city through speculative scenarios while walking through the current city." They chose 'neglected neigborhoods' in Lithuania for these walks in order to make equality and potentialities visible to the participants of the walks. The project was embraced by the organization and has already led to an online community where thoughts and observations are exchanged. Moreover, the organization introduced the project at the London Architecture Festival where they will also organize a future walk. Aušra herself is modest about this positive development. She thinks she mainly owes it to the "scale" of Lithuania and the fact that the speculative approach in thinking about the built environment was still unknown there.

Aušra reiterates that she would have liked to have known more about life after the study during the study. She had no knowledge about the "dirty reality of professional life," no knowledge about the necessary time investment and dealing with disappointments. "So I lacked the mental preparation for professional post master life." She advises INSIDE to get serious about that: "explain how things work by someone who has experience," she recommends, "that doesn't have to be much but make students aware of how you can build your carriers." And then not only the success stories, but especially the basics. During the conversation she names that as workshops in "future practice skills" that are best programmed after the thesis completion in the second half of the graduation year.

Despite this missed mental preparation, she feels that INSIDE has given her a great solid start for her professional life. But that start is still not stable. How long can she continue to combine working in the bakery with starting her own practice? Then again, stability may be a lot to ask for within a year of graduating. As a former 'lost architect', the programme has worked perfectly to find out what else is possible in spatial design. And lost architects are exactly the category of students she would recommend INSIDE to. "If you already know what you want and you are mostly waiting for digested knowledge to be brought to you, this is not the right course. This course is for people who want to explore, to go wider rather than narrowing things down." And the current format of INSIDE makes that quite possible with a first year with lots of meetings with representatives of diverse design cultures and a second year with the opportunity to go in depth with your chosen approach. She would not name the summer between that first and second year as a vacation but as a necessary "time of productive relaxation."

Jack Bardwell (graduated 2019) grew up and studied in London. He did a bachelor in design with a specialisation in graphic design. Before coming to INSIDE, he worked for several years mainly on exhibitiondesign projects. He now profiles himself as a designer and artist working across the disciplines of graphic design, installation and spatial change. (https://jackbardwell.com)

After graduation, Jack participated in the raumlaborberlin project 'Creative Urban Living' in Milton Keynes, England. In collaboration with 'no purpose', a collective of INSIDE alumni from 2015-2019, he participated in an open call after which they were invited by the city council. For a two-week period, they created a mobile radio station that was essentially a combination of his graduation project and that of Daniele Valentino, a fellow student. The mobile radio station is a research method for getting in close contact with the community. "That was the first project I did outside of INSIDE." Furthermore he is also doing things that are mostly education-related and "organisational stuff like creating frameworks for other people to work within or create", but less about making a spatial intervention with its own identity and presence.

A driving force behind his projects after the academy is radio, one of the tools he developed for his graduation project to create a place as a "medium for other people to speak". In his research, he observed an urgent need among students to exchange views on the growing criticism of the culture of the institution. Especially in times of corona, when everyone had to keep a distance from each other, radio proved very suitable for this. His 'Mushroom Radio' is still being used at the KABK and also earned him an invitation to a workshop at the Design Academy Eindhoven and an invitation from the Future Architecture Platform to Croatia. In addition, he hosts a weekly radio programme for Pension Almonde, a project by INSIDE practice tutor Erik Jutten in Rotterdam, and in the summer of 2021 he will take part in 'The Waterschool' by Studio Makkink&Bey as part of the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale. Jack says he started with radio "out of restrictions, but meanwhile it has proven its value as a community creating tool".

But what is the relationship of radio to spatial change? First of all, for Jack it is "a tool for understanding how space is used." He started using radio because during his studies he "also questioned the visual representation of architecture. That it is always represented through drawings or through imagery. Especially on platforms like Instagram there is very much a focus on how buildings look, icons of buildings." In contrast, he says, INSIDE's approach is not to look at architecture as an image, but to look at the social and cultural implications of architecture and space. "Audio platform and recording is about how people are living and using the space. And by focussing purely on audio in that way, you can capture the atmosphere and how people are using the space before you think about the aesthetics of how things look. It tells a different story when you can't see it." His project in Milton Keynes, too, may have been a mobile radio station, but at the same time it was very much about the built environment. "We created a spatial intervention that was mobile and that was also about aesthetics. It caught a lot of attention and broke down barriers for people to open up to us and tell their stories". In this way, they collected a lot of stories, opinions and proposals for changing the city. And what was the output? The project did not end with designs for the city by 'no purpose'. Nevertheless, there was a lot of output that can play a role in a future spatial change of the city. First of all there was the performative act with the mobile radio in the city with which they realised intense moments of reflection with residents. The recordings of these moments were broadcasted on a local radio station. In addition, there was also a final parade through the city where the collected ideas were carried and also processed into a future model by other participants in the festival. The project in Milton Keynes consisted a lot of communicating and archiving and mainly caused awareness by "creating a space to imagine things being different to the dominant narratives." Within this, the radio worked as a tool to initiate continuous change, but not to take control of how these proposals would eventually be transformed spatially.

What role has INSIDE played in shaping his approach? Jack says that "the attitude of going and acting and seeing what the reactions are from that process, and not being shy to go out and try things, is something I got from INSIDE". It is about working with first-hand information and realising that the action of gathering that information, the research tool, is part of the process, as an event for example. His projects research and activate at the same time, they are a tool to gather knowledge and to influence how people perceive their living environment. The spatial design lies in the event, like the design of the mobile installation in Milton Keynes for example. When he used the radio at the KABK, he could build on the fact that he himself was part of that context, but in Milton Keynes he was a stranger and could not pretend to be part of the community. The designed installation created a new place in that context for new relationships.

Jack cannot say whether INSIDE prepared him for his current position. According to him, this is not possible because it would imply that the position was known and the necessary skills for it would have been predictable. Rather, Jack sees it as INSIDE having put him on the path to this position. He appreciates that INSIDE opens the way to different positions in designing space but still sees room for improvement. For example, he was already more aware than his fellow students in his year group of the position he was aiming for within the bandwidth INSIDE opens up. As a result, part of the programme from the first year was of limited relevance to him. He found it regularly too assignment-oriented and too little open to other perspectives on the core situations. He would have preferred a more open studio situation. A specific tutor who introduces her or his design vision as a starting point, but subsequently opens a context in which the students can develop their own views. The tutor then reflects on this from his or her own vision of the built environment. INSIDE could also more explicitly open the way to information, discourses and communities that represent different positions on the bandwidth. All these positions do not have to be hard-wired into the programme, but encounters with them can be organised in the form of lectures and workshops. Jack emphasises that this is a possible improvement because he found the meetings and the information he experienced at INSIDE good and interesting. He was particularly impatient to get fully started in his preferred direction. Besides his wish for a more open programme, he also appreciated the super-concrete workshops: "specific skills you get to know for some days, and then you can decide on the applicability", and the travel programme: "meeting people in different contexts doing similar things", which he enjoyed very much.

He did not always find it easy to work with fellow students who had very different ideas about working on the built environment. It became a learning experience for him because he often missed active engagement in his peer group, which led him to look for like-minded people within the KABK for his graduation project. The sociocratic organisation model that studio practice tutor Erik Jutten introduces every year was an eye-opener for Jack. He discovered a tool for setting up fruitful collaborations with people who think in a completely different way. However, Jack does not want to advise eliminating those differences in the student group by striving for a more unified group. Differences in culture, gender, age and portfolio are good, but that variety "needs to feed into the culture you are trying to create within INSIDE." Jack recommends recruiting new students based on the specific views of INSIDE and testing the potential students on these. Less selecting on the basis of similar portfolios, and more looking at what lies beneath the surface of their work, such as criticality and the ability for self-expression. "If that is strong, it can be looked for in a variety of disciplines." And Jack recommends involving current students in the selection process, because he thinks they are better able to recognise precisely those qualities.

Finally, Jack has no specific recommendations for INSIDE, but he shares his thoughts. He thinks the way INSIDE presents itself on Instagram is not very exciting. He recommends becoming more active on social media because those are the places where students orient themselves. "Then I think you would attract more people that are engaged in the things you want people to be engaged in." He does not support the division of positions within the bandwidth into separate programmes; creating more choice in the programme and better guidance to specific information suffices. Despite the fact that his work, especially with radio, seems far removed from the classical architectural profession, he is happy with architecture in the master's degree title. In addition to all the aforementioned activities, he is also working with a group of designers he worked with before INSIDE. Under the name 'Everyday Fictions', they are participating in open calls for spatial design projects and exhibition design. A master's degree in interior architecture certainly comes in handy then.

Yu-Chin Ku graduated from INSIDE in 2018 with a project in Zhongxin Village, a run-down covered market in Taiwan, for which she designed a strategy that aimed to strengthen the community by renewing the market at the same time. Currently she lives in Dresden, Germany. She herself does not see this as isolation because she can travel back and forth to Taiwan for her projects and moreover, when the pandemic allows, she still wants to visit many places in Europe.

Before Yu-Chin came to INSIDE she did a bachelor in industrial design with a specialization in interior design and furniture. The course was at a technical university and in the program the emphasis was on drawing skills both technical and hand sketching. Extremely useful basic skills that she did not, however, want to apply in the conventional way and in the commercial and retail-oriented places that the course focused on. She was looking for an education where her skills were respected but where she would have the opportunity to build more value with them. And not value in the sense of money, but with an emphasis on respect for the environment and sustainability. In her education, the main focus was on the aesthetics of the space that had to be achieved regardless of the loss of materials. "I felt there was something missing at that time and I wanted to contribute my skills to that." What she was looking for she eventually found at INSIDE, though not until the very end of her studies, a few weeks before graduation. As she searched for openness and increasing her flexibility, she didn't dare give up her foothold. Only when shortly before graduation someone described her work as a spatial curatorial practice did the penny drop. This gave her more confidence and allowed her to really become part of her project herself.

After graduation, Yu-Chin fully committed to exploring that curatorial position further. She was hired by raumlaborberlin whom she had also met as a teacher at INSIDE. There, by chance, a project in Taiwan came up that she could play a role in. She left for Berlin to work as a freelance artistic designer on the project Theatre of Flows. The project focused on 3 Flows in the Taiwanese context that all had a relationship with water: oyster/farming, ponds and irrigation, fishing and ocean waste. She had become familiar with that Flows approach at INSIDE. Her main task in the project was communication and organization. Her organizational skills reached a professional level because, among other things, she had to translate the principles of this artistic research project into language that would be readable for bureaucrats and position the project's wishes amidst legal requirements. She organized the research and the presentations, brought the people of raumlaborberlin together with local craftsmen, she did the visualizations and was especially surprised by the richness of working together with representatives of other disciplines such as a choreographer and photographer.

Meanwhile, she initiates spatial research projects herself. She writes project plans, looks for funding and then her work consists of: curation, spatial design, setting parameters, setting the program the interactive sessions, managing the team... and illustration. When she introduces herself she calls herself independent curator, research designer and illustrator. The word 'space' no longer appears in her description, as that would only create the wrong expectations of spatial design. But the built environment is still central to her work, which she describes as "raising awareness about spatial issues that I see as critical" or "creating participatory awareness connected to the built environment," as in the project on human interaction with the river that she is currently preparing. She derives her professional identity not from the profession she has learned but from the issues she is concerned with, which she summarizes as "taking care of the living environment". INSIDE was the start of this journey and she does not yet know exactly where that journey will take her next.

When asked if INSIDE has prepared her for her current professional position, she answers unreservedly yes. She defines this preparation in 5 points: 1-Writing Skills and training - at INSIDE she has considerably improved her ability to develop a well-structured, readable and understandable argument. In presentations, applications and reports she notices that she benefits greatly from this. 2-The interpretation of 'space' - coming from a course with conventional views on what 'space' is, the diversity of ways in which space was interpreted at INSIDE was an absolute eye-opener for her. For example, the question, "how can the outdoor become a space of belonging?" gave her a lot of space for imagination. 3-The anti-capitalist, anti-popular-system mentality-she certainly wouldn't call INSIDE a political education but it did teach her to see "the political" in the design of the built environment. "INSIDE helped with the formulation of thoughts and proposals that address critical subjects, for mental health in a capitalist society, how we treat a river, how is it more than just a stream sewage...". 4- Undefined profession - opening up the profession of interior architect, the flexibility to see not the limitations of the fields 'art' or 'illustrator', or researcher' or 'curator', but rather the crossovers between them. 5-And finally, the networks of colleagues she was able to start at INSIDE and which continue to grow.

She also has recommendations for improving INSIDE. First of all, INSIDE's studio space, which she has found to be less than ideal. Much too sterile, light and characterless with also poor ventilation. She also recommends setting up more cross disciplinary projects. To give students the opportunity to work together with other (master) disciplines. Not to come to joint products, but to learn from each other's ways of analysis and to develop projects from there. She has had good experiences working with a choreographer but now works for example with weather experts and river managers and finds that fascinating and instructive as well. Finally, looking back, she can well imagine that more knowledge and information about the professional challenges after the study could be relevant in the program. Knowledge, for example, about the financial aspects of projects in which she has now gained much experience. We agree that Yu-Chin will give a workshop to the next generation of graduates about financing in a new program to be started with the working title 'Alumni Skills'.