International Workshop on Design – DJAD Designer Assemble 2025
DJAD is honored to host the International Workshop on Design – DJAD Designer Assemble 2025, bringing together global design experts to explore innovative ideas, hands-on learning, and creative collaborations.
Workshop Highlights
1. Making Meaning – Stimulating Human Senses Versus Artificial Experiences
In today´s increasingly digitalized and busy world, attention is a scarce resource. Humans adapt to, cope with, interpret, but also ignore stimuli that are often perceived as intrusive or disruptive. Let´s call them artificial experiences. Many artifacts that surround us are blunt attention seekers by design. Actual meaningful messages are getting drowned by the deafening noise of things we don’t need, nor care about.
This workshop takes inspiration from the “Little Signals” project by Google that envisioned artifacts for a subtle form of interactions.
We will explore and experiment with possibilities of mediating information in tangible ways that are inspired by human patterns of perception and interactions. We will imagine new ways to interact with technology in a meaningful way. Over the course of the workshop, various aspects of design research and methods will be used to observe, envision, prototype,
evaluate and build a series of small-scale artefacts to imagine interactions based on human senses, understandings and needs. We will use playful prototyping techniques to bring low-fidelity mock-ups to life through form, sound and video.
Facilitator: Magnus Feil is a faculty member of the Industrial Design program at the FH JOANNEUM—University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is both an experienced design creator, and an educator who teaches courses in product-, interaction-, and sustainable design on an international level. His trans-disciplinary work and research interests are focused on the critical examination, design, and development of product systems to facilitate more meaningful interactions between our environment, people and technology. Specifically, his work is focused on the development of sustainable solution in support of circular economies, design for social good, storytelling, design for tangible interactions, and the re-envisioning of design education.
2. Making Objects – Lighting Design & Industrial Design Prototyping
Mark’s workshop offers a comprehensive journey through the design and production of a batch-produced domestic floor lamp. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll dive into every stage of the design process, from initial research and defining objectives to concept development, full-size mock-ups, and a functional prototype. Working with only the tools and materials available at the academy, you’ll start by sketching ideas and building scale models, gradually refining your design. By the end, you’ll have created a full-scale prototype that demonstrates your concept in action.
This workshop goes beyond traditional classroom learning by immersing you in real-world design challenges. The focus on batch production will help you understand the realities of designing products that can be manufactured affordably and sustainably, emphasizing the importance of material choices, structural integrity, and stability.
Additionally, the workshop encourages critical thinking and problem-solving as you consider factors like light quality, environmental impact, and user experience. Through the creation of your prototype, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of design principles, sustainable practices, and the technical aspects of production. This is a hands-on chance to solve real-world design challenges, ending with a final presentation and review.
Facilitator: Mark Bond with more than 30 years of product design and development experience, Mark crafts sustainable, well-thought-out solutions that successfully combine excellent design and sound business practices. In addition to conducting his own design consultancy for clients like Hermès and The Design Museum in London, he has supervised design teams and collaborated with multinational corporations like Tesco and IKEA. Mark now concentrates on producing high-quality, environmentally friendly lighting and furnishings as the founder of hemtools, his most recent business. In addition to his main profession, he has published books, organized exhibitions, predicted trends, given advice on the development of retail collections, and done a great deal of design work, constantly aiming to use design to change the world.
3. Making Stories – Acoustics Typo-Topographies - Transforming urban sounds into captivating typographic installations.
Inspired by literary works that delve into the poetic and philosophical essence of cities, this workshop reimagines urban spaces as layered, living entities—intertwining physical structures with emotional narratives. Participants record city sounds, map their rhythms, and translate them into typographic expressions through their own selection of materials and medium, which offers as much experimentation.
Drawing from literature’s evocative imagery, they create typographic forms and assemble dynamic cityscapes that tell stories of complexity, rhythm, and recollection. By shifting scales and recontextualizing their work, participants explore the relationship between micro and macro
perspectives. The final exhibition invites visitors to explore engaging typographic stories, resonating with the echoes of urban space
Facilitator: Ola Kot is an artist specializing in typography, publishing graphics, and spatial forms. She explores the intricate relationship between typography, architecture, and space, with a particular fascination for the narrative role of typography and its connection with movement. Building upon her experiences, she develops projects that treat the written word as a catalyst for performative activities. Her research focuses on developing methods and discovering tools to create interactive typographic installations. Her creative projects combine typography, space, and narrative, including the neon visual identity for ‚Iluzjon Cinema‘ and the commemorative installation „Keep Them In Our Memory“ at the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
With over a decade of experience as a lecturer, she is an adjunct professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She leads the Typography Studio for full-time studies, the Diploma Graphic Design Studio for first-cycle part-time studies, and co-runs the Diploma Studio of Graphic Design and Visual Communication for second-cycle part-time studies.
4. Making Print – Graphic Design as a Cherry on the Metaphor
Words do not only say what they are supposed to say, it is what makes a language rich. Proverbs and ancient legends are the origin of many colorful expressions. They are sometimes incomprehensible to those who, for geographical, cultural or temporal reasons, have never heard them. Isolated from its context, the metaphor can amuse or surprise. The images provoked by listening to them offer a multitude of individual or collective interpretations.
We will design with pedagogy, humor or boldness, a full-size poster paying tribute to these expressions. By confronting the text with an image (drawing, illustration, photograph, graphic signs, etc.), we will attempt to orient (or disorient) the readers’ imagination and guide them towards the idea sought through the use of a metaphor. We will enrich the words with visual clues, we will play with the text and the context. With the image we will try to reinforce or divert, redirect or confirm the message, while leaving to the metaphor it’s role of pictorial expression
Facilitator: Samuel Roux is a graphic designer, living and working in Orleans, France. Born in 1963, he started graphic design studies in the early 80’s, in a particularly free and creative pre-digital period that was amazing in the fields of music and pictures. Graduating in 1986 from the Orleans Visual Art Institute, Samuel then started working freelance for the cultural and social fields, with in order of preference, poster design and visual identity. For instance, Jazz festival identity, theater programs, rock summer festivals, symphonic orchestra seasons, addiction care, scientific exhibitions, human rights meetings for local and national institutions, associations or movements, Town Councils or Ministries.
Parallel to this activity, Samuel teaches graphic design at the Orléans School of Art and Design, since 2000. He tries to develop critical faculty of the student, the research for ideas, the authenticity for a singular graphic writing, taking special care to the meaning and the ethics which the images can carry.
