Unfolding Spaces

The Design Department has been cooperating successfully with the National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT) in Taiwan for a long time, both in research and through regular study and research visits by students, staff and professors. The next step is to develop and test joint courses that will consolidate the partnership.

In the project "Unfolding Spaces", an English-language online course will be developed together. The development of the methodological-didactic teaching concept for this virtual and intercultural course is based on the findings of a course "Social Design in Public Spaces" that was already conducted jointly in winter semester 2020/21.

The planned course "Unfolding Spaces" addresses central challenges for the design of public spaces in Europe and Southeast Asia. In an intercultural comparison, conflicting goals such as competition for space, new concepts for spaces for the general public, ecological issues such as heat stress and noise, freedom and security, as well as design solutions and interventions for linking virtual and physical spaces will be developed. To this end, student teams in Potsdam and Taipei will explore public spaces in their respective urban contexts, share experiences, derive problem areas and challenges, and develop prototype solutions in the field of tension between global developments and local impacts. "Social Design" will be critically scrutinised both as a phenomenon that has experienced a real boom in the second decade of the 21st century and as a powerful inventory of methods to be applied in the design process "for society and with society". The course is aimed at students of all design degree programmes and, in its transdisciplinary perspective, combines urban geography, urban sociology and urban planning approaches with design potentials for sustainable infrastructures, urban logistics, urban engineering and street furniture.

Furthermore, this course is to be offered continuously, anchored in the curriculum, scalable in terms of content and as attractively transferable as possible for international cooperation in artistic-research and design study programmes.