Category: Interviews and features

Niusia Winczewski on urban foxes

Niusia Winczewski is a part-time student on Goldsmiths’s MA course in Design and Environment; this September, her project “Fox Diner”, which encourages Londoners to share their scrap food with urban foxes, was exhibited at the Goldsmiths Design MA show “TILT”. Urban foxes are a familiar presence to us, but they also tend to cause controversy. How can we learn to share our space with them? Niusia answered a few questions about her project and her take on the issue: 

Q: How did you arrive to the idea of your Fox Diner project?

A: Having moved to London around 2 years ago, I initially did not believe that there were foxes living here, as it took me a good year to finally spot one. One night, cycling back home, a shadow crossed my path, quickly acknowledged my presence and returned back to his secretive world. Jean-Christophe Bailly’s essay, The Animal Side, describes these chance encounters with wild animals as instances where we touch some part of their world. However centuries of human development and civilization now seems irreversible and have drastically minimized these shared spaces. Back home in South Africa, I have this latent fear of protected nature reserves becoming the last “vestiges of a world about to dissappear” as global policies of infinite growth with finite resources hurtle forward. So in a localized context, the Fox Diner aims to reclaim a communal space for humans and animals to overlap, where instead of discarding food on the ground (as one often sees on the streets of London), passersby can read a menu of food that foxes enjoy eating and share it with them, and in so doing, learn something about another species, and help to sustain it. That is in essence is what sustainability entails: the sustenance of life. Continue reading “Niusia Winczewski on urban foxes”

Svenja Bickert on Design Thinking

Svenja Bickert graduated from the MA in Design Futures in 2012, and this year she is back at Goldsmiths Design as a visiting lecturer on the same course, bringing in the knowledge she acquired on the MA as well as in her professional practice to a new group of students? What was her experience on the course? What is she doing now? Here she is answering those questions (and others) herself, in an interview for the Design blog.

Q: What made you want to come back and teach on the MA in Design Futures?

A: I enjoyed the course when I was here, and I believe in Meta Design and the theory behind it. It’s quite exciting for me to be in the course now with students who are just starting. Because I was on the course myself, I know how they feel and what they may need, and because I graduated so recently, it’s easy to remember how it felt coming to the course and what I was, maybe, missing at that time.

Q: So what is the course about?

A: It’s a Meta Design course, meaning designing design, re-thinking design practice, and it’s also quite a loose framework, though it has specific tools and specific values. The whole course is quite ecologically and ethically-driven, and I really like that you can focus throughout the year on your practice, on how design practice could be different, and on how you could work differently yourself. I think that’s quite original, because normally you learn design and you learn about design being specific, graphic design, product design etc, but this course is about what design could be. I’ve never heard of a different course that put that at the heart of the course.

Q: What was the topic of your dissertation? Continue reading “Svenja Bickert on Design Thinking”