NEB ambition

The ultimate ambition of the New European Bauhaus is to achieve transformation. To do this, the NEB Compass has identified specific levels of ambition that outline the desired outcomes for each of the NEB values.

Action areas

These areas refer to the five key domains of intervention that CrAFt's New European Bauhaus Impact Model considers essential for guiding and evaluating complex urban initiatives.

Participation level

The participation level refers to the degree or extent to which individuals or groups are actively involved or engaged in a particular activity, project, or process. It assesses the depth of their involvement, contributions, and commitment, ranging from minimal or passive participation to active and dedicated participation.

NEB values

The New European Bauhaus (NEB) aims to promote the values of sustainability, aesthetics, and inclusion in the design and transformation of urban spaces. It emphasises the integration of environmental, social, and economic considerations to create harmonious and innovative living environments.

Implementation Stage

According to the Smart City Guidance Package, there are seven stages to plan and implement smart city projects. These stages propose a logical and coherent roadmap for city initiatives involving many stakeholders.

Sensing our surroundings: A Think-Do Tank for experiential care practices in our everyday spaces

As CrAFt’s last Core Group of Students, we were thrown into a sea of knowledge that had been accumulated by the previous three core groups. Among them, a Think-Do Tank event in Milan became ours to execute, which we took over mid-planning. Incidentally, the intensity of this process influenced us to choose a different approach than previous editions of the TDT, and navigate towards the act of slowing down and sensing one's surroundings.

Takeaways:

  • Embracing the unknown: Positive uncertainty, as the backbone of student-driven collaborations for future developments, should not be ignored.
  • Educational models: Relying on observational knowledge as much as on theoretical systemic information can be a valuable foundation for future educational models.
  • Group activities: Engaging in interactive group activities can foster the exploration of a plurality of experiential practices.

The Core Group, as we call it, consists of 6-8 students from universities located in Trondheim, Bologna and Amsterdam and is a part of the three-year pilot project “CrAFt – Creating Actionable Futures”. Our current group is the fourth and final iteration. Our main role is to propose student-driven participatory models and set up mechanisms for CrAFt and similar initiatives to engage with other students. One of these models, is the “Think-Do Tank”, a concept that has gradually been developed by previous groups:

“A Think-Do Tank (TDT) event is a collaborative and interdisciplinary event led by the CrAFt Core Group of students in collaboration with project partners and external stakeholders. The main goal of a TDT is to iterate between doing (creating, intervening, taking action, piloting, etc.) and thinking (envisioning, theorising, and rationalising).”

The one-day Think-Do Tank ‘Sensing our Surroundings’ was planned to facilitate discussions, workshops, and collaborative activities centred around ‘experiential beauty’. We aimed to empower students to voice their ideas, think critically, and engage in interdisciplinary collaborations. The event was open to all, our main target audience being students from diverse academic backgrounds.

The majority of participants were enrolled in local universities but came from a variety of geographic backgrounds. The event also included students from Ukraine, who were in Milano for the ELIA Biennial Conference that was held on the campus of NABA Academy of Fine Arts, for which our TDT acted as a fringe event.

We introduced Experiential Beauty’, as an artistic tool, to create collaborative grounds for the event in Milan. In our understanding, ‘Experiential Beauty’ is a concept linked to “quality of experience and style beyond functionality”.  It encourages a potential change in attitude towards our environment and certain types of aesthetics, focusing instead on our sensory connections to our surroundings. As our common senses trigger these feelings, the environment of the TDT becomes informal and inviting.

An escape from the icy drizzle outside its walls. We wanted to spark a discourse between all participants on care practices through experiential commonalities within our everyday environments and ecologies and to challenge participants to take care, engage with their surroundings, and become aware of the ecology they are part of. 

Inspired by the methodologies of walking, the TDT Milan was based on an evolving structure of accumulating exercises that build up a narrative of understanding one’s surroundings:

“Walking and looking – I’m less frightened when I’m in motion. Somehow that helps me absorb what’s there and gives me a better chance of joining it: intelligently, respectfully and yet with adequate strength.”  Jenny Holzer – an artist using narratives including public dimensions 

We began with an exercise in slowing down and focusing purely on one’s non-visual senses. After activating their senses beyond visual and auditory perception, the participants were sent out on a walk, just as the skies dried, equipped with prompt cards to inspire new ways of reading their environment. This was done without specifying any final output or outcome.

More so, the walk was unguided, instead, we let participants guide themselves based on whims and gut feeling, asking the city to lead them to its obstacles instead of navigating around them and stopping to take it in rather than glance over it.

Afterwards, we guided them through five steps of reflecting, internally and within the group, finding common feelings and findings. No matter how grey this November day proved to be, there was a warm feeling within the space as we shared the outcomes and started approaching common ground.

By intentionally not giving the participants all instructions at once, we were hoping to see what reflections might come out of an unbiased perspective, as opposed to one already looking for solutions to a specific problem. Whilst this was a clear choice for us, the students were looking for direction from the very beginning. This was observed during the day itself, and also reflected in the anonymous Mentimeter towards the end:

“I would appreciate more articulated instructions or expectations, I felt floating among the possibilities.” (Anonymous)

As students, hosting a workshop in Milan for student participants has brought us to realise certain relational aspects of education and the professional environment. The educational sphere that we are in, seems to be sheltered against the current realities of our everyday life at times.

The open-ended nature we decided to follow to understand ‘experiential beauty’ during the TDT in Milan, has brought the often overseen preparatory aspect of current Western education to light, as it shapes us to expect a goal-oriented, one-directional attitude. Considering the challenges of climate change this attitude seems rather unfit to manoeuvre in uncertainty. It is surprising to see that an artistic environment has evolved also into this approach.

While fitting for the current professional environment, education prepares students to work in a task- and goal-oriented way, and this is also often expected of them as a continued practice. Whereas tackling topics for more sustainable approaches often requires us to work towards a goal that is not 100% clear, relying on conscious decision-making that is less number-oriented, and more focused on including a broader perspective.

By having the opportunity to dive more and more into the potential to orient ourselves in the up-and-coming discourse, we, as students, believe that this slight change of understanding reality can be extremely valuable. Relying on observational knowledge as much as theoretical systemic information can be a valuable base for our studies, as well as for building our shared future. 

As noted both by all and emphasised by Lorenzo Tripodi and Juan-Pablo Aschner invited as “practising co-participants” for a panel discussion, the beauty of the public space is not in its aesthetics. As an urbanist/artist/activist,  Lorenzo Tripodi is one of the co-founders of the organisation called “Tesserae Urban” social research. He has collaborated in the walking exercise by contributing to navigating the concept of urban experience under the scope of ‘experiential beauty’.

By crossing traditional academic boundaries, Juan-Pablo Aschner Real has been a part of a research project ‘Creative Education in the Global South’, where key questions on pedagogical practices are addressed while motivating interest in indigenous knowledge, and developing frameworks for investigating and preserving traditional artisanal knowledge. He has been an integral part of the discussion at the end of the TDT by sharing his insights in discussion with Lorenzo.

Coming back to defining ‘beauty’, the unknown processes of observational collectives become the centre of discussion during our conversations with Lorenzo and Juan-Pablo. These processes by emphasising commonalities can empower misfit communities. ‘Experiential beauty’ in this regard, can become a tool for creating common grounds for care practices. Or, as expressed by Juan-Pablo Aschner: ‘Playfulness can bring people closer to the reality of situations by proposing reason.’

In conclusion, we have come to realise the potential power of student-driven workshops and collaborations that rely on uncertainty and the want for exploration. A positive understanding of uncertainty and awareness of the unknown in a collective environment, and with the willingness to collaborate across fields and nationalities to explore these unknowns, should be at the core of any student-driven actions. Including, but not limited to, throwing oneself into the middle of an uncertain process, and trusting that whilst the goal is not clear, it is possible.


Written by Ceylan Ergelen and Sara Darle Olsson
Photos by Davide Marchesi (1, 3, 5), Vasil Sharkov (4), Anna Vermenych (2)

A story about…

Location

Protagonists

NEB Values

Participation level

Implementation stage

Story format