Swiss Innovation – Collaboration with KIT & HdM

The explosion of social media in the past decade has reshaped how we perceive and interact with spaces and architecture. With this new wave, comes new experiences, new thoughts and new ideas. The art of story-telling is central to the field of architecture – on the cusp of this next age, how may we embrace these fresh perspectives to inform how we think about architecture?

Taking place in Basel, Switzerland, the Instagram Innovation Workshop was an international collaboration between Herzog & de Meuron of Pritzker Prize fame, Kyoto Design Lab of the Kyoto Institute of Technology, and ASD@SUTD. Experimental and experiential in nature, the workshop brought together participants across different year groups in SUTD and sought to develop thinking at the boundary between design and technology through the lens of architecture and social media.

Examining critically social media’s role in our modern perception spaces and how different ways of capturing and story-telling may be explored, participants were challenged to seek, create and share new perspectives.

This was accomplished via an exciting programme that had as its major highlight, a series of behind-the-scenes visits to notable architecture projects accomplished by Herzog & de Meuron. Hosted by members of the design team for the project and facilitated by the clients/operators of these spaces, the visits gave participants valuable insight into the processes, flow of thought behind the projects, and their eventual manifestation. These insights allowed students to build upon ideas developed during a pre-trip research and idea exchange phase, setting them off on a work development process over a series of after-hours work sessions. The workshop cumulated in a final exchange in the offices of Herzog & de Meuron, where participants presented their explorations over the course of the workshop, and Herzog & de Meuron shared too their own efforts in the collection and curation of architectural and design intelligence in the Kabinett.

Exploration with the students can open avenue for confirming how:

Written by: Kendrick Tay