Together with some of our friends and partners we organise hands-on design workshops that allow participants to explore their own creative potential.

Design workshops are a great opportunity to escape from the everyday; to try your hand at new, challenging topics; to learn new skills and techniques; and to meet new, open-minded people.

BAUHAUS live Together with Hidden Fortress and the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, Faces of Design recently organised the BAUHAUS live Workshop in Berlin, a workshop focusing on the Utopian spirit of the Bauhaus movement, hosted by Werner Aisslinger.

The starting point of the workshop was the interdisciplinary vision of the Bauhaus movement. Participants from ten countries and diverse backgrounds spent a week in Berlin, challenging themselves to develop concepts and products that apply the avant-garde thinking of the Bauhaus movement to today´s challenges.

After an introduction by Werner, a guided tour of the Bauhaus Archive and an inspirational talk by furniture manufacturer Wilkhahn´s Head of Communication Burkhard Remmers, the participants got started on their projects, and quickly found common ground: sustainability has almost become a hygiene factor within the design industry, and heavy criticism of today´s consumerism in its various shapes and forms became apparent in many discussions.

Some concepts were strongly led by controversial economic considerations, and an early starting point for discussion was "Forget about the money!", a slogan coined at the very start of the workshop: expressing a concern that all too often, designers are caught up in the immediate desire to pay their bills - and end up producing endless, marginal variations of existing products. Instead, the participants chose to focus on fundamental, almost universal needs.

Nonetheless, Werner and the participants agreed that a modern take on the Bauhaus should not be utopian, defined as promoting an abstract, prescriptive social ideal. Indeed, the participants questioned the right of designers - in fact, anyone - to make such prescriptions. In this, the participants broke with the elitist self-image of the compound, so prevalent in the history of the Bauhaus movement. The modern designer, as represented in the workshop, does not consider himself a messianic figure; instead, he sees himself as a problem solver, applying his creative talents to address concrete issues of our time.

Having chosen their challenges, the participants developed products and concepts to help "build" their vision, to demonstrate how it could be made into reality. This approach in itself expressed a freedom to design anything - from products to services, housing concepts and even business models.

The approach of the Bauhaus movement naturally reflected the manufacturing processes and materials available at the time, just as much as social conditions. The participants´ designs, on the other hand, incorporate modern technologies such as the internet and telecommunications; indeed, some designs will require great further technological innovation. What the workshop illustrated was that the core values of the Bauhaus movement, such as the accessibility of design, interdisciplinarity, its international spirit and the integration of crafts, remain as relevant today as they were at the beginning; however, what has changed is the nature of the issues to be addressed, and the technologies available to tackle them.

all photos: Katja Hiendlmayer