Last year, the Interaction Project “yourPark” by Jared Fiedler, Hakan Selek, and Marius Meyer from the third semester of Media Design won gold at the ADC Talent Award in Hamburg and bronze at the ADC Europe in Barcelona. The project has now been presented to an academic audience at the Cumulus Conference in Nantes. After being selected through a double-blind process, supervisor Prof. Mathias Hassenstein and the three students traveled to France, where they presented “yourPark” in a scientific poster session to an international expert audience, thus making a valuable contribution to positioning design as a research-oriented, ethically responsible discipline.
The Cumulus Conference sees itself as the central international network for universities in the fields of design, art, and media. With this year’s conference theme, “Ethical Leadership – A New Frontier for Design,” it highlights design concepts that go beyond mere aesthetics to include social responsibility, research depth, and ethical effectiveness.
In this context, the project “yourPark” fits in excellently. It is particularly noteworthy that the students succeeded in moving designing away from subjective positions towards a research-oriented, socially relevant design practice—an approach that is both practiced and taught here in Ravensburg.
The impetus for this work in the area of “speculative design” originally came from the Bürgerforum Altstadt Ravensburg: “What if the Rutenfest parking lot were transformed into a park?” This concrete yet challenging task did not receive much enthusiasm in Ravensburg, given the current park development plans and loyalty to the Rutenfest, but it attracted much more international attention. The concept of an interactive park design with citizen participation can be applied to various cities and has the potential—with its focus on current issues like democracy and sustainability—to be implemented internationally.
