POST Design Festival 2019

The Rodina (Tereza and Vit Ruller) is a post-critical design studio with an experimental practice drenched in strategies of performance art, play and subversion. Both in commissioned work and in autonomous practice, they activate and re-imagine a dazzling range of layered meanings across, below and beyond the surface of design. The Rodina invents ways in which experience, knowledge and relations are produced and preserved. The interests for social issues are intertwined with the development of design as a ‘space’ for new imaginaries.

Dinamo is a Swiss type design practice offering retail and bespoke typefaces, design software, research and consultancy. Dinamo has spaces in Basel & Berlin, and satellite members in several locations more. They’ve recently published three self-initiated projects using variable font technology: DinamoDarkRoom.com, DinamoPipeline.com and the Whyte typeface family. Johannes Breyer and Fabian Harb are members of the AGI (Alliance Graphic Internationale).

Elham Namvar is a Persian, Swiss-educated, UAE-based designer and researcher. Departing from practice in editorial, visual identity and experiential design, her work now employs a multi-disciplinary approach between design, research and critical thinking. Currently, her exploration involves inquiring methodologies of archiving and taxonomies of knowledge. She holds an MDes / MAS in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois Chicago, and The Basel School of Design.

Amy Suo Wu was born in China, grew up in Australia, and lives in The Netherlands as an artist and teacher. Her practice is an exploration into how to amplify, preserve and (re)activate obscured histories in critical and playful ways. Her ongoing research, Tactics and Poetics of Invisibility, revives the use of the obsolete, low-tech and analogue steganography. Its purpose is to subvert digital surveillance, bypass censorship and provide visibility to the struggles of minorities and other marginalised cultures. Through workshops, lectures, exhibitions and publications the project also aims to inspire communities to develop their own poetic and playful forms of communication as a way of nurturing social bonds.

Johanna Burai is an artist and multidisciplinary designer based between Stockholm and London. She mainly works in the cultural field of art and music, creating designs and art direction for commercial and self-initiated projects. Her design approach is to use norm creativity – to make visible and question political structures and norms within our society and within the visual communication field. She graduated with a BFA in Visual Communication from Beckmans College of Design in 2015 and are currently working full time with her own practice.

Anna Haifisch was born in 1986 in Leipzig / Germany. She studied at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig and worked as a screenprinter for Kayrock Screenprinting in Brooklyn. In 2013 she co-founded the Comics and Graphics Festival 'The Millionaires Club‘. She drew the weekly comic ‚The Artist' for Vice.com. Her books are published in English by Drawn and Quarterly (CAN), Breakdown Press (UK) and Perfectly Acceptable Press (US). Anna lives in Leipzig and loves print making and drawing comic books.

Fraser Muggeridge is a graphic designer based in London. Throughout a wide range of formats, from artists’ books and exhibition catalogues to posters, marketing material, exhibitions and websites, the studio prioritises artists’ and writers’ content over the imposition of a signature style. By allowing images and texts to sustain their own intent and impact, each project is approached with typographic form and letterform playing a key role in arriving at a sympathetic yet alluring object. Fraser Muggeridge founded and is a tutor at Typography Summer School, a week-long programme of typographic study for recent graduates and professionals, held in London (since 2010) and New York (since 2013). He is a visiting lecturer at The University of Reading (since 2003) on the MA Book Design Course and Camberwell College of Art, London, 2nd Year of BA Graphic Design (since 2011).

Hackers & Designers is a non-profit Amsterdam-based initiative developing hands-on activities with an emphasis on technology design, and cross-disciplinary exchange. H&D operates as a collective with a flat hierarchy and working structure. By means of hands-on workshops, H&D promotes and stimulates self-initiation and strategies of critical making to enable socio-technological literacy within design and developer’s practices. By creating shared moments of learning and unlearning, H&D invites makers and users to discuss topics related to ubiquitous computing, disappearance of interfaces, transhumanism, digitized bodies, biometric data, and the agency of users and citizens.

Alexis Mark is the shared pseudonym of Marie Grønkær, Kristoffer Li & Martin Bek, and an office for graphic design and research located in Copenhagen, Denmark. Their work ranges from commissioned graphic design assignments, branding and identities, through self-organised autonomous projects, to design-education, exhibition-making and curating. Additionally, Alexis Mark is the founder and organizer of the exhibition– and project space Annual Reportt.

Many representatives across the publishing fields describe the present editions of e-books as poorly designed and not fully exploring the new media potential. In 2015, The Reading School was initiated to encouraging a new experimental way of communication. Reading in our part of the world is often associated with the book as one unit, however in our investigation we’re focusing on new upcoming technology, in order to find different ways of mediate and re-mediate content. The Reading School is a social platform to create workshops and talks, inviting participants and experts from different disciplines to challenge the conventions of reading. We have had several get-together sessions that explore reading together with the use of different tools or carriers. This time the Reading School is collaborating with Elham Namvar (IR/UAE) and Pouya Ahmadi (IR/US/CH). The Reading School is an initiative by Hanna Bergman (DK, SE)