Re:Place – A design expedition into unknown territories right before your nose.

(Gemischtsprachiges Projekt, daher nur englische Beschreibung.)

> “The map is not the territory.”
-- Korzybski

A half-remembered school yard, or a leafy glade half covered in sunlight may have deep significance to us and trigger related thoughts and emotions. A place can also be a state of mind. Everybody will have their own places that are special, hidden or maybe even secret. We leave our footprints in places as well as places leave their marks and traces in both our individual and collective memories.

Obviously, the world around us is way too rich to fit on a stupid map. Sure, augmenting our navigation skills is quite nice. But far beyond mere geo-coordinates and locations, *places* have strong emotional and cognitive ties to our past, present and future. Just how should we best capture the essence of places, how might we share their essentials and stories with others?

Re:Place will take you on a field expedition around Berlin that will get you to experience and document places in novel ways. You will discover how to use technology to capture some essential spirit of places as data – data that needs to be examined, played with, designed, and shaped in order to make sense and create meaning. We will explore all kinds of aesthetic means to use and present this data in compelling ways, far beyond maps. On this basis you will develop narratives that convey essential qualities of place. And you are going to turn them into convincing concepts for place-based products and services.

We are planning to accompany the project by a lecture series that shall shed a light on the qualities of places and their relationship with human memory and storytelling.