Day After Day

Despite not always being entirely comfortable with the label “designer,” Ronan Bouroullec is undeniably among the most prolific and admired practitioners working today. For more than three decades, his Paris atelier—led with his brother Erwan until 2023—has produced a remarkable series of “singular objects,” often in collaboration with leading design manufacturers such as Alessi, Artek, and Vitra. In a special conversation with journalist Anne Quito, Bouroullec reflects on the arc of his career and explains how his drawing practice has remained a central pillar of his life and work. Vignettes from his latest monograph, Ronan Bouroullec: Day After Day (Phaidon, 2023) will be a highlight of the evening.

Born in Quimper, Brittany, Ronan Bouroullec is a celebrated artist and designer based in Paris. His studio, formerly led with his younger brother Erwan, has collaborated with some of the world’s most prestigious design companies, including Artek, Alessi, Cappellini, Galerie Kreo, Hay, Kartell, Kvadrat, Magis, Mattiazzi, Mutina, and Vitra. Also a prolific artist, his drawings have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Ronan Bouroullec’s studio, founded 30 years ago, is based in Paris and comprises a team of six assistants.

Surveillance art, dying phones, and fake likes

In this engaging talk, Dries Depoorter delves into his world of his art, blending the boundaries between technology and creativity. Attendees will be taken on a journey through Depoorter’s recent and upcoming projects, offering insights into the conceptual and technical processes behind his works. Dries will showcase live demonstrations of his art in the form of giving away likes or followers. This lecture offers a unique opportunity to learn more about the projects that have brought him worldwide recognition.

Belgian creative technologist and artist Dries Depoorter, based in Ghent, creates thought-provoking work about technology, surveillance, AI and social media in a playful way that makes people laugh while delivering serious messages in an accessible way. His projects explore digital culture that can inspire marketers: privacy challenges, artificial intelligence applications, surveillance and authentic social media projects.

With his unique background in electronics and digital innovation, Dries has become a voice for forward-thinking brands and marketing professionals looking to navigate today’s complex digital landscape. His artistic approach can directly inspire brands to think differently and develop original marketing concepts that stand out. Through his work, Dries demonstrates how combining creativity with technological insight creates viral moments.

His award-winning “Die With Me” app, accessible only when a user’s phone battery drops below 5%, demonstrates how scarcity and unique user experiences can create powerful engagement. On Black Friday, he doubles the price of his app instead of offering discounts, showing brands how breaking marketing rules can create attention.

In his viral project “The Follower” Dries leverages open cameras and AI to reveal the reality behind curated Instagram moments—offering marketers an unfiltered look at consumer behavior and content creation.

Meanwhile, ”The Flemish Scrollers” uses AI to automatically identify politicians using smartphones during parliamentary sessions, highlighting how technology can create accountability and transparency in public spaces.

Dries has exhibited at prestigious venues including the Barbican in London, Art Basel, Mutek Festival in Montreal,ZKM, Bozar, WIRED and Ars Electronica.

Cryptic Type Systems

A workshop to hack writing systems for dissident ideologies. In a world where freedom of expression is increasingly at risk, spreading subversive or system-critical ideas is becoming ever more difficult. Throughout history, writing has been one of the most powerful tools for sharing dissident thought — and at its core lies something as fundamental as the alphabet itself.

This workshop invites participants to explore how we might reformulate alphabetic systems into cryptic or coded forms that, beneath a seemingly random or pseudo-chaotic appearance, can still convey messages and meaning.

Participants will experiment with ways of encoding communication — creating new visual, symbolic, or structural systems that disguise yet preserve language, challenging the boundaries between legibility, secrecy, and artistic expression.

Ricard Garcia is a type designer based in Barcelona. In 2015 he received his BA in Graphic Design from the University of Barcelona. Before moving to The Hague to study at Type and Media, he worked at Typerepublic as a type designer. His work is now a balance of type design, lettering & code.

AI Infrastructure
Like other digital technologies, the rise of AI is propped up by the myth that these systems are weightless and abstract. The fantasy of a spotless Cloud floating beyond the physical world conceals the reality: vast stretches of fiber-optic lines, sprawling data centers, and growing energy use. The workshop explores the fact that the Internet driving AI is a mesh of hidden materials and infrastructures, from anonymous city buildings to beaches where buried undersea cables link continents.

Mario Santamaría is a Barcelona-based visual artist who works with a wide range of media, frequently using photography, video, performance, websites, and online interventions.

His recent work seeks to embody protocols and processes of information distribution, performing actions such as physically travelling to his website by repeating the path of data; going for beers around the city as a Google algorithm or creating a tour operator based on the infrastructure of the Internet.

20 Years in Design
Across nonprofit and for profit, startups and scale, on boards and in residence, in print and with AI, as a writer, designer, teacher, and leader — Rob’s career has spanned a wide range of projects at the intersection of design, culture, and technology. This talk will share some recent work from Notion as well as work from Google and MoMA, connected in their uses of strategic inquiry, brand-focused storytelling, and multidisciplinary human-centered design to convey unique stories and experience to global audiences.

Rob Giampietro is a designer based in New York, where he is Head of Creative at Notion, a productivity tool celebrated by Forbes’ “AI 50” list in 2024. Active across worlds of design, art, and technology, Rob has held creative leadership roles at Google (Material Design, Research & Machine Intelligence, Search/Assistant) and MoMA, where he was Director of Design during the museum’s historic 2019 expansion.

Rob taught for over a decade in RISD’s MFA Graphic Design program and has served as VP of AIGA/NY. In 2024, he was a jury chair for AIGA’s 100th Annual 50 Books 50 Covers awards. A graduate of Yale, Rob has had fellowships at MacDowell and the American Academy in Rome, along with recognition from the National Design Awards for his work at Project Projects. Rob has been an Advisor to the Aspen Ideas Festival and is a trustee and board member of the Aperture Foundation.

Notion is the connected workspace that allows teams and individuals to easily share documents, take notes, manage projects, and organize knowledge—all in one place. Users can create and customize beautiful documents, roadmaps, knowledge bases, and more, helping them work smarter and faster.

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Today, we can fabricate anything. Digital fabrication now functions at both the micro and macro scales, combining multiple materials, and using different materialization processes. Complexity and customization are no longer impediments in design. 

While we can fabricate anything, design arguably appears confined by our instruments of design: we can only design what we can directly represent. If one looks at 3D-printed artifacts, there is oftentimes a discrepancy between the wonder of technology, and the conventionalism of design. We appear unable to exploit the new freedom that digital fabrication offers us.  In short: we can currently fabricate more than we can design.

What is needed is a new type of design instrument. We need tools for search and exploration, rather than simply control and execution. As of yet, we have countless tools to increase our efficiency and precision. Why not also create tools that serve as our muse, that inspire us and help us to be creative? Tools to draw the undrawable, and to imagine the unimaginable.

What we stand to gain are entirely new spatial and haptic experiences. A playful design that stimulates the senses, elicits curiosity, and invites interaction. A design environment that simultaneously allows control and surprise, and that embraces and celebrates the unforeseen.

Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who writes algorithms to generate and fabricate architectural form. Recent work includes the design of a 3D printed concrete tower in the Swiss alps, an installation of a forest of columns at Grand Palais in Paris, and the fabrication of a muqarna for Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Michael taught architecture as visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at Southeast University in Nanjing, and as a lecturer at the CAAD group at ETH Zurich. He previously worked for Herzog & de Meuron architects, and holds an architecture degree from Columbia University.