The Hague Street Art (THSA) is a well-known street art collective in The Hague, and in 2018 the municipality invited them to transform an old industrial area in The Hague into a ‘street art district’. For over a year, local and foreign artists worked on multiple artworks and ‘pieces’ on various locations raging from power boxes and garages to full murals and even hotel rooms.

After a year THSA asked us to bundle all the artworks into a publication, and create a Street Art Guide of the area.

Even though all the artworks are legally made in broad daylight, our concept for the design came from the thrill, adventure and fun that is surrounded by graffiti artists. Trying to translate this adventurous characteristics with the important element of fun, we chose to show the artworks in the form of a comic book – using the same dimensions, shiny cover and uncoated paper of the comics we used to read as kids.

Since there was off course no storyline, all the individual projects are ranged chronologically as they were made, all of them marked with a location and time as for all of these projects their story starts here. The one anomaly in the story is transformation of the ‘Teleport Hotel’ into a Street Art Hotel, giving the artists the opportunity to paint the lobby, hotel rooms, their garage etc. This project started earlier in 2017 and is still on-going, so by using flash backs and flash forwards we fit this project into the story by using the language and characteristics of comics.

And of course as any good comic book story, this project is to be continued…

RESTORY is a serious game which can be used by policy-makers, officials, architects, artists – everybody involved in (re)using space and purpose – to (vacant) plots and (empty) buildings, such as office buildings, a park, malls, churches etc, to create a new purpose of program such as education, space for artists, recreation, catering industry etc.

The game was conceived by Martine Zoeteman / Stadvogels and commissioned by H-Team, to create a tool for the complex task of reusing buildings and plots with all parties involved to get a better understanding of the process and each other, and to see and discuss possibilities you maybe haven’t thought of before. Possibilities to ease the process, for communicating with partners and parties, or possibilities that can flip the whole idea you started out with.

In the game you can find yourself in multiple existing and non-existing cases and in various roles of people involved (i.e. architect, official, resident, sustainability expert etc.), all having a personal mission.

The game comes with a manual, a manifesto, role cards and case cards which are all printed with a risograph. The box is laser cut and the icons are laser engraved.

The online platform RE-source.info is a living archive. It archives the designerly research performed by the designers, categorizes it and breaks it down. You can navigate the growing collection of designs, interventions, reflections and conversations through the use of labels.

RE-source.info is dived into two worlds, a practice oriented part (Practice and Design) and a more theoretical part (Theory & Reflection). On the one side, a collection of moments from the design process is taking shape, visualizations, blogs and video’s. On the other side a theoretical reflection on the project is taking shape. By positioning these worlds next to eachother, theory and practice, they feed into each other; the abstract and the particular. The collections of related moments from the practice side, selections based on overlapping labels, are juxtaposed by theoretical reflections on the left side underneath the heading ‘Artikelen’. The amount of overlapping labels determines the order. RE-source.info inspires and invokes further reflection as unanticipated and unexpected connections show themselves. The platform helps make the multiformity of the design process insightful and experiential. It brings new possibilities to the fore; RE-source.info as ‘serendipity machine’.

By selecting your own labels, you can build collections and groupings, making RE-source.info into a research tool. The complexity of the RE-source project is made workable by offering the possibility of selecting and navigating based on type of residual flow and name of the designer. As well as an archival, communicative and research function, the online platform offers possibilities for education. By collecting and catagorizing various design and research strategies RE-source.info gives valuable insights in the design practice in relation to circularity for both professionals and students.

Every investigation into a residual flow within RE-source is introduced by a synopsis in text and images. From this introductory page you can further explore the residual flow through the most relevant labels listed on that page.

www.re-source.info

In June 2019, RE-Source was awarded with a Dutch Design Award in the category Design Research. A few lines from the jury report: “Extensive, high-quality research that has resulted in a layered website, on which a wide variety of design language, moving image, material and experts are skilfully interwoven. RE-source is exactly right and succeeds in approaching a complicated theme with a pleasant playfulness. The project has a richness that does justice to the complexity of the topic, from accessible projects to academic applications.”

This is the facade of our very own studio complex in the inland harbour of The Hague. In fact, our studio is situated at the end of the big hall where you can see inside in photo shown.

The studio complex has a rich history of housing artists – from being a dependance of the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in the ’90’s, to temporary use for a group of artists (including the founders of ‘De Besturing’), to being the self-owned ‘breeding ground’ it is today. To become the latter was quite a process, and took the effort of a lot of people who have their studio in De Besturing and also perform its management tasks. But in the end ‘we’ succeeded; we bought the building!

It was time for a new and fresh identity to mark this succes and face the future. It was an open call to all the tenants, so we teamed up with Typeish (Michel van Soest) to take on the challenge.

After a lot of brainstorming we decided to design a blackletter typeface, finding the constructed characteristics and craft of a blackletter a really good match with the ideas, character and image of De Besturing and its tenants.
Starting out sketching the individual letters through calligraphy, we later digitalised and finalised the typeface.

As a statement of the clear and worry-free future that was now laying before us after the purchase of the building, we painted the line ‘It’s all smooth sailing from here on out’ on the facade, also welcoming the ships still using the industrial harbour.