How can what we do professionally be more effective and relevant while also celebrating the more playful and joyful aspects? 

The course “The Struggle is Real! Ways of Creative Involvement between Art & Design, Activism and Politics” explored a number of ways through which we can channel our energy, our ideas, and our activism into the world and engage with our target audience. In this regard, an important aspect was the interaction across different disciplines between students at the JKU and at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Over the course of 4 full-day sessions, students were inspired by the experiences of successful professionals in the field and in small groups, they also created their own project. During the first 3 course days, artists and designers, activists, politicians and entrepreneurs spoke with the students about different methods and approaches. Students met inspirational individuals and learned more about various initiatives across a range of different approaches that are committed to a more loving and sustainable society.

The students let us in on their secrets:

What drives and motivates them? How do they identify their target groups? What are the most effective instruments, methods and approaches in order to reach their goals?

The students then experimented with practice-based methods using participative and experience-based workshop formats.

As part of a collaborative approach between different disciplines, the students worked together as part of heterogeneous teams to come up with their own creative instruments - a toolset to become more involved. The goal was to use a range of methods to listen to and engage with concerns and ideas. How can you engage a target audience and become part of a productive process? During the final session, students tested the projects and ideas within the group. The exercise taught the students how to facilitate their own concepts so they could experience the effect their ideas have on the participants.

The results included active neighborhood initiatives addressing the right to public space, a communal lunch serving ‘salvage foods’, and a media campaign to create new meeting spaces where different generations can come together.

Designer and researcher Alexandra Fruhstorfer, opens an external URL in a new window created and organized the course.

Alexandra is active at the crossroads of art, design, and science and firmly believes in creative disciplines and their transformative powers. She works on experimental methods in design and futurology, most of which she experiments with as part of a participative setting and in an effort to unlock new imaginative possibilities as well as new spaces to act.

The course objective was to share these methods and approaches with students and encourage them to further improve on these ideas.