July 2, 2011
The 9th DMY International Design Festival Berlin was held June 1-5, 2011 at the historic Tempelhof Airport. Taking advantage of the venue’s unique characteristics, the space was set up so that many booths were housed in the hangar or overflowing into the spacious runway, providing a feeling of liberation. Our workshop/exhibit area in the factory space had a tranquil atmosphere and gave a sense of the passage of time. The project Berliner Naruheso Weltzeitung was a newspaper project designed to simulate a city’s transformation. The original project, Nagoya Naruheso Shinbun [Newspaper] was designed for a workshop of Creative Design City Nagoya 2009. This was the Berlin/International edition.
The layout of a newspaper as a medium, in which a variety of content and space shape are complexly intertwined, is similar to the look of a city, in which buildings and spaces with a variety of meanings and functions are intricately intermingled. In this project, the intention was not to produce an amended version of the paper with a single redesign, but to have workshop coordinators and volunteer participants work together throughout the exhibition period, transforming it little by little, just as a city is transformed gradually, finding out on the last day what kind of “newspaper=city” it would be.
For the festival, we coordinators prepared a particular version of a newspaper as an old city, created by a combination of the layouts of a 19th century German newspaper, marking the birth of the modern newspaper layout, and a 1960s East German newspaper. Working with workshop participants over the entire course of the event, one by one replaced with new editions the English/German/Japanese articles in the first (0 edition).
Just as we demolish an old building to make space for a new one, in this newspaper, we went through the process of making an empty lot by actually cutting out of one of the articles from the previous edition before writing and inserting a new one. Each and every day of the event, an endless stream of people came through our workshop, sharing their interest in the project, their affection towards newspaper as a medium, changes in people’s lives and in the urban environment, or their enjoyment as they produced information through the cut-and-paste process.
Berliner Naruheso Weltzeitung Progress
There is a big difference in both process and meaning between building a new neighborhood in a new location and creating a new look for part of an existing city. A lot of people live in a city; what shall we do with them and the privately and publicly held spaces and buildings? Numerous questions and issues arise. To create a new look for the virtual Berlin, Berliner Naruheso Weltzeitung, we used as our research touch point for reporters and participants, “memories of houses and buildings that were once occupied but now are gone”. This is because within each person living in the city of the present there exists a multilayered city of the past that overlaps with the present city and is invisible to others. Some visitors were so interested in our intent that they began acting as reporters, interviewing people at the venue and writing articles for our Naruheso newspaper. It seemed that those who were interviewed at our workshop enjoyed recalling memories one after the other when prompted by the phrase, “a house that is no more”.
Just as one day we realize that our entire city has changed, although through small, daily changes over the space of several years, the final edition of Berliner Naruheso, the 16th, had a completely different look from the 0 edition, having been renovated continually throughout the workshop. This project was not intended to simply arrive at a new page design or a functional and beautiful aesthetic, but to act as an experiment, in which, staying focused on the reality that a city is destined to undergo change, we attempt to relocate memories of the city of the past to the city of the present, and find meaning in the revision process or in the very form of a medium. The festival programs concentrated on product design at large. Conspicuous at the product design-heavy DMY Festival, our project, focused on urban design, was featured in an online article on the National Public Radio (NPR) website. We also found it quite meaningful that the Naruheso project was held in the country that served as the birthplace of both printing technology and the modern newspaper format, and in Berlin, a Design City that since the fall of the Berlin Wall has undergone rapid transformation.
Ko Yamada
Jin Murata
Please refer to the event page.
| Date: | Wednesday, 1 - Saturday, 4 June, 2011 |
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| Venue: | Flughafen Berlin Tempelhof |
| Organizer: | Creative Design City Nagoya Organizing Committee DMY Berlin GmbH & Co. KG |
Directors: Ko Yamada, Jin Murata Special Thanks: Georg Schmalhofer | |
| Link: | |
