Every other year, the NODE team gets together to design an event. And with every concept we draft, we expect our beloved forum to allow for knowledge transfer, critical exchange and the opportunities to develop collaborative ideas. This is, indeed, quite a demanding task and leads us to perpetually reconsider questions like: Which formats do we suggest as a framework for all these interactions? Whom do we address? How do we allow everyone to get the most possible amount of visibility she/he longs for or deserves in this forum of peers? And repeatedly we notice that during every festival edition, we experience insane amounts of enthusiasm, open-mindedness and productive energy – an energy that catches everyone, triggers some to take home inspirations, new ideas our just increased curiosity. But how can we nurture these wonderful side-effects even more?
When choosing our festival topic, ‘Designing Hope’, we noticed at a certain point that what we are doing – creating a festival – is to design a space and a structure which is indeed an insanely fruitful ground for hope and positive thinking – so we asked ourselves:
How to channel this enthusiasm? Which responsibility do we have, as festival designers? How can we design NODE in a way, that all this energy can actually feed critical or even sustainable action?
During the last month, a team of five amazing artists started working for NODE and being our critical consultants and counterparts – and this is their mission statement:
“The HOPE Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory prototyping beacons of hope for visual creators and aspiring idealists at NODE Forum in Frankfurt. We are focused on helping realize the NODE community’s greater collective potential to change the world in an era where hope has been co-opted.”
Stay tuned and watch out for #HOPElab activities before and during #NODE17!
The first working session was dedicated to analyzing NODE and social communities in general. In five days, the team met to discuss former festival learnings and feedback they had gathered from interviewing former festival participants.
As a first test field, Kreativwirtschaftstag Hessen was the setting for applying the first prototypes of the HOPE lab hopebeacons.
See some images from their playground at Börse Frankfurt: