Course Description:
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The transformation towards greater sustainability, global justice and a “good life” is the central social issue of our time. Design in particular must rise to this challenge and use innovative products, services, and systems to help develop suitable alternatives to seemingly no-alternative development. But, transformation design doesn‘t just want to offer new solutions to problems. It wants to stimulate social debates and rethink things and circumstances. In other words: Transformation Design consistently understands design from the perspective of human, social, and cultural needs and attempts to make a sustainable contribution to the future viability of society without neglecting the economic [and as I would necessarily emphasize, ecological] framework.
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The Master’s program in Transformation Design at HBK Braunschweig teaches project-based skills to reflect, initiate, and help shape change processes. Questions of sustainability and future viability of society play a central role and are viewed from a design method and theory perspective. At the same time, design itself is being reinvented as processes, connections, and interactions with other disciplines, institutions, and civil society are taken into account in the design process.
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In her role as Acting Professor of Transformation Design, Dr. Anna-Sophie Springer teaches across Environmental Humanities, Design Research, Critical & Spatial Theory, and Experimental Ecological Practices in courses such as Social Transformation, Critical Futurities, Writing & Publishing, and An Introduction to the History of Sustainability, as well as a studio-based seminar in the first and second years of the Transformation Design MA program.

MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image
at Goldsmiths, University of London
on invitation of course leader Gail Pickering

How do we build a synthetic editorial-design process that insists on the mutuality of content and form, allowing us to concurrently rethink and reshape contemporary political, ecological, and theoretical ambitions and expectations? In this workshop, Anna-Sophie Springer will share aspects of her collaborative and multidimensional practice as co-founder and publisher of the Berlin-based publishing atelier K. Verlag Since 2011, she has been committed to working with the book as a space of exhibition. During our meeting, we will discuss ways of relaying complex research into publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design create radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London is one of the oldest and largest institutions of colonial science in the world. During this daylong excursion led and organized by Christina Leigh Geros and Anna-Sophie Springer, students will be introduced to the complex history of the site and its infrastructures. "While," as one panel in the palm house states, "motivations for plant hunters have changed over the years, from collecting status symbols to economic botany to conservation," we will aim to think beyond these proud frameworks and confront the role of logistics, extraction, industrialization, appropriation, denaturalization, and exoticization at play in the constructs of nature-as-commodity and the gaze-as-spectacle that is this garden.

How do we build a synthetic editorial-design process that insists on the mutuality of content and form, allowing us to concurrently rethink and reshape contemporary political, ecological, and theoretical ambitions and expectations? In this workshop, Anna-Sophie Springer will share aspects of her collaborative and multidimensional practice as co-founder and publisher of the Berlin-based publishing atelier K. Verlag Since 2011, she has been committed to working with the book as a space of exhibition. During our meeting, we will discuss ways of relaying complex research into publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design create radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.

On invitation of Profs. Yvonne Wilhelm and Christian Huebler, I had the opportunity to share some recent projects by K. Verlag that convey the atelier's research approach and conceptual methodologies with regards to ecological thinking and resistant publishing cultures.

Having prepared back in February for a two-day, in-person visit to Eindhoven in March, I was pleased to engage with the MA students from DAE through an online seminar and subsequent public lecture. Within the pandemic circumstances of physical distancing and newly exposed perversities of supply chain capitalism, my talk "Herbarium Politicum" on the inherently political character of seeds, soils, and gardens was now more timely than expected: with a virus currently reminding us of biological connectedness and shared (albeit asymmetrical) vulnerabilities, many urbanites not reliant on subsistence agriculture have recently taken up planting vegetables and/or gardening—whether as a welcome pastime while sheltered at home or as more conscious method towards a decelerated awareness for life's becoming. The role of gardens as spaces of care and survival (i.e. for political prisoners or the enslaved) suddenly took on an uncanny, quotidian resonance—albeit their singular and incomparable histories steeped in systemic violence and inequality. I want to thank Tim Roerig for the kind invitation and perfect organization as well as all attendants for their participation and feedback.

While forest fires have been raging in Amazonia, Indonesia, the Arctic, and many other regions, my two-day seminar will focus on the archetypal role of plants for life on earth. We will discuss the concept of the "forest" philosophically and biologically as a concept for multiplicity, diversity, and reciprocity. Unpacking the meaning of the "Anthropocene" as a species concept with limited ability to capture the capitalist-extractivist dynamics that have produced the current ecological crisis, we will explore alternative terminologies centering specifically on human-plant relations—including the "Plantationocene" as suggested by Donna Haraway, Jason Moore, and Anna Tsing and the "Planthroposcene" as suggested by Natasha Myers and colleagues. Throughout the seminar, we will counterpoint our theoretical work with examinations of curatorial, editorial, artistic, and writerly methodologies dealing with our subject matter in a manner of lived, ethico-aesthetic practices.

I'll be returning once again to the final year BFA students of the Art Institute, Basel. Last session, some in the group found they had heard enough now about the eco crisis. My plan this time then is to try focusing and bridging more profoundly the political-economic dimension of nature and the ways in which climate breakdown currently drives contemporary politics internationally. On the reading list: Naomi Klein, Bruno Latour, Geoff Mann, Alexis Shotwell, and others. Looking forward!

Departing from Elizabeth Kolbert's recent piece in the New Yorker, "How to Write About a Vanishing World," in this seminar we will read and discuss a variety of different genre texts dealing with our relationships to nonhuman worlds in the current context of climate disruption and extinction. Moving from the depth of the ocean through the soil to above the ground and ultimately into the canopy of trees, where the wind blows, we will explore how various authors and visual artists embrace and produce different emotional registers in their work and to what effect. To this end, the seminar will also include a hike through a nearby forest.

In one of the galleries of Basel's Museum of Pharmaceutical History we find an early twentieth-century print depicting the immense variety of derivative carbon chains that are released in the process of burning hard coal for energy consumption. The centerpiece of the illustration visualizing this organic chemistry network is a large tree with a massive trunk and a huge, lushly green canopy—a veritable symbol of life, health, and stability. Along one of its branches run all the carbon chains used to produce aspirin while another branch symbolizes those chemical chains that enabled the development of synthetic dyes in the late nineteenth century. In the background of the tree we see a panorama of factories and smoking chimneys. Departing from the story of this "Carbon Tree" image, in this week-long seminar we will research the history of carbon capitalism in Basel and explore what possible alternatives are proposed in the city today. The goal of the seminar is to develop a set of timely interventions in the narrative displayed at the Museum, which hasn't been changed since 1931.

This year's Ph.D. seminar is focused on strategies of “publication." Here, the main guiding questions are how to make research (in art and design) public? And how can media such as the book, the library, and the exhibition be mobilized as research tools in this process? On 18 May 2017 I will present some of my recent publishing work as one of the seminar's external guests speakers.

Using the new intercalations publication, The Word for World is Still Forest, as a starting point, my second seminar at Institut Kunst in Basel will combine readings and discussions with excursions behind the scenes of the city's Tropenhaus of the Botanical Gardens, the Museum der Kulturen, and the Natural History Museum. Traversing through the archives of institutions that collect natural and cultural material—books, artworks, artifacts, and scientific specimens—we will reflect on how these institutions organize what is considered knowledge and explore strategies and practices with which we can activate and connect these spaces in ways in which they are not normally viewed by dominant, colonial cultures. The seminar is an introduction to applied critical thinking with a focus on more-than-human entanglements and ecological urgencies of our times.

This workshop will unfold through a series of traversals through the archives of institutions that collect cultural material—books, artworks, artifacts, and scientific specimens. We will understand how these institutions organize what is considered knowledge and explore strategies and practices with which we can activate and connect these spaces in ways in which they are not normally viewed by dominant, colonial cultures. In this process, we will critically interrogate books, exhibitions, archives, and collections, attending to how they record and disseminate knowledge, experimenting along the way with cross-overs, shape-shifting, fact and fiction.

With regards to the meaning of collecting, collections, and curatorial practice, classes will consist of readings, lectures, and discussions about thematic and visual strategies. An introductory contextualization to the history of exhibitions is provided through excerpted readings of seminal texts. We ask: What does the Anthropocene thesis imply for museums and the collections they contain? How do environmental and geopolitical concerns transform traditional exhibition practice? And, what is the potential of curatorial-editorial agency for alternative forms of collecting and presenting in the Anthropocene? The goal is to examine such exhibition and publication projects that have confronted the entangled legacies of institutional collections in order to illuminate and compare how exhibitions communicate different concerns through a variety of media presented in spatial constellations.

Offering a curatorial perspective on the Anthropocene, Anna-Sophie Springer's presentation "A Palimpsest of Species & Spaces" takes its point of departure from the juxtaposition of two drawings. First, the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt's panoramic map of the Andes, from 1851, showing a set of steep mountains covered with strata of different types of green forest, rock, and ice; second, American artist Mark Dion's colour pencil work Anthropocene Monument, from 2014, with its compacted pylon of mineral and fossil resources and anthropogenic soil. While the former image is one of the earliest modern cartographic representations of geology and botany as understood in relation to geography and climatic zones, rendering visible for Western science nature as a complex system, the latter schematically depicts the long-term impact of a single species—our own—within the geological subsoil of the planet. Arguing that current matters in natural history are more messy than either of these layered images seems to suggest, Springer will discuss her current research and previous exhibitions and publications which have engaged a complex spectrum of species and spaces to create possible affective and conceptual affinities beyond representation, provoking instead new concepts for increasingly turbulent times.