First, a quick survey of those present: four screens, in the audience many designers, a number of journalists, one visitor combining both disciplines, and five speakers: TINKEBELL, Sophie Tendai Christiaens, Daniëlle Arets, Mirjam Zweers and Abel Enklaar.
The presence of professional designers and journalists in the room created a good balance and made it possible to dive straight into the subject matter. The size of the group seemed just right. It was not an overcrowded room, which gave the gathering an intimate and personal character. As a result, visitors felt free to ask questions and share their own examples, enriching the discussion. Since many professionals were present, there was no need to explain the fields of design or journalism, and the conversation could immediately focus on the topic itself.
The ever-colourful artist, writer and strategist TINKEBELL (Katinka Simonse) opened the evening with a somewhat provocative remark: “Journalism steers the debate, but it is the makers who have the ideas, not the journalists.” She is known for her controversial and investigative performances, installations and publications that expose ethical dilemmas around social issues such as consumption, animal welfare and sustainability. Her journalistic work sits on the boundary between art, activism and provocation, and it often makes headlines.
TINKEBELL knows better than anyone how to attract media attention as a maker. Even before the final presentation in her first year at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Tilburg, she issued a press release about her work, written in such a way that a newspaper could publish it as an article. She repeated this every year. “By my fourth year, De Telegraaf called me to ask what I was planning for the following year, so they could already schedule an article about my exhibition.” Entrepreneurial as she is, she ensured her graduation project could be presented both in a gallery and in a shop, generating further press coverage of her work.
How do you make the news?
During the meetup, she gave a kind of mini-masterclass: how do you, as a maker, get into the news? “Through storytelling,” she said. “Act as a news whisperer: journalists are eager for leads, so give them information in such a way that they feel they came up with it themselves.” You also stand a better chance if there is a news hook. “I raised the issue of online hate and threats long before it had taken on today’s forms; I used the term ‘fake news’ before it became common usage; and I created artworks from the emissions of Tata Steel, drawing attention to the damage being done to the environment and our health. That resulted in a series of articles and in coalitions eager to search for solutions,” she explained.
What bothers her is the fast pace of daily journalism, with little time or money for thorough investigative reporting. “I miss the space for nuance and depth.” Yet journalism, especially in times of increasing polarisation, carries a great responsibility — perhaps even power. It can expose frictions within society, but it can also shape the public debate. It determines which voices and frames are given space, and which stories make the front page or the evening news.
Can design thinking help to break through patterns and bubbles, to make alternative perspectives visible and to create space for change? And can journalists and designers together forge meaningful coalitions that contribute to a more resilient democracy? These were the questions explored by the five diverse, investigative and design-driven innovators who shared ideas and solutions for a more sustainable and equitable society.
Sophie Tendai Christiaens is a design researcher at Stby, a service design agency driven by meaningful and positive change. As a specialist in design for the circular economy, she approaches her work journalistically: “I always start from local stories and people’s needs. I focus on decolonising design perspectives and explore how critical reflection on oppression can lead to a broader outlook and contextual solutions,” she explains.
An example is her collaboration with What Design Can Do (WDCD) in stimulating and accelerating the transition towards a more sustainable and equitable society. “Design can be a powerful tool to make climate and social justice tangible. With thorough research, we can better equip designers and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration to achieve more impactful and effective design,” she believes.
The Library as the Last Public Space
Mirjam Zweers, Strategic Manager at Probiblio, also works towards a sustainable and equitable world. She highlights the unique role that the library can play in society. “The library is the ultimate and perhaps the last true public space,” she argues. “Squares and stations, once visible public meeting places, no longer fulfil that role.”To stimulate inclusive social dialogue and democracy in and around libraries, she encourages co-creation and connects creative professionals and a forward-looking perspective to the library sector.
From the Library to Journalism Education.
Daniëlle Arets, Professor of Designing for Journalism at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, identifies the stigmatisation of groups in society through word choice or imagery in the media. She researches how design and co-creation can contribute to innovation within the media landscape. As a design researcher, she collaborates with journalists, AI experts, press photographers, anthropologists, researchers, designers, and educators to develop knowledge for both the design field and education.
“Design-driven research methods are applied to current journalistic challenges. This creates new stories and products, such as live journalism in the theatre or the project ‘Homeless People in the Newspaper’, with Manon van Hoeckel from Het Bouwdepot.”
Arets notes that homeless young people are often afraid of journalists because of the way they are stigmatised. “The image of the so-called ‘problem youth’ lying on a bench is not representative. More awareness and improvement in representation are needed,” she stresses. In co-creation, a more representative image bank has therefore been developed (though AI too often generates stigmatising cliché images).
Cross-Pollinations
Abel Enklaar, editor at VPRO Medialab, explores how new technologies can enable creative storytelling. “The Medialab provides space for journalistic makers who seek cross-pollinations with disciplines outside the media world,” they explain. “Through hackathons under the name ‘Public Pioneers’, we also explore how AI can be used to create tools for a more democratic digital society, one in which algorithms steer our information, communication and imagination.”
The Medialab collaborates with journalists, designers, developers, artists, students and researchers to create new forms of public infrastructure. It develops prototypes that often evolve into innovative projects within public broadcasting. These designs help break through our bubbles, connect citizens with one another, and support democratic thinking and action within a filtered environment.
Enklaar introduced Sander Veenhof, AI explorer at VPRO Medialab, as someone they had admired since their student days. “The contrarian thinker once dropped artworks based on quirky augmented reality experiments into an exhibition at MoMA in New York. I thought that was brilliant.” Veenhof developed Manifest-O-Matic, a tool that translates a multitude of manifestos into a to-do list. During the Coalitions Meetup, participants jointly — and with AI — drafted such a manifesto on AI.VPRO.nl. “It’s another form of public participation to help find answers to pressing questions,” Veenhof believes.
Allies for Change
The central question of the evening was: how can we see each other more as allies in driving structural change in society, and what is needed to achieve this?
Sophie Tendai Christiaens emphasised in her manifesto point that people’s dreams and needs should always form the starting point, as this leads to more effective design processes. Enklaar added: “Stories no longer exist in language alone; language is linear and does not always capture the complexity of events.” They referred to how they had effectively reconstructed three days of student protests at the University of Amsterdam in 3D.
Enklaar also shared another perspective: “The VPRO of the future is no longer a classic broadcaster, but, like the library, a platform for people. We need to create tools that enable audiences to make well-informed and considered decisions themselves.”
Mirjam Zweers added: “Trust us, because we also trust you: we share responsibility for the content. We should not take on a patronising role, but rather allow — and trust — people to create their own stories.”
Manifest-O-Matic
Finally, the pause act by Jazzmatazz offered the audience the opportunity to submit a statement for the manifesto. From these, Veenhof and AI distilled a Top 10 of positive and negative manifesto points. Among the contributions from the audience were: “Journalism, give the public the power to reveal the world themselves”; “Journalists should be more open to multiple, complementary perspectives and alternative forms of storytelling”; and “Journalism improves by listening to the whisperers rather than — or at least alongside — the shouters.”
The plan is for the document to reach editorial teams across the Netherlands. Hopefully, there will be no need to issue an annual press release, but instead journalists will take up the manifesto widely and immediately — as TINKEBELL has already demonstrated is possible.
