JUDITH VAN DEN BOOM AND GUNTER WEHMEYER

Judith van den Boom is a designer and lecturer, currently developing a practice design led PhD on Designing Resonance. She is also Head of Department in Product Design at ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Her own design philosophy is fuelled by being a practical idealist. Since completing her degree at the Royal College of Art she has worked for over 10 years as studio BoomWehmeyer with institutes, practices and industries in China, the EU, and USA, connecting context and craftsmanship. For Judith, craft is a tool for presence, awareness and exploring relationships in ways that help to transcend us to a richer sense of self, a new sense of connectedness, with others, and with a more sustainable way of living.

Gunter Wehmeyer is a designer and researcher. Having studied Urbanism at the University of Kassel and being an alumnus at the THNK School for Creative Leadership Amsterdam, he is currently doing a practice-based PhD at the Manchester School of Art in the U.K. on flourishing through nature towards nature-centric design frameworks. Furthermore, he is the Co-founder of the Design Factory at the Manchester Metropolitan University of Art, where he is addressing societal, business and ecological challenges to maximize innovation in the city. Fusing design, spirituality and leadership, Gunter’s work is fuelled by developing innovative design solutions to global urban and societal challenges – stretching the use of creative practices as a new mind-set for being, belonging and becoming nature.

Judith and Gunter both work at Unidentified Facility, a collaborative design platform based in the Netherlands. Together their work connects design practice and education. Their projects are grounded in dialogic research, narrative and form. In their most recent collaboration, they took part in Design Inquiry Portland USA, where they developed a week of practice on the topic of Currency as a collaborative act.

At Boisbuchet Judith and Gunter worked at the original space of the “potager”, the vegetable garden. The potager is a designated space that can be traced back in the original Domaine design of 1860, functioning as a productive space for growing vegetables. They used the garden as a space to reconfigure between self and nature, using ‘Nothingness’ as a garden tool for tending a balanced design practice. To do so, they used this concept of nothingness as a method to arrive, by rethinking the cycles of night and day, tuning into the land, without aim of production, but engaged in learning. They created tools for observation and gathering, to stimulate activities of drifting, sensing and tending. The observation tools were explored as bamboo rakes, spatial structures to meditate with trees, and a compost weaving tool to identify species. The gathering tools were explored through bamboo woven meshes, daily recording of insights and local sound recordings. All physical tools were designed with materials found on-site. The gathering, harvesting and processing of that material showed them the potential and application into tools to forge a relationship with the lay of the land. Whilst garden tools exist for maximum productivity, efficiency and maintaining the garden, “Spaces for Arrival”, the title of Judith and Gunter’s creative residency at Boisbuchet, developed tools and spaces for gardening the mind.