SteamSpace enables agile, mobile, and creative learning formats for communication and interaction by expanding STEM disciplines to include Art and Design—thus forming MINKT (the German equivalent of “STEAM”).
Explorative design, in connection with other scientific disciplines, fosters adaptability, imaginative invention and an understanding that helps us to address complex challenges of the present. Future Skills, Design Thinking, as well as reflective, self-, and future-oriented competencies (creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking) are fostered through diverse participating factors, disciplines, and methods. In this way, awareness for sustainable development and future-oriented worldmaking is encouraged, taking into account economic, ecological, and sociocultural dimensions.
Ultimately, SteamSpace is about reconfiguring and expanding our human sensorium and our imaginative capacities.
SteamSpace is a project funded by Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre. The project concept was developed by Prof. Dr. Bettina Bruder in the field of Media, Art and Design, drawing on Explorative and Transformative Design, Design Futuring, as well as Speculative and Critical Design.
The SteamSpace design concept visualizes inter- and transdisciplinarity through the logo of a mirrored ligature—the typographic sign representing the fusion of letters. The ligature ‘æ’ (derived from a+e and mirrored here as ‘ea’) symbolizes the connection between different disciplines. This sign refers to infinity ‘∞’ and to the infinite entanglements and interdependencies described in the concept of ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel/Webber 1973).
Originally emerging from manuscript culture, ligatures were used to simplify and accelerate a writing process. In book printing, they served both aesthetic and technical functions. The use of the ligature in the logo and in explanatory graphics emphasizes the aspects of connectivity and entanglement. This interdisciplinary collaboration enables the process of generating (new) knowledge so that a holistic consideration of interrelated dependencies in current issues is fostered. Design (and art) can therefore be understood as a cultural practice of the in-between (Popp 2025).
The materiality and functionality of the spatial elements, modules, and mobile teaching and learning products underscore the agile, modular, and temporary approach. For example, the electric SteamMobil is used as an original and iconic vehicle during pop-up events.
Popp (2025): Eine Kulturpraxis des Dazwischen. Design im Überall und Nirgendwo. In: Popp, JF., Foken, G. (eds) Design als Kulturpraxis. Würzburger Beiträge zur Designforschung. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-46953-5_2
Rittel/Webber (1973): Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. In: Policy Sciences, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730
A permanent workshop where prototypes, plants and printed circuits share a table
The Steam Lab is the fixed address of the project: a room full of tools that invite you to be slightly unqualified. Soldering irons sit next to petri dishes, a 3D printer hums beside a stack of hand-bound zines, and nobody has to declare a discipline at the door.
Sessions run in short cycles — build something, break it, describe what happened. The lab is less a place for finished results than a place where the difference between a sketch and an experiment stops being interesting.
The lab packs itself into a van and shows up where the workshops are
Steam Mobil takes the equipment on tour: microcontrollers, cameras, cutting mats and a suspicious amount of gaffer tape, arranged so that a whole workshop can be unpacked in twenty minutes and packed up in ten.
It has been parked at schools, festivals and one very windy courtyard. Wherever it stops the format stays the same — a table, a pile of parts, and a couple of hours to find out what happens.