Pop-up events, Brown Bag Snacks, and lectures facilitate the transfer and communication of processes, concepts, and projects emerging from the STEAM experiments to a broader, interested community. The informality of a coffee or lunch break creates an unconventional setting that encourages the open exchange of information and ideas. In contrast, everyday academic teaching offers little to no opportunity to experience inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration—or to organize it effectively as a team.

Participants can prepare for the challenges of tomorrow through this shared, constructive experience of the 4C skills (creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking).

By combining inventiveness, empathy, technical planning, engineering expertise, and civic engagement, traditional modes of knowledge transfer and the mere acquisition of facts are expanded. This approach fosters innovative solutions, encourages the critical evaluation of strategies, and allows for unorthodox approaches that enable sustainable, future-oriented development.

Call for Papers: REACT 2025 – Research and Educational Advancements in Culture and Technology

At the annual CULTTECH Conference in Vienna 2025, hosted by CULTTECH, artists, educators, and technologists gathered to discuss the evolving relationship between culture and emerging technologies. The conference serves as a platform for critical dialogue at the intersection of art, science, and digital innovation, highlighting how creative practices respond to rapid technological change.

One of the featured presentations, “Teaching Analogue Creative Practices in Times of Generative AI” – held by Bettina Bruder, Professor for Art, Design and Media at the University of Osnabrueck; Elke Reinhuber, Associate Professor for Expanded Photography at City University of Hong Kong and Silke Helmerdig, Professor for photography and digital imaging, Pforzheim University – explored the dynamic interplay between art, AI, and education. The panel emphasized that despite the accelerating capabilities of generative AI, hands-on, tactile experiences remain fundamental to creative development and may even gain importance in an increasingly digital world.

The first proposal from Elke Reinhuber stressed the value of “learning by doing,” arguing that manual skills and tacit knowledge are essential for forming an individual style and generating original ideas. While AI can assist with research, prompt design, and instruction, it cannot replicate the embodied understanding that emerges through physical processes such as pinhole photography or cyanotype printing. These analogue methods encourage experimentation, resilience, and openness to unexpected results.

The second proposal from Bettina Bruder framed creative education as a catalyst for societal progress, advocating a STEAM approach that integrates sustainability and ethical reflection. By combining analogue devices—such as camera obscuras or Foucault pendulums—with digital tools and AI systems, educators can foster innovation while addressing issues like algorithmic bias and energy consumption.

Finally, Silke Helmerdig highlighted the philosophical implications of AI-generated “simula.” Understanding the physical foundations of image-making becomes crucial for critically evaluating synthetic imagery. Together, the proposals affirm that analogue practice, ethical awareness, and technological literacy must coexist to shape responsible creative futures.

The lecture took the Trojan horse seriously as a design object: something beautifully made, gratefully accepted, and entirely not what it claimed to be.

From there to interfaces, defaults and terms of service is a shorter walk than the audience expected.

Visits to institutions, studios and one school with a suspiciously good workshop room, collected as a set of borrowable ideas.

This selection keeps the parts that turned out to be transferable — and one or two that clearly were not.

The Brownbag series runs on the assumption that a good talk survives being heard while eating. Design meets the sciences, with the slides kept honest by the format.

The recordings are collected here, unedited and occasionally interrupted by a kettle.

The second Brownbag strand asks what actually helps when the brief keeps changing: collaboration, criticism, and the willingness to be a beginner in public.

Recorded sessions, kept in the order they happened.

The Linz lecture argued that design education spends most of its time installing habits and far too little time removing the ones that no longer fit.

The examples came from the studio rather than the literature, which made the argument harder to dismiss and easier to disagree with.