MADE Labs

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About MADE Labs 

MADE Labs are high-intensity workshops, led by world-renowned creative professionals and addressed to designers, architects and artists who are curious about new developments in their fields. MADE Labs provide an opportunity for students and professionals to “level up” and enhance their skills. MADE Labs are guided by thematic perspectives on design, such as sustainability or migration. Students can complete one or both MADE Labs, earning 6 ECTS credits (3 US credits) per intensive Lab session. 

MADE Labs have a unique structure that includes: the aforementioned weekly theme or topic addressing a pressing global issue, daytime workshops led by some of the most prominent artists and practitioners of the 21st century, evening lectures by thought leaders, visits to local towns, and final presentations by participants. MADE Labs are hosted in the main building of the Academy, a XIX century building, as well as other venues in the heart of the island of Ortigia, the historic center of Siracusa, Sicily. Past Lab themes have included: “Borderless Visions on Design, Architecture, and Visual Arts” and “The Authenti-City, Or the UNESCO Paradox.” 

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MADE Labs Summer 2025

Theme 

IN/VISIBLE
The Elephant in the Room

Digital technology has permeated everyday life.

What is the role of designers, artists, researchers, students, and the educational system in this scenario? How is modern democracy based on the capitalist economy, from production to distribution, changing? Beyond doomsday scenarios, can we use technology in directions capable of shaping the imagination of contemporary society as much as the “utopias” that were the basis of modernity? Is it possible to imagine alternative ways of using technologies or coping with, resisting, understanding, and reusing them?

In its best tradition, design reflects our ever-changing society, aspires to shape it, interprets behavior, offers pragmatic solutions to problems, and improves our daily experience. And the most radical solutions are often due to countless, virtually unknown “inventors” who belong to the anonymous history of the 20th and 21st centuries. The history of design does not always coincide with the history of designers.

The topic has become too important for it to be left to technology experts and entrepreneurs.
It is time to look at the elephant in the room.

The Video Screenings curated by Alexandra Midal

Filmic experimentations are directed by designers since the 1910s, and they act as ideological instruments; a female gaze (L. Gilbreth) to form the future of society (L. Moholy-Nagy 1934), a lifeline to escape from the normativity arising from the imperative of industry (R & Ch. Eames, 1953), or an object language (N. Toran, 2000). Many texts, manifestos and essays claim a relationship between film and teaching, starting with the Staatliche Bauhaus and their motto “Open the Eyes” by Josef Albers. This correlation became central to the concepts of “interseeing” and “interthinking” that were at the origin of the construction of the Visual Department in the M.I.T Graduate Program in 1946 by Gyorgy Kepes (Kepes, 1952; G. Dorfles in Kepes (ed.), 1965; Blakinger, 2019) that resulted in the creation of the CAVS, inaugurated at the M.I.T in 1967. By measuring and asserting the influence of communication patterns, both Moholy-Nagy at the Art Institute of Chicago and Kepes at the MIT carried out filmic experiments renewing design and art pedagogy. May they be abstracts, fictional, political or experimental (T. Tode, Expanded Bauhaus, ZKM, 2020), Films by designers display a vast and rich filmic production of films that attests to the rising prominence and importance of these experiments as a design expression. Films belongs to history as well as to the contemporary designer’s dissemination practices as they encapsulate design discourses through their transmission, access and realization (digital media, global reach, affordability and use of smartphones, etc.)

Now, the current and noticeable proliferation of films by designers represents a critical turn within the discipline..

Summer 2025 MADE Labs Schedule 

*Workshops subject to change 

MADE Labs 2026 DATES & FEES 

INCLUSIONS 

MADE Labs 2026: tuition, transcript, housing, airport transportation, comprehensive orientation, city activities and design labs, guest lectures and city projects, student services (including health/safety and emergency) 

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