The [ID]factory conducts radical research in the area of non-linear, artistic thinking and action in extra-artistic areas and is a project of the Centre for Cultural Transfer at Technical University Dortmund's Department of Art and Material Culture.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
3D Printing Sustainable Building is an IAAC research project which demonstrates the potentials of additive manufacturing technology and robotics in the production of sustainable low-cost buildings that can be built with 100% natural materials. Inspired by millenaries of human experience with Earth Buildings, this project combines recent technological advances in material science, robotics, and computational design to reintroduce this sustainable construction material into modern architecture. The project successfully developed a suitable material three times stronger than usual thanks to bio-based additive, cut own fabrication cost by using On-Site Automation (including rovers, cable robotics and drones) and allowed new high-performance buildings by 3D printing technologies.
Shortlist 2019Winner 2019
'The Fair Grounds' is a project by media art collective DROPSTUFF MEDIA, consisting of a collection of artworks where amusement rides are presented as art installations. A new artistic or social narrative has been added to pre-existing attractions and old forms of entertainment have been updated with new technology. The result is a fairground where forms, colours, smells and voices tell stories in new ways; popular culture meets high tech and high art! The goal of the project is to grant access to rapid technological and creative changes to a wide audience that doesn’t necessarily have access to that. Finding common grounds in times of heavy polarization. Where 'inclusive' replaces 'exclusive' inside the cultural sector.
Shortlist 2019Winner 2019
100 Masters encourages the public to nominate people who are great at what they do from all walks of life; from arts to engineering, medicine to business. Through artist commissions and informal learning tools, 100 Masters creatively profiles local skills and artisan talent through film, photography and print. Online metrics analysis demonstrates how wide reaching 100 Masters’ influence is. Our digital content has garnered in excess of 9,000,000 views and most of our 70,000 followers come from outside of the UK. We are exploring how the 100 Masters model can be tailored to meet international challenges. In May 2018 we trialled a successful campaign in Indonesia in partnership with the British Council. We are building contacts in Europe and Asia so we can continue to grow a worldwide network.
Shortlist 2019
The 1D touch project is a fair-trade streaming platform supporting independent creators and artists from around the world by offering an alternative for mainstream business models which mainly benefit the most renowned artists.
NICE AwardShortlist 2015
In the 2-year international project State Machines, we have further developed DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others) with the Goethe-Institut London. International artists, musicians, technologists and theorists join forces to understand how blockchains might enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture. Using playful workshop formats incorporating participatory role-play methods, diverse participants explore how blockchains might transcend the emerging hazards and limitations of pure market speculation of cryptoeconomics. They share knowledge about the current impact of blockchain technologies, develop new insight arising from interdisciplinary, transnational collaborations; establish emerging fields and priorities; and build content, networks and scope for a global view.
Shortlist 2019Winner 2019
AuLAB is a methodological innovation experience grounded in project-based work and competence-based programmes which is developed in four lines of work: design and digital fabrication, experimental television, creative programming, and art and science.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
Beautiful Trouble (BT) is a growing web toolbox and an international network of artist-activist trainers and finally a book whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
Climate for Culture has taken an innovative approach to assess the risks climate change poses to historical artefacts through the combination of high-resolution regional climate modelling together with building simulation tools.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Conexiones improbables' work is based on the observation that more and more artists are interested in applying their methodologies, thoughts and way of perceiving situations out of the artistic field.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
Creative Technologies in the Classroom (CTC) is a collaborative learning curriculum designed for schools wishing to incorporate emerging technologies into their existing classes by introducing basic concepts in programming, electronics and mechanics.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Cultural Adaptations will encourage and equip artists and the cultural sector to transform society’s work on adaptation to the impacts of climate change, using the unique skills and practices that artists can bring to this inherently borderless issue. Through collaborative pilot projects in four countries it will develop, in adaptation to organisations and artists, awareness of the potential of the cultural sector and artists to contribute to this work. Cultural organisations in the four city-regions will be helped to develop their own climate change adaptation strategies. The resulting openly available Toolkit and Digital Resource will enable cultural actors worldwide to prepare themselves and apply these skills and practices to the most challenging issue of our time.
Shortlist 2019
Understanding itself as an international monitoring centre, the Data Ethical Culture Observatory evaluates and shares best practice models on data valorisation, aiming for a cultural stronghold in the digital revolution by encouraging an international convention on data ethics.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
The project Deaf Magazine was nominated as a special guest because of its great contribution to the shaping of an inclusive society. The lifestyle and society magazine deals with the culture of German sign language and communicates to both hearing-impaired and non-hearing impaired people.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Stein mit Vollausstattung/Stone with full equipment (SmV) is a project focusing on the synergy of technical aspects of renewable energy and art in public space since the very beginning.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
The ground-breaking creative entrepreneurial programme Education In Place of War (IPOW) empowers the world's most marginalised communities to create sustainable income and social change through their creativity.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
elCASC is an urban festival that aims to investigate and transform the social and urban fabric, delivering a series of low-cost architectural, artistic and socio-cultural interventions that relate to the urban renewal process.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
Empower Parents is an educational community of families with children with ASD, professionals and cultural spaces. Through cooperative work among these agents, it seeks to make an impact in the community in order to raise social awareness regarding the reality of people with ASD.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017Winner 2017
ePublisher aims to contribute towards audience development by promoting innovative ways of publishing poems by professional and amateur poets, helping them to reach new audiences and improving overall access to poetry. Project partners from Lithuania, Finland, Poland and Portugal used two distinctive methodologies to achieve these goals: the first, multimedia and online tools used as an innovative way of writing and promoting poetry, and the second, through presenting poems in a traditional way to the general public. The partnership developed an eportal www.epublisher-platform.eu. Anyone from any country in the world, writing poetry, can join the ePublisher community. Events to promote poetry and international poetry festivals were organised in all project partner countries.
Shortlist 2019
The EU2016 arts & design programme ‘Europe by People, the Future of Everyday Living’ looked into contemporary social issues through arts and design, by providing solutions for everyday living and by being a canvas on which creatives and citizens painted a picture of Europe’s future.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017Winner 2017
Fontus and Airo are water bottles capable of harvesting water from the air. The system introduces a solution for the severe issue of drought and water unsafe which many parts of the world suffer from.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Understanding itself as a revolutionary protest movement that aims to subvert and finally beat capitalism with its own means, RLF is a think tank, experiment and political work of art.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
The Healthcare Innovation Exchange (HELIX) Centre faces the most pressing healthcare challenges through combining user-centred design expertise and scientific know-how to identify patient-centred solutions.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Facing the ongoing crisis in Spain HOME BACK HOME proposes a platform for analysis, monitoring and treatment of new models of domestic living.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Hostanartist is an online exchange platform that gives property owners the opportunity to share their space with artists. Artists will offer a work of art to create a unique link between themselves and their hosts.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
IC is about developing the best online researching tool concerning informal knowledge, citizen agreements and non-directed urban processes. What we do is taxonomize intelligent urban solutions, upload and share them, take feedbacks and organize actions with local agents to prototype architectures.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
Julie's Bicycle was set up to inspire action on climate change. In the context of the Paris Agreement and a limit of 1.5 degrees of warming our focus is on the public positioning of climate change and the environment by bringing the full force of the creative community to accelerate change.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
’Do we know each other?’ is an interdisciplinary project that works with and for people with dementia to improve their quality of life. 13 students and their co-designers (caregivers, relatives and/or people with dementia) developed products and services in a very close participatory design process.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017
Already during the founding of kitev, its members had the vision of restoring the historical tower of the main station Oberhausen and transforming its infrastructure for new use.
NICE AwardShortlist 2014
LxFactory is a project that takes advantage of the structure of a large factory, no longer in use, and develops a plan to reuse this space for cultural purposes.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
Makeright introduces creativity/restorative processes to prison industries through design-thinking education. The reframing of inmates’ behaviour through the design of anti-theft bags is intended to make a social contribution by raising income for charity and building inmate skills, e.g. empathy and resilience.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017Winner 2017
Makerversity is Europe's most exciting community of pioneering startups with campuses in the heart of London and Amsterdam.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
The aim of the multi-genre cultural centre is to provide space for the creation and presentation of elements of contemporary culture and art.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
MyData 2018 is Europe’s leading international conference on human-centric personal data. It is the third annual conference of MyData movement and MyData Global network, held in Helsinki, Finland. The core idea of MyData is that we, you and I should have an easy way to see where data about us goes, specify who can use it, and alter these decisions over time. Only ethically sound approaches to personal data can bring value and wellbeing to citizens, businesses, governments, and civil society. MyData 2018 conference facilitates dialogue and collective action across the whole spectrum of expertise (business, legal, technical and societal) to implement our vision of a fair digital society.
Shortlist 2019
The game takes place in the fantasy world of Neto, destroyed by the effects of corruption, and our hero, Sevan, discovers a diary left by his grandfather, that holds the clue to the cause of the corruption many years ago. Players must solve the corruption problem to see the world blossom once again.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017Winner 2017
Oberhaus is an artistic approach to upgrading a neglected building and improving the housing situation in the city centre. It focuses on fostering intercultural dialogue between current and future neighbours to create a better life.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017
9 young Basques reflect on, get to know and recognize the violent past of the Basque Country, they interview citizens and the interviews are then used to construct the memory of the conflict through the testimonies which are posted in the web and the documentary showing the experience.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
OuiShare Fest is a unique and playful space for interaction, collaboration, and exploration.
It is a three-day conference with a ’TED meets Burning Man feel’, as an attendee once described it. Our speaker line-up of known and undiscovered pioneers will push you outside your comfort zone.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017
PlanEt constitutes an open-source device for collecting and visualising biological data from plants in order to increase the citizen's consciousness about the role of plants in citites. The data can be used for monitoring and moderating urban and spatial conditions.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Dortmund 2014/15: 1 year, 7 artists, 500 participants and 100.000 “Chances”. It is an experiment in art and society, introducing a creative currency as innovative tool for sustainable urban development, supporting participation, community service and social creativity.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
Refugees’ Kitchen is a mobile kitchen, developed through collaboration between artists and refugees. It was planned, built and operated collectively and now travels from city to city, bringing people together through cooking & eating.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017
ROC21 is an approach to designing life in refugee shelters, based on experiences from the open source movement. The goal is to transfer our social tools to inhabitants and share the learnings accross Europe.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
ROOM IN A BOX addresses the mobility which the Generation Y, living and working in global markets, is confronted with by focusing on furniture and interior design made of paper-based materials like corrugated cardboard.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Smart Citizen's aim is the empowerment of citizens through the development of bottom-up digital tools under an open-source philosophy.
NICE AwardShortlist 2015
Smarter Than You Think is a campaign aiming to raise awareness about dyslexia and promoting understanding and empathy towards this condition through the concept of design.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
The project Ware Mensch was nominated as a special guest and presented with the nominees at the N.I.C.E. exhibition.The goal of the project is to open the eyes of the public and to raise awareness of the problem of human trafficking.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
The Internet of Clothes is a wardrobe where each garment is digitally tagged to know if it has been worn. Clothes Tweet their owner asking to be worn. If a garment is ignored it will automatically contact a charity to be collected.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
Designed as an interactive performance installation, THE MACHINE TO BE ANOTHER is an art investigation on the relation of identity and empathy, taking the open-source form of a creative commons tool to promote tolerance.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
Art to be touched at Prado Museum. Endorsed by ONCE, the oldest blind people organization in the world, Didú proposes a new dimension of the image that opens the doors of the art world for the blind.
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016
Unperfekthaus is a privately owned 5.000 sqm restaurant/event location/hotel project.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
URBANATIX is all about beat, speed and city heat. Authentic street arts – tricking, dance, parkour, biking and beat boxing – are combined with show artistry in one on- and off-stage concept. Breathtaking shows and a publicly accessible training centre for young street artists and their followers have established URBANATIX as a multi-cultural focal point in the region's cultural urban life.
NICE AwardShortlist 2017Winner 2017
URBANAUTS is a new generation of city hotels. Innovative accommodation for modern nomads is created through the revitalisation of empty shops as individual four-star hotel rooms, so called Street Lofts.
Shortlist 2014Winner 2014
The project Waves of Energy is an innovative approach to citizen participation in public cultural policies which aims at increasing the acceptance of culture in society.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
For six months, 10 design studios and 10 material researchers at the forefront of their fields embarked upon an extraordinary collaboration. Combining insights and technology from the cutting edge of material science with the curiosity and creative vision of design, each partnership has set out to translate often complex research into visually engaging forms, and to explore the potential of new, non-commercialised materials to solve the design challenges of tomorrow. From game-changing innovations in bioplastics to new applications for naturally abundant materials, the latest leaps in artificial intelligence to the ancient processes at work in living systems, each of these 10 projects presents an intriguing – and often beautiful – vision of what our material future might look like.
Shortlist 2019
Wikihouse is an open source building system making it possible for everyone to design, print and assemble beautiful, low-cost, low-energy and high-performance houses according to their individual needs.
Shortlist 2015Winner 2015
World Wide Dream Web is a social network for dream sharing that creates interactive Dream Maps. What do our cities dream about when the sun sets? What is that universal planetary language we all share?
Shortlist 2016Winner 2016