The working field of designers has fundamentally changed. Designers now operate within a hybrid society in which technological, social, and cultural conditions are constantly shifted and negotiated. Communication no longer follows fixed formats or static hierarchies. As a result, the value of the designer lies not only in visualizing messages, but increasingly in organizing, structuring, and giving meaning to complex flows of information and social interaction.

Facing Spaces approaches communication as a narrative practice. The city functions as both subject and working field: a dense, layered environment that reflects the complexities of contemporary visual culture and modern life.
Students engage directly with the urban landscapes, working on site and researching spatial, social, and visual conditions - often those that remain unnoticed, hidden, or taken for granted.
During each workshop, participants are trained to observe, analyse, and register these conditions with precision, empathy and curiosity. The ability to read complexity - through the senses as much as through analysis - is treated as a core design skill.

Each workshop is built around a specific theme and explored through a unique, process-based design method. The city is treated as a found object: a context to be experienced, understood, and questioned before it is judged.
Participants act as 'forensic researchers of meaning', when locating, exploring, and interpreting signals in public space. Workshops apply a range of investigative design tools that reinforce one another, such as photographic scanning, creative writing, mapping, building visual essays, and performative or sensory exercises.
The method is hands-on and immersive. Students move, observe, listen, smell, discuss, collect, test, and reflect. This approach expands the professional horizon of (graphic) design students and provides a solid working methodology that can be integrated into both academic studies and future design practices.

Each workshop results in a concrete design outcome and (collective) presentation that reflects the underlying research process. Collected material is analyzed, filtered, and distilled to its essence.
Deliverables vary depending on the theme and context of the workshop and may take the form of routing systems, maps, signage, logo systems and brand identities, publications, posters, installations, or other spatial or visual narratives.
The outcomes may also emerge as mainly experimental or research-driven, like through visual essays, spatial narratives, alternative guidebooks, annotated walks, performative interventions, archives of found materials, audio or sensory mappings, temporary publishing formats, or hybrid formats that move between documentation and fiction.
Each outcome translates collected observations into a specific perspective on the city—distilling complexity into forms that are readable, experiential, and open to interpretation.

The workshops by Facing Spaces address subjects that matter today. They are explicitly hands-on, situational, and embedded in real-world contexts. Learning takes place through direct engagement, collective research, experimentation, and critical reflection.
The program offers an proactive mode of teaching alongside established curricula - by organizing didactic terms alternatively, and by placing equal emphasis on analysis, associative thinking, making and experiencing.
At its core, Facing Spaces offers individual students a unique method of observing, analyzing, and structuring (visual/social) complexity. These process and dialogue based working skills can be applied across their future projects, contexts and (collective) professional practices.

Steffen Maas is a graphic designer, illustrator, and photographer based in the Netherlands and the Caribbean. He studied Illustration and Graphic Design and has built a diverse practice encompassing exhibitions, publications, and public art projects: steffenmaas.nl In addition to his independent and commissioned work, he is involved in various cultural initiatives and platforms. LinkedIn.

Maarten Verweij works at the intersection of visual communication, brand identity, and cultural storytelling. As co-founder of the creative studio Sinds 1416, he develops distinctive design solutions that help brands and institutions position themselves with clarity and character.
Alongside his studio practice, Maarten is director and curator of the art institution Machinery of Me, and a founding partner of Ice to Eskimo, a strategic F&B agency.
He regularly shares his approach to design as a form of research and exploration, at the invitation of universities and cultural institutions in the Netherlands and abroad. LinkedIn.