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Thierry Brunfaut is a creative director and one of the founding partners of Base Design, the international network of branding studios based in Brussels, New York, Geneva, and Melbourne. He is the author of the renowned 5–Minute poster series, a professor, and a regular speaker at design and branding conferences around the world. Thierry bears a striking and seemingly contradictory resemblance both to Moby and Kermit the frog.
Base Design is an international network of studios that creates brands with cultural impact. Located in Brussels, New York, Geneva, and Melbourne, our team of creatives, 
strategists, and digital experts design and develop simple yet powerful brands, and build unique personalities.
Base knows that branding is first and foremost about people, so specializes in helping companies – whether new or established; large or small – to become human-centric brands with vision, clarity, and empathy.
Founded in the early ‘90s, the company has evolved continuously over the years and is now steered by partners across all four studios. Clients include Apple, The New York Times, The Institut Français de la Mode, la Fondation Cartier, Studio Brussel, MoMA, Bob Dylan Center, Dior Galerie, La Monnaie Opera, IFAW, The Prince Estate, Orior, Bozar, NY Mets, Caran d’Ache, Caudalie, the JFK Terminal 4, and many more.

Thierry Brunfaut 

Thierry Brunfaut is a graphic designer, therefore learned graphic design. Also, Thierry is an entrepreneur. However, he did not know anything about people management or human resources. So, with his partners, Thierry made ALL the possible mistakes you can make while running a creative business. Until the day they decided to redesign Base, their own company. Thierry will share this journey with the Base teams, how they changed and implemented new processes and rituals while maintaining personal inspiration and accelerated creativity in their four studios in Brussels, New York, Geneva, and Melbourne. Moreover, he will also give you one or two simple but effective bits of advice &#8230;

How to create a studio culture

Theatre

Base Design

Kathleen Siminyu is an AI Researcher who has focused on Natural Language Processing for African Languages. She works at Mozilla as a Machine Learning Fellow to support the development of a Kiswahili Common Voice dataset and to build speech transcription models for end use cases in the agricultural and financial domains. In her NLP research, Kathleen has previously worked on speech transcription for Luhya languages and contributed to machine translation for Kenyan languages as part of Masakhane.

Kathleen Siminyu

A deep look at Mozilla Common Voice’s Kiswahili work – an initiative to bring a vital language of East Africa online, and to make voice technology accessible to Kiswahili speakers. The talk will cover the mission, challenges, and successes of building an open-source Kiswahili speech data set + community of contributors.

Honoring Kiswahili through technology and community

Merging the latest technology with traditional crafts, Sophie’s creations explore themes of body image, modification, evolution and transhumanism, whilst promoting positive conversations around disability and celebrating body diversity.
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Sophie de Oliveira Barata

The alternative limb project was found by Sophie de Oliveira Barata using the unique medium of prosthetics to create highly stylised wearable art pieces.
Drawing on her own specialist skills in making ultra realistic looking limbs, Sophie collaborates with specialists in fields such as 3D modelling, electronics and cutting edge technology, and works in conjunction with in-house prosthetist Chris Parsons at Design Prosthetics. Clients have included Paralympic athletes, musicians, models, performing artists and video game companies.

The alternative limb project

Immersive Garden has been recognized as Studio of the year 2017, 2018 and 2020 by AWWWARDS. Our vision is focused on crafting in-house meaningful concepts and stories thanks to digital experiences. This translates in websites but also installations, apps or any media that is relevant. Immersive Garden’s focus on details allows to bring high-end experiences that merge innovation in design and in technology to offer a powerful digital presence to brands. Our experience and dedication has brought us to collaborate with international clients: they reach out to us from all parts of the globe, leading us to have 75% of our collaborations with companies abroad.

Immersive Garden

Neil Mendoza’s work combines sculpture, electronics and software to bring inanimate objects and spaces to life. By combining found objects with technology in unexpected ways, the different elements of his work can be looked at from a new perspective. He explores themes of the absurd, the humorous, the futile and the surreal. He has exhibited work and talked at conferences around the world, taught classes on art and technology at UCLA and Stanford and co-founded the art collective “is this good?”.

Neil Mendoza

In this talk, Neil will share some of his thoughts on using technology to create artworks that live outside the screen, blurring the line between physical and the digital.

Screens and Machines

Elliot Woods (UK) is a digital media artist from Manchester UK.
He graduated with a Masters from the School of Physics and Astronomy and entered the arts following the founding of studio Kimchi and Chips in 2009 where he currently tests alternative relationships between images and reality. Here he participates in conceptual and technical design of projects, and develops techniques in computer vision, machine learning and robotics. His works reveal the implicit nature of systems therein suggesting to audiences revelatory experiences about nature and reality. He has created large scale light field art installations which draw floating images of the sun out of sunlight, or moons from 600 calibrated projector beams. Elliot has contributed to the openFrameworks and VVVV creative coding platforms and has released over 100 open source libraries for free on GitHub.

Elliot Woods

The work of Kimchi and Chips deals with the notion that images are physical representations of imaginary forms, and that the technology of images therefore reshapes and filters our collective imagination.

Images that change the way we see

Kimchi and Chips

SNASK is your future romance. A creative agency of misfit geniuses conquering the world through fine lookin&#8217; design and real emotions. They seek to challenge conservative frameworks and they do it with their backs straight, supported by their unbreakable values. They don&#8217;t cower away from the challenge, as they see that the magic lies within the unexplored. In order to be great &#8211; you have to be brave and bold. In order to be real &#8211;  you have to stand up for your opinions and beliefs. And that is Snask &#8211; brave, bold and real. They excel at branding, design and film and refuse to do anything else than what they see as world class. They are doctors of disturbance, wizards of disruption and spokesmen of disobedience. They take on the responsibility to stay engaged, give a damn, and strive for empathy. There is a short word for this assumption of responsibility: Snask.

SNASK

Snask will walk you through their view on life, their view on branding and their view on conservatism and why change is fucking inevitable. Hold on to your hats, because here comes your future romance!

Change is Fu*king Inevitable

Aparna Rao, of duo Pors &amp; Rao since 2004, works between their studio in Bangalore and lab in Zurich. They make objects and installations often incorporating physical animation and responsive behaviors, to evoke a sense of a being. Many of their works are conceived as a kind of &#8216;being&#8217; with basic behavior traits such as shyness, fatigue and dependency; highlighting involuntary aspects of human behavior and relationships. She also runs the Robotics Aesthetics &amp; Usability Center at ETHZ, to freely share the robotic tools extracted from the artworks with other non technical users.

Aparna Rao

Pors & Rao

Artificial Rome

We will take a stroll down memory lane and do a timewarp thru the past 25 years. We shed light on the origins of the metaverse, which seems astonishingly closely interconnected to our own past. We will showcase some of the work that led to our involvement with the metaverse, we will highlight the limitless opportunities, but we will also voice some concerns about the current state of things.

Creating the Metaverse since 1996

Gabriele Rossi is a co-founder of Accurat, a boutique data-driven design consultancy with offices in Milan and New York. There, he directs a multi-disciplinary team of 40 designers, researchers, and engineers working on data visualization and digital experience innovation challenges at the forefront of the most disparate industries. Over 11 years, he has led the Accurat team on more than 600 ground-breaking collaborations with clients including the United Nations, Google, MoMA, IBM, Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation, TED, Starbucks, World Economic Forum, and Adobe, among many others.

Gabriele Rossi

After running a firm operating at the intersection of design, technology and data for more than 10 years, Gabriele takes stock of all the hard-learned truths, disproven myths, dangerous habits, and healthy discomforts encountered while making contrasting approaches work together. Drawing from Accurat’s experience on more than 500 projects combining art and science, the talk tries to frame a pragmatic perspective to answer the questions we all keep asking ourselves: Are interdisciplinary teams worth the effort? How to find your “secret sauce”? How —and why— does a team grow? What’s the endgame?

The things I wish I knew BEFORE starting a data design studio

Accurat

Guided by an emotional approach, Berlin based studio onformative constantly searches for new forms of creative expression. Through an experimental practice they create meaningful digital art works to question the relationship between humans and technology. Their outcomes and interpretations take on varying forms across media through self-initiated and commissioned works that range from interactive media installations, generative corporate designs and dynamic visuals to data-driven narratives. Works by onformative have been exhibited across Europe as well as in North America, Australia and China.

Cedric Kiefer

When talking about the creation of digital art, we believe that technology is both a tool and parameter. It is enabling and adding new dimensions to what is possible. At the same time, technology sets limitations – which can serve as an inspiration as well. What we find in our practice is that it&#8217;s all about co-creation. Cedric will reflect on the role of the designer and how it evolves when computers end up taking over even more design tasks. Regarding data as an inspiration and A.I. as a muse, we can create an interesting interplay to integrate into our work.

About inspiration and co-creation in the age of data & AI

onformative

More information on the conferences very soon

More info soon

More than 20 names to come

Conferences

More than 35 conferences about creative coding, data visualization, artificial intelligence, branding and strategy, VR/AR, bioart, design, research and more.

COnferenCes

Decay

Le Pavillon

Pepa Ivanova

Part animal documentary, part erotic film and part science fiction film, Cindy Coutant&#8217;s high definition camera follows the (fictional) day of a group of snails. The gastropods, the stars of this short film, are bathed in a light that is sometimes pink, sometimes blue. From sunrise to sunset, the snails advance in a slow ascent, out of time and following the Earth&#8217;s axis. Télédésir, a thirty-minute film, follows their nonchalant rhythm and love-making. 
The animal reproduction takes on a theatrical, even supernatural dimension, enhanced by the soundtrack of Théo Pozoga, a musician and DJ also known as &#8220;Strip Steve&#8221;.
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Télédésir

Cindy Coutant

Econtinuum invites us to dive into the ecosystem of trees. This work is a collaboration between the artist Thijs Biersteker and the Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso. Before our eyes, it creates a conversation between two trees as it might happen underground, showing how the two species can warn each other of danger, how they share nutrients and how they learn from each other. As visitors enter the system, they realise that the roots respond to their presence and learn from their habits, forming a futuristic ecosystem of shared knowledge. 
The system is equipped with two sensors. Each one represents a tree and captures data on humidity, pressure, temperature, CO2 and the level of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in the exhibition space. These sensors are combined with artificial intelligence that mimics inter-tree communication from a large network of scientific data.

Econtinuum

Thijs Biersteker

Japanese artist Aki Inomata draws a parallel between the behaviour of hermit crabs that change their shells when they get too big or are simply chased away by another species, and that of humans and their migratory movements. 
The artist started with shells used by hermit crabs, which she scanned to reproduce an exact copy with the addition of urban landscapes, all 3D printed. 
For both Aki Inomata and Thomas Thwaites, their work is an exploration and displacement of our perception of others and ourselves by observing the living.

Why Not Hand Over a "Shelter" to Hermit Crabs?

Aki Inomata

The bacteria that live on your body outnumber your own cells.  While we have 23,000 genes, our microbiome can contain up to 2 million unique bacterial genes.  There is a lot of emerging research on the role of all the microorganisms cohabit our body and personal traits, such as mood, behavior and health.  These findings unseat our relationship with notions of identity and genetic determinism; do I exhibit certain traits because of genes I inherited, because of the environment I was raised in, or because of the biome I have acquired through a lifetime of kissing and touching? 
Kisses from the Future consists of a series of self portraits exploring a decentralized identity composed of the multi-species constellation that is a microbiome. This project examines the impact of microorganisms living in the body that impact mood and behavior- elements that we typically associate with a sense of “self”, but is co-made with other species.

Kisses from the future

Ani Liu

Thomas Thwaites is a British designer who, through the creation of his objects, explores the psychological and social impact of technologies. For over a year, he conducted research to prepare himself to spend three days living like a goat in the Swiss Alps. He built an exoskeleton to adapt his bipedal body to that of a quadruped, and created a prosthetic artificial stomach to allow him to feed on grass, just like a goat. For several days he lived among the herd, observing distinctions in the natural world that he had not previously perceived, and observing the world from new perspectives, in a desire to step out of himself and distance himself from an anthropocentric vision.

Goatman

Thomas Thwaites

In 25 woodworms, sound artist Zimoun captures the sounds emitted by 25 woodworms encased in a piece of bark. Using a simple device, a microphone placed above the bark, the artist makes the invisible presence of the living creatures audible to the human ear.

25 woodworms

In 25 woodworms, sound artist Zimoun captures the sounds emitted by 25 woodworms encased in a piece of bark. Using a simple device, a microphone placed above the bark, the artist makes the invisible presence of the living creatures audible to the human ear. 
The sound produced seems to follow its own swarm logic, but this is just an impression because it is actually random. Only animals like termites and ants follow their own logic; woodworms do not adopt this behaviour. Each one emits a unique sound sequence that is born purely of the moment. In 25 woodworms, some 20 individual sounds reveal themselves to us.

Zimoun

More information on the KIKK in Town very soon

More infos soon

KIKK in town

KIKK invades the whole city with an art exhibition in 20 different indoor and outdoor locations. Discover the city in a different way thanks to this journey including monumental and interactive installations!

Kikk in tOwn

ENTER.black is a young company bringing together two artists with a common goal: to make digital tangible by producing physical and hybrid artistic installations.

ENTER.black

The Metamorpheur is a personalized photocall that uses micromapping and an intuitive interface. A disruptive booth that projects evocative patterns on the faces of its guests, making them a part of the art piece. Alone or with others, spectators can select their favorite projections and collect their portraits through a web-app or instant printing.

The Metamorpheur

KIKK Market

ENTER.BLACK

At ODD our mission is to unlock the fun, inspiring, educational and therapeutic powers of music for everyone, through playful but powerful smart products.

ODD Ball is the first ball in the world to make music. It connects to the ODD App, where you can choose 100s of sounds from percussions, keys, guitars and more. You can play over your favorite artists using Spotify or Apple Music, record and create a full track, sample your voice and share your creations with your friends.
It works as a wireless MIDI controller and is sensitive to the intensity of the bounce. Every time you bounce, tap, slap, catch, spin or juggle the ball, the app will play a sound through the phone&#8217;s internal speaker or any headphone or speaker connected to the phone.

ODD Ball

Play and create music by simply bouncing a ball 

Born in 2015 during an educational workshop led by the Master ITER (Innovation and Territory) and the LabEx ITEM (Innovation and Mountain Territories), at the Institute of Alpine Geography in Grenoble, France, the Losonnante project was initiated by Sébastien Depertat, joined in 2017 by Thomas Bonnenfant.

Losonnante

Losonnante is an original sound installation in that it offers a bone conduction listening experience. The sound is therefore not projected into space through the air, it travels along the elbows, arms, hands to the ears.

Bone conduction audio terminals

La niche is a digital agency specializing in the collaborative design of relevant solutions to boost your growth. From project management to digital strategies, from interface design to user experience, from application development to maintenance, from SEO to online marketing, from data intelligence to reporting, our team of experts are at the forefront of all the areas of the digital world. Our involvement and our passion have led us to collaborate with many clients and help them design quality digital projects that make sense. In this way, La niche offers a strategic and operational partnership to ambitious digital startups.

La Niche

Digital Agency

Zafi Cycles is a start-up that manufactures wooden bicycle frames that are 100% made in Belgium. 
Manufacturing wooden bicycles combines technology and craftsmanship to create an exclusive and innovative product. Its technical qualities (performance and comfort) and its timeless aesthetics make it a unique object capable of satisfying the simple amateur or the experienced cyclist.
In fact, wood is a great engineering material because its cellular structure acts as a network of natural shock absorbers, absorbing road vibrations and making the ride extremely smooth. It therefore allows you to combine performance and pleasure.
The wood is sourced from local sustainably managed forests (including the Sonian Forest) and everything is done to minimise the ecological impact during production. Each bike is custom built and designed in Belgium.
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Zafi Cycles

Wooden bicycle frames that are 100% made in Belgium

Deloitte Digital combines industry intelligence, tech know-how, creativity, and a human-centric mindset to create end-to-end experiences. From frictionless, always-on experiences and platforms that deliver simple, accessible human utility, to branded products and services that convert prospects to lifelong customers, we amplify behaviors that fuel growth.

Deloitte

The Deloitte Digital team will showcase its rapid prototyping capabilities by giving visitors the opportunity to experience their latest Digital Twin. Through the lenses of an augmented reality headset, users will discover the relationship between traffic and air pollution in a city center, and will be able to interact with the data in real time to improve the daily lives of citizens.

Augmented Reality & Digital Twin

Elevating the human experience

EyeHarp Association is a social company with the mission of improving the quality of life of people with disabilities through music.
Our activity aims to generate positive change in the life of people with disabilities by artistic, social, and laboral inclusion.
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EyeHarp

EyeHarp is the first musical instrument that is played with the eyes or with head movements. It allows people with disabilities to learn and to play music without barriers. Designed with musicality in mind, EyeHarp offers the same expressive qualities as any traditional instrument. It adapts to the musical level and capabilities of each user, thus providing a tailored, accessible music playing experience.

Musical instrument played with eyes

Fabricar3v is an INTERREG FWVL (France-Wallonie-Vlanderen) project created in 2019 and having the ambition to develop a &#8220;low cost&#8221; process of metal additive manufacturing. Our objective is to allow the greatest number of structures to have access to the printing of metal parts for prototyping and production in small or medium series. The work carried out within the framework of the project is open source and the technology developed is based on &#8220;MIM-like&#8221; manufacturing (FDM printing of metal-filled granules), which is very easy to implement, unlike other processes currently available on the metal 3D printing market.
The developments made will give rise to a technology with the lowest possible purchase cost: The complete process is currently less than €10,000. This is 20 times less expensive than what is currently available on the market, making this process accessible to small and medium-sized businesses and FabLabs.

FabricAr3v

Open Source and Low Cost aim to facilitate the adoption of metal 3D printing by all industry players. By freeing ourselves from the constraints of industrial property and cost we wish to accelerate the development of this promising technology. The design and development of a technology like this is complex and the skills to be implemented are therefore very diverse: Fabricar3v is composed of a multidisciplinary consortium, bringing together all the skills needed to pursue the objectives we have set ourselves. The project is composed of 10 cross-border partners, led by the CNRS. We are thus combining know-how and expertise in five areas: additive metal manufacturing, mechanics, metal injection moulding, simulation and industrial property.

Metal 3D printing

IT4Anxiety aims to support the implementation of innovative solutions through start-ups with the objective of reducing the anxiety of patients suffering from mental disorders.

IT4Anxiety

The project focuses on three aspects:
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1/ Supporting the co-creation of innovative solutions, based on the needs of mental health users, families and professionals in the field of mental health;
2/ Developing the competence and confidence of the mental health users and professionals;
3/ Assisting the implementation of the best solutions to ensure long-term sustainability.
This partnership comprises start-ups, Information Technology companies, mental health institutions, research centers, mental health users’ and families’ associations, psychiatric hospitals, universities and public authorities.

The Project

Blended Therapies

About 40 projects will be showcased from all over the word, all curated by us.

More names soon

Market

The Market is the place where you will discover the unique and innovative projects of talented Belgian and international entrepreneurs. On the program: a selection of innovative objects to handle, to test before everyone else. 