Thomas Laureyssens

Research

Appropriation

In 2005 I glued white stickers onto a city wall: a chopped-up pedestrian crossing turning the corner, Pedestrian Levitation. One day I watched a young girl trying to walk up the stickers, jumping, in a way so distinctly personal and playful that for a moment she merged with the work. The stickers were static; what she did with them was alive. That moment set the course for my practice: I wanted to make interventions people could make their own.

This became the core of my PhD in the arts, The Appropriation of Interactive Interventions within Urban Social Contexts (LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven, 2022, supervised by Andrew Vande Moere and Nel Janssens). Its starting point, in the dissertation's own words:

“As urban technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent, it is of the utmost importance that they are not only deployed for the benefit and use of governments and corporations, but are also open for citizens to use and appropriate for the good of themselves and their communities.”

The research proposes appropriability as an explicit design goal — “the appropriability of interactive civic interventions as a critical design goal”. Through seven urban interventions I (co-)designed and deployed myself, I developed the lens of Portals and Paths of Appropriation. Portals are the material, visible entry points through which passers-by familiarise themselves with a work, with what it is for and with the people already involved. Paths are the trajectories along which those passers-by grow into another role: from participant to champion, and sometimes to someone who makes it possible for others.

The seven interventions are:

The lens has since been taken up beyond the dissertation. Martijn de Waal, professor of Civic Interaction Design in Amsterdam and general chair of the Media Architecture Biennale 2020, devoted his contribution to Provocations on Media Architecture (Set Margins’, 2023) to it. He reads interventions there as a seed from which social gatherings, discussions and communities can grow, asks whether such a germination can be designed as well, and invites designers to appropriate portals and paths in turn and build them into concrete design elements.

Why this matters to commissioners: interventions, installations and participation trajectories don't succeed because they are perfectly controlled, but because people can make them their own. That insight steers all my work, from museum games to co-creation workshops.

Further reading