The design turns ideas into reality and every year students at design and architecture universities from all over the world meet in an international workshop: MEDS ”Meeting of Design Students”. Different people, different cultures, different languages and different design departments are joining one place, for two weeks, to create new projects with fresh ideas.
The excellent news for Romania is that the capital Bucharest was chosen to hold the MEDS workshop in 2016. The other competitors of Romania were Italy and Croatia. The winning project was made by Diana Stoicescu and Smaranda Ilie, two former students at ”Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest. The Romanian team also includes other three members: Sandra Lup, Miruna Darie and Catalin Grigore, all former students of the same university.
Diana Stoicescu: ”We presented Bucharest as a city of contrasts and Romania, as a rich country geographic, cultural and artistic, despite the fact that most of the people are suffering from poverty and as a nation we hardly protect our environment. So what our team wishes for is to develop a bigger desire for recycling and to keep alive the Romanian culture that we will share with the young students who will come to our country. This workshop will bring together 250 artists from all around the world and the event will include exhibitions of furniture, photography and much more. And all of this will help improving our country’s image in Europe and worldwide. This is the first time when Romania will host such an event. An event that will bring long-term benefits. And the final exhibition will be open to the public, for anyone who wants to admire the projects.”
From ”Alice in design land” to ”eco-design”
MEDS ‘Meeting of Design Students’ was created with the aim to join all design departments together: architecture, interior architecture, industrial design, graphic design and all other departments of design. The first MEDS edition was held in Alanya (Turkey), in 2010, and the theme of the workshop was ”Alice in design land”. Next was Istanbul (Turkey), in 2011, and Ljubljana (Slovenia), in 2012 where 250 European students took part in the event. In 2013 the reunion was held in Lisbon (Portugal) where students from 30 countries gathered. And then, in 2014, the host was Dublin, the capital of Ireland. The final design projects were admired by tourists and local people downtown the city for one month.
UPDATE:
This year MEDS workshop took place in the small city of Tara, Serbia, in a mountain area. The theme was eco-design and the students built all kinds of structures only by rudimentary methods, with no machines and no alternative technology.
Photo credit: MEDS (www.meds-workshop.com), Facebook.