CIAC TALKS
“CIAC TALKS” NEW SEASON PREMIERES TODAY
The first episode of the new season of the CIAC Talks interview podcast is now available on the CIACmedia YouTube channel. The episode features Nanthana Boonla-or, a professor and director of the Social and Cultural Innovation Lab at the School of Architecture and Design (SoA+D) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), discussing “Sustainable Design, Innovation, and Cultural Wisdom.”
The Thai professor has been involved in numerous community development projects in Asia, ranging from research in design and social and cultural innovation to the design of handmade products, especially textile practices.
The conversation with Nanthana Boonla-or focuses on the themes of sustainable design, technology, cultural wisdom, project-based learning, and social impact through initiatives such as Cultural Mapping: Collaborative Tool to Leverage and Yer-de-ner: Fostering New Generation of Cultural (The Leaf Plate), developed by professors and students of SoA+D/KMUTT in Thai-Karen ethnic communities in the provinces of Ratchburi-Petchaburi, Thailand.
Nanthana Boonla-or and other professors from the Social and Cultural Innovation Lab at SoA+D/KMUTT have been dedicated to training designers and creative professionals with socio-cultural awareness and environmental responsibility in the Thai territory.
CIAC Talks Bangkok was recorded in November 2023 through the Postgraduate Program in Design at the Jacob Jensen Design Office/KMUTT Knowledge Exchange for Innovation Center (KX) in Bangkok, Thailand. The series was a collaboration between the CIAC/UAlg audiovisual team and SoA+D/KMUTT. The interviews were produced and conducted by journalist, multimedia creator, FCT-CIAC research fellow, and Digital Media-Art Ph.D. student Juliana Wexel, under the supervision of the creator and coordinator of CIAC Talks Bangkok, Mirian Tavares.
The episode “Sustainable Design, Innovation, and Cultural Wisdom” with Nanthana Boonla-or also features images kindly provided by the @GMM25Thailand channel, taken during the development of the Cultural Mapping and Yer-de-ner projects in Thai-Karen ethnic communities.
All participants in the CIAC Talks Bangkok season are closely associated with SoA+D as professors, visiting artists, and alumni, invited by one of the scientific coordinators of Cultural Adventures, Nigel Power (SoA+D/KMUTT).
The upcoming episodes of the CIAC Talks Bangkok series will feature interviews with Cedric Arnold, a Franco-English visual artist, filmmaker, and photographer based in Bangkok; Nat Setthana, a Thai visual artist based in Finland; Eiji Sumi, a Japanese artist and lighting designer based in Bangkok; Unchalee Anantawat, a Thai graphic designer and creator of the Speedy Grandma project.
This initiative is part of the ongoing scientific and artistic research project, Cultural Adventures. The project establishes interactions between Faro and Bangkok, exploring historical, contemporary, cultural, documentary, fictional, factual, and symbolic relationships between two distinct cultural contexts. Cultural Adventures is developed by CIAC in collaboration with the School of Architecture and Design at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (SoA+D), in the areas of visual communication and digital art, and is scientifically coordinated by Bruno Mendes da Silva and Nigel Power.
This work is funded by National Funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P., under the project UIDP/04019/2020.
