Changing and protesting by design - Bandung Creative City Forum

Bandung Creative City Forum (BCCF) is a cross-community forum and organisation for support of creative communities in Bandung. The organisation aims to make Bandung as one of the influential player in the urban creativity. [1] Currently, it is an independent organisation based on activities focused on supporting, education and development of different communities. This platform organises networking events, educates local entrepreneurs through workshops or seminars, helps to build collaboration between different communities and intervenes public space.

BCCF team. Image source: Bandungcreative.id [1]

BCCF is also influenced by urban acupuncture concept[2] and design thinking methodology, which they use for future strategies.[3] During my interview with Tita Larasati, Chairman of BCCF, (January 2018), she has mentioned their four main activities:

1. Simple Institute (sharing expertize, classes, workshops, seminars and creative knowledge)

2. Design Action (workshops based on design thinking methodology, where they cope with Bandung city challenges and problems)

3. Kampung Kreatif (engagement creativity of villages in the city)

4. Helar festival (festival that lasts for a month, created by Bandung communities in different areas)

Bandung creative city forum is living design every day

BCCF is an example of the movement, which has a real impact on the shape of the city. The interview was held with Tita Larasati and we were mostly talking about organisation and activities of creative cities. Personally, I was really impressed by the engagement and impactful actions that they are making toward a vision of Bandung as a better place for supporting communities and their creativity.

“BCCF started in 2008 as a form of activisms. Here we had really potential people and that time, we didn’t think that the city would provide what we needed which was space to gather together. We’ve started to find our similarities within goals and activities and finally, we have decided to make everything under one umbrella to show the government that we exist. First, we made a month event where each community used their own resources and people saw a big potential in it.”

Tita Larasati. Image source: Twitter Batik Fractal

The activism of BCCF was visible from the beginning of their activities. Once, there was a case, where forest, which belongs to the city, should be turned into property area. As Tita mentioned: “BCCF is protesting by design.” They’ve started to make a partnership with one conference for children and youth. They placed activities and programme to this forest, to attract attention and also show the potential of the place. The organisation additionally made a forest walk and bike sharing there. They ended up with 400 bicycles. By active approach, they have protected the forest and furthermore, it was a beginning of the bike sharing in the city.

BCCF is using the method of design thinking as a creative strategy to developed solutions according to human needs. During our interview, we were discussing the starting point and impact of design thinking activities within an organisation. The way of applied design thinking was in their case really natural, without any radical implementation of this method. “We had conference Arte-polis[4] which is an annual conference about place making. I was introducing Bandung and our BCCF activities to one of the speaker and he was asking me: Do you know that what are you doing is design thinking? As a designer, I live design every day, so for me all our actions were very natural. That was the first time that I heard about design thinking. Then we got deeper into topic and we were invited to talk about how we apply design thinking in D.confestival in 2012 in Potsdam, Germany[5]. We also started our design thinking workshop activities, which last until now.“

Design action. Image source: Instagram BCCF

Another activity where BCCF is involved is Design Action. During those workshops with participants from different areas of interest, they solve the city problems. They collaborate with the major of the city (that time Ridvan Kamil) so therefore the programme has real results in the city. “Design Action is responding to what city and people need.”

I couldn’t skip the question about creativity and what does it mean for Tita. She gave me her personal view of creativity: “Creativity means to be restless. You are never satisfied with where you are now. You always need to find new things. Therefore we shouldn’t be annoyed when someone imitates our work, it means your work is good enough and you just need to find something else.”

More information:

BCCF website: http://bandungcreative.id/main/main/about_me/

BCCF facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BandungCreativeCityForum/about/

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Sources:

[1] https://creativeconomy.britishcouncil.org/blog/14/06/30/bandung-creative-city-forum/

[2] Marco Casagrande - Urban acupuncture is an urban environmentalism theory which combines urban design with traditional Chinese medical theory of acupuncture

[3] https://bandungcreative.id/tentang-kami/

[4] http://arte-polis.id

[5] https://issuu.com/d-school/docs/d_confestival-the_book/106 and https://dconfestival.hpi.de

Image sources:

[1] http://bandungcreative.id/main/main/about_me/

[2] https://twitter.com/batikfractal/status/947112683475816448

[3] https://www.instagram.com/p/BbecyrzhRvC/?taken-by=bccfbdg