Challenges of the Anthropocene

Dr. Flavia Alice Mameli is a postdoctoral research fellow at the HfK Bremen and has been awarded one of the coveted Walter Benjamin Scholarships from the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Dear Flavia, please give us an overview of your career.

Before my academic career, I worked for several years as a freelance product designer and, among other things, as a consultant in the Berlin start-up scene. I originally studied industrial design at the Berlin University of the Arts.

In Berlin, I supported several digital companies in their start-up phase and worked for others as a creative manager. In addition to working on topics such as neighborhood, mental health, and e-learning, I learned a great deal about entrepreneurship, organization, the digital and physical setup of new working environments, and team constellations, which is still incredibly useful to me today.

After that, I gained three years of experience in organization and project acquisition for a Berlin landscape architecture firm. In the course of this work, I came into contact with open space planning and urban development topics related to participatory design, which inspired me to choose my dissertation topic.

Using a discourse-analytical and ethnographic case study of Berlin's Park am Gleisdreieck, I analyzed the everyday practices of appropriation and design of urban open spaces and examined the paradoxes that designers encounter in the process.

In 2018, I was accepted as a doctoral student and full-time scholarship holder at the University of Kassel in the field of open space planning, and in July 2022—after two years of pandemic and three children born in the meantime—I was able to complete my doctorate.

2022 was a particularly exciting year because I went to Indonesia with my family on relatively short notice to live and work there. We will return to Europe in the middle of this year (2025). 

Why did you choose the HfK Bremen for your research, and what distinguishes the work at the HfK for you?

I got to know the HfK as a place that is open to experimental teaching and research concepts, which are particularly interesting to me, and I already had a personal connection through Annette Geiger (professor of design theory and history at the HfK Bremen since 2009). Among other things, she co-supervised my dissertation, and I had already accepted two teaching assignments in the Integrated Design program in the past.

The idea of making “sustainable” design in Indonesia and Southeast Asia the subject of my postdoctoral research came to me quite quickly because I came into contact early on with a fairly extensive network of start-ups, designers, and academics working in this field.

A lot is happening there, but we in the Global North know very little about it (yet), and that should change!

Can you please give us a few details about your research project, including how it fits into the current state of research, possible practical applications, and future prospects?

My research project, which I will carry out as part of the Walter Benjamin Scholarship, aims to systematically examine discourses on resilience and sustainability, for example in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, within university design and architecture education. The focus is on how sustainability, circularity, and resilience are taught as concepts and what new methods and practices are being developed at universities to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. A global perspective that includes not only the Global North but also the Global South is particularly important to me.  The results will be published in a monograph and a digital map, and ideally will promote exchange and cooperation in international design and architecture education.

What are your next steps after the fellowship?

I can't answer that yet. As things stand today, I, or rather we as a family, would like to move back to Indonesia or Southeast Asia, but how that can be combined with a new project or job is still completely unclear. My “second self” as a practicing designer is also still working on a project related to Indonesia.

The fact is: as wonderful as the freedom of temporary project work is, long-term planning must remain flexible—an immense challenge, especially for academics or freelance creatives with children!

The Walter Benjamin Program is still a relatively young scholarship program—what motivated you to apply, and what does the funding mean to you?

During my dissertation, I took part in various continuing education courses, including a 200-hour course on third-party funding acquisition and management. That's where I first heard about the Walter Benjamin Program. With my interdisciplinary profile and my experience in both the practical and academic worlds, individual support as a researcher is exactly right for me—I love working independently and autonomously, whether creatively or analytically. I am very grateful for the freedom in terms of content that the Walter Benjamin Scholarship gives me.