Dusty, noisy, annoying and irritating. State of dissatisfaction is a common phenomenon caused by unresolved problems and unfulfilled needs. Shared emotions are considered important in relations between people enabling collective actions such as protests or parades. Imagine if sharing negative emotions, instead of dividing people, could encourage the communication empowering them to turn their frustrations into an opportunity. The aim of our workshop is to break existing patterns of behaviour by raising social awareness and as a consequence result in a positive change. Humor was an  integral part of the process, as a disruptive element that engages the imagination and expands the social boundaries.

FRUSTARTION SPOT was a one week workshop with 17 MA students from University of Antwerp. Run with Ola Mirecka in collaboration with JES Antwerpen - the youth organisation. The project was a part of The International Design Week 2020 “COMMONS” where 15 different workshops were facilitated by different artists, designers and architects.

Students were divided in 4 groups and each of them received the ANNOYING KIT- a Cultural Probe, that aim was to collect the information about the frustrations in the neighbourhood. NEIGHBOURHOOD POISON and NIGHTMARE COFFIN served as metaphores for the research problems. Based of the findings students created prototypes and performed multiple urban interventions and PLAY EXPERIMENTS. Collected artifacts, videos and manifests were displayed during the final exhibition organised in the empty apartments, and multiple places around the workshop field, in our case - in the laundry room.

Due to the bad weather condintions our flight to Antwerp was cancelled. The first 2 days of the workshop were fascilited remotely from the hotel room in Billund.