On Friday, May 10 2024 at 9 am, an artist and educator Nick Tobier will give a lecture at the Department for Textile Design (Faculty of technical engineering University of Bihać), entitled Design with others. His artistic practice is rooted in Detroit’s landscape of neglect and systematic failures, amid budget constraints fueled by uneven development, and an intensified need for services to manage problems associated with depopulation. Many cities just like Detroit and its outlying areas, have had to contend with the gaps left behind (trash, street lighting, water service, fire) and have been unable to maintain structures and lots. Bounded to his enduring project Brightmoor Makers – which is based upon community transformation and revitalization, Tobier’s design approach arises from the basic questions can you fix your own house with your tools and skills? or can resources, ideas, skills, misery and joy through collective actions of art and design be shared with neighbors and others from the community?

Nick Tobier studied landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Subsequently he worked in professional practice at Landworks Studio (Boston) and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation (Bronx Division) as a designer. Prior to his appointment at the School of Art & Design in 2003, Tobier spent four years as assistant professor at the School of Art at Alfred. He served as project manager for Storefront for Art and Architecture, writing critical essays, facilitating public projects and coordinating international competitions as he conducted broad-thinking explorations of architecture and urban space beyond expected function. Through individual and collective work, Tobier’s interest in the potential of public places has manifested itself in built public projects and actions in San Francisco, Detroit and New York, internationally from Toronto to Tokyo, and performances from Brussels to Paramaribo, Suriname and at The Edinburgh, Minneapolis and Philadelphia Fringe Festivals. Project sites include bus stops, flea markets, Laundromats and car washes, and include the entrepreneurial ventures, F.O.O.D. (Field of Our Dreams), Brightmoor Bikes and Brightmoor Maker Space. He is also the author of a series of critical and speculative writings on design, city space, itinerant entertainment, and forms of public interruption as radical social strategy, including, with Juliane Stiegele, Utopia Toolbox (2016).