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About:

Vinterskolen is initiated for activities of communication design and autonomous work.

Participation: 

The third edition of Vinterskolen is only open for enrollment by MA students at Graphic Communication Design, at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.

Please confirm your attendance for both weeks by sending an e-mail to vinterskolen@orbivraa.dk. Should you have a valid reason for not being able to physically participate in Vrå, please let us know in the e-mail as well, so we can inform you on an alternative assignment.

Deadline: December 15 2025.

Costs:

Food and accommodation during the week at ORBI in Vrå, is 1.000 DKK. pr. person.

Participants must cover their own expenses for transportation to Vrå.

Travel:

Travel is made by either train (train stop: Vamdrup station) or preferably a shared car.

Facilities:

All meals are organised and prepared together. Sleeping is communal as well (7 dorm rooms group 3-6 people), participants bring their own sleeping equipment. Our facilities are rather simple/rustic and offer one shared bathroom with shower. We are located close to a river and forest as well.

Teachers:

Copenhagen-based association, project space, imprint and studio for critical graphic design and publishing stanza, initiated the programme.

stanza’s Line-Gry Hørup and Freja Kir will host all main activities.

Guests:

Hans Peter Dinesen 
Art Director, Dinesen

Louis Madelung Petersen
Architect and carpenter

Peter Møller Rasmussen
Architect and Program Manager for the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape, Royal Danish Academy Kalundborg

Schedule:

Tour of ORBI exhibition 10:00 at Dinesen Showroom: 4/12 2025.

Monday 9/3 2026 – Friday 13/3 2026: Working on first assignment at Holmen, Copenhagen.

Sunday 15/3 2026: Arrival afternoon-evening. Welcoming dinner is prepared by teachers for 19:00 o’clock.

Monday 16/2-21/3 2026: Activities (see bottom of page)

Sunday 23/3 2026:
Cleaning, saying bye and departure.

Monday 24/3 2026 – Tuesday 25/3 2026: Presentation at Holmen.

A House for Publishing

How does a house define what we do? And how does what we do, define a house? 

From the medieval scribe, print workers in the 17th century, to the ad agency, the office cubicle, socialist printing co-ops, and the remote laptop worker of 2025 – the practice of communication design is informed by the physical spaces we inhabit, along with the technology and tools they provide. 

Vinterskolen 2026: A House for Publishing, will target reflections on current as well as future habitat of the graphic designer. With a pretty straight forward approach, we will transform reflections on the workspace into a 1:1 house at ORBI.

Arbejdsrum: Syv grafiske arbejdspladser set gennem nøglehullet – repotage on workspaces by graphic designers Stuart Bailey, John Morgan and Carl H.K. Zakrisson. Published in the year 2000, for an edition of Danish journal on book work, Bogvennen.

The medieval scribe and author Christine de Pizan ( born 1364, France ) worked simultaneously on her writing, while making a steady income as a scribe, handcopying manuscripts. Records indicate that she herself art directed the illustrations and ornamentations accompanying the manuscripts of her written work.

Workspace: Adapting to the context, her space is confined with the functional setup she needs, – love those bookstands of various angles – creating a small world within a bigger space. taying warm in a confined space.

The Bloomsbury Group structured their lives in a way highly avant-garde at the time. A collective house to work and live together. Painters, writers and political thinkers, different professions co-exisisted an exchanged.  

“… As an alternative to “the designer as author,” I propose “the designer as producer.” Production is a concept embedded in the history of modernism. Avant-garde artists treated the techniques of manufacture not as neutral, transparent means to an end but as devices equipped with cultural meaning and aesthetic character…”

– Ellen Lupton, The designer as producer, 1998.

“Before I leave this matter of the surroundings of life, I wish to meet a possible objection. I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; and I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don’t quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays.”

“And, again, that word art leads me to my last claim, which is that the material surroundings of my life should be pleasant, generous, and beautiful.

— William Morris, How we live and how we might live, 1884

Appendix to Whole Earth Catalogue, produced in Ant Farm collectives inflatable structure desert structure, The Pillow, 1971.

The Detroit Printing Co-op existed from 1969 to 1985 in southwest Detroit, and as its founding manifesto decreed, offered printing facilities and equipment as “social property” to “provide access to all those individuals in the community who desire to express themselves (on a non-profit basis), with charges made only to maintain the print shop (rent, utilities, materials, maintenance of the machinery).”

“In a recent lecture, Ed Fella references a collage he made earlier in his long and prolific career as both self-proclaimed “commercial artist” and iconoclastic figure in the graphic design avant-garde. It shows a bottle of ink, a cup of coffee, a burnisher, an ashtray–re creating the work surface of a typical graphic designer circa 1975. he deadpans to the audience: “the only thing left is the coffee”. Today, the typical desktop of the graphic designer is a virtual one invented for them in the famed confines of xerox park and Apple computer: some folders, a ticking wristwatch, a trashcan, and a bomb. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the transformation of a profession from handicraft to technocrat, from skilled labor to managed service, than this metaphorical transformation of a workspace.”

– Andrew  Blauvelt, Tool (or postproduction for the graphic designer) 2011. Graphic Design, Now in Production, Walker Art Center. 

The Women’s Graphic Center ( WGC ) was a print workshop located in the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1973 by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Susan E. King was the artistic director and Sue Maberry was the business manager. The workshop provided the tools for typesetting, printing, and bookbinding.The center had equipment for offset lithography, letterpress printing and silkscreen printing. The WGC had exhibition space, as well as offering classes and renting studio time.The WGC evolved into the Women’s Graphic Center Typesetting and Design, a business providing design and printing service. It closed in 1991 along with The Woman’s Building.

Futuristic and devoid of natural light, the big scale office is equally depressing and fascinating. A social experiment? Optimized workflow? Ruha Benjamin reminds us that the world runs smoother when only a handful of people imagine otherwise, more precisely restraining power by shaping “A world relying on people to “sit still, raise their hands, and take instruction” (Benjamin, 2023).

A contemporary, Christine de Pizan like set up, Sister Corita is sheltered from having to make commercial income by her religion and the structure of the convent.

Graphic designer and art director Cipe Pineles ( born in Austria, 1908 ) at her work desk.

Activities:

( 1 )

Assemble, design and print a reader for designing a house for publishing at ORBI

( 2 )

Build a 1:1 house for publishing at ORBI.

( 3 )

Theory ( film ) night on printmaking and bell casting.

( 4 )

Initiate contributions to The Greatest Hits Library.

( 5 )

Continue refining the printing options and facilities at ORBI.