Lo-Fi Playground

The Lo-Fi Playground is an open studio jam session and experimental community night for designers, makers, and visual explorers.

This is a space for exploration, not necessarily for producing finished work. It’s a chance to use a studio space and collaborate with others. No egos, just pure creative play: generating raw material, sketches, and rebuilding instinct. We focus on momentum and keep it playful, poetic, direct, abstract, messy, tender, humorous, or a combination of all of it.

We’ll end with a brief selection and a quick show-and-tell, then you take home what you made: studies, fragments, and raw material you can build on later.

Each evening gives you a simple theme or a few prompts, just enough structure to help you begin and stay with the act of making. You’ll work quickly, try things out, and follow what has energy, using basic materials and direct decisions rather than polishing and refining.

We’ll work in a lo-fi spirit, meaning low-tech and direct, using simple materials and quick decisions to invite texture, imperfection, and surprise, and to access a state of creative flow.

Alex Libotte is a Berlin-based visual artist, photographer, and former creative director with a background in Communication Design. After years working across the creative industry and living in London and São Paulo, his practice gradually shifted from brand and agency work toward a more personal, process-led approach rooted in experimentation, craft, and making by hand. Today, he teaches a course on experimental design in Hamburg and brings that studio and workshop mindset into every session.

Alex co-founded Space Of Hearts together with his wife, Adriana Takeuchi Libotte, as a space for hands-on practice, cultural exchange, and creative community. Design Unplugged is the result of many conversations with fellow creatives about the fact that in a screen-first, AI-accelerated industry, many of them are starting to miss the tactile side of the actual craft and that returning to materials can restore creative confidence, satisfaction, and a more human visual voice.

Design Unplugged is a series of hands-on, off-screen workshops for designers, makers, and visual explorers at Space Of Hearts in Berlin.

It's a deliberate interruption. A holiday from perfect. A retreat off-screen where experimentation, and the act of making, matter more than the polished outcome. We consider it freedom from the need to perform. A space for you to simply be and experiment. Here, the hands and the heart lead again.

Our workshops are built for anyone who considers themselves a designer, an illustrator, or a creative mind who misses making with their hands, and for anyone curious about experimental methods that don’t start with a template.

There are various formats within the Design Unplugged series, but the intention is the same: step out of digital autopilot, calm the system, experiment without needing immediate answers, and rebuild trust in your own ability to create, to make. You’ll leave with artifacts, techniques, and inspiration, but more importantly with a refreshed relationship to what creative work can hold. Not faster or better, but honest and more human.

• A set of physical design studies and compositions
• A small library of textures, marks, and shapes you created
• A reset toward trust, taste, and creative confidence
• The satisfaction of working offline, hands-on with materials
  

Old magazines, paper scraps, packaging, printed matter, printed photographs, labels, receipts, typographic scraps, or anything you’re happy to cut up and explore with.

Duration: 3,5 hours
Language: English
Group size: Up to 8 people
Price: €55.00 per person (materials and tea/coffee/water included)

Materials provided: Varies per night but usually includes paper stock, collage materials, tape, glue, stencils, scissors and cutting tools, pens/markers, basic stamping tools etc.
Who it’s for: Designers, illustrators, and all curious makers who want to get off-screen and into hands-on experimentation. No prior experience needed, background and interesst in visual arts or graphic design is helpful

Minimum participants: 4 people. If fewer than 4 people are booked, we will cancel the workshop and issue a full refund.
Cancellation and refunds: Tickets are non-refundable. If we cancel the workshop, you will receive a full refund.

Takeaway: Your physical studies, a great memory and the satisfaction of having worked with your hands and physical materials.

Important Photo & Video Notice:

We may take photos and short videos during the event for documentation and promotion. If you prefer not to be photographed or filmed, please let us know when you arrive.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Space Of Hearts, Bismarckstraße 3, Berlin, Germany

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