Smart Oman

MUS­CAT To ex­plore lo­cal­ly avai­l­able build­ing ma­te­rials and tech­nolo­gies a joint Omani-Ger­man work­shop en­ti­tled “Lo­cal Re­sources – New Ma­te­rials” will be held at the Ger­man Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy in Oman (GUtech) next week. The work­shop will be held in co­op­er­a­tion with Prof. Heike Kluss­mann, Head of the De­part­ment of Fine Arts of the Uni­ver­si­ty Kas­sel (Ger­many) and Asst. Prof. Daniela Ott­mann of the De­part­ment of Ar­chi­tec­ture and Ur­ban Plan­n­ing at GUtech and will be the be­gin­n­ing of a three year joint Ger­man-Omani re­search pro­ject, fund­ed by the Ger­man Aca­dem­ic Exchange Ser­vice (DAAD). “The main mis­sion of the re­search is to ex­plore and ex­per­i­ment with lo­cal­ly avai­l­able tra­di­tio­n­al ma­te­rials and tech­nolo­gies in or­der to in­vent 'new ma­te­rials' to meet the needs of a sus­tain­able built en­vi­ron­ment of the pre­sent and fu­ture,” said Daniela Ott­mann.

As a start-off ses­sion of the joint re­search pro­ject Prof. Heike Kluss­mann, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kas­sel and her team of the prac­tice-based work­ing-con­cept plat­form 'BAU KUNST ERFIN­D­EN' (Build­ing/ Art/ In­vent­ing) will be con­duct­ing two in­tro­duc­tion work­shops for GUtech stu­dents. In­struc­tors and stu­dents will work to­gether to find so­lu­tions on how to deal with art and tech­nol­o­gy. One work­shop will be con­duct­ed by former BMW con­cept car de­sign­er Klau­dia Kruse who will pro­duce not on­ly prints on fab­ric based on the stu­dents own de­signs but al­so con­struct the screens for the prints them­selves. The other work­shop will be based on the con­cepts “the do it your­self” and “mak­ing is know­ing”. Stu­dents will build their own so­lar cell, based on Pro­fes­sor Michael Graetzel's in­ven­tion of a dye-sen­si­tized so­lar cell im­i­tat­ing the pho­to­syn­th­e­sis pro­cess.