The first workshop was held at Academy of Design, Ljubljana, Slovenia on 12 & 13 December 2008.
The mobile workshop group was created by So Hyun Kim, Bas Kools, Nina Mrsnik and Henny van Nistelrooy to suggest the design education system under the title of Designers are future makers! The mobile workshop group builds future scenario’s with students through local research lead mobile workshops in across different disciplines.
THE AIM OF THE WORKSHOP
Being fresh in the design world, all four of us have graduated within the last two years, our strength lies in being a team of four independent minds who each approach design differently. Having a shared background in the MA course Design Products at the Royal College in London, that thought us to think and work in design in very different ways and view it from many different perspectives.
This is what we wanted to confront the students from the Academy of design with. We wanted to make a collision of the many ways of designing and bring the students out of their comfort zone. In this first workshop called “Designers are future makers” we asked the students to apply research on a specific object that they found in the vicinity of the college.
Our aim was to stimulate them to question the objects and their existence by answering questions about materials, function, time and association. We took the students outside college to find design in their everyday lives and make them work within the local context. We want students to ask questions about what they can do in their community. We want students to create a new context to design through their local research and create a future scenario from this.
We took them through a basic design process. Starting off by doing research and translating this in a new design. In this new design it was important to place this in the context of its use. The predictions are made based on the research they have done. By doing this we have offered the students a glimpse of a way of working that can enable them to personalise projects and create more depth in their process to later apply this knowledge in their design practice.
DAY BY DAY
On day one we worked with the students on performing a research on the object the students found as a group. A description of the object was made at the start of the day reviewed and compared with the findings at the end of the day. The discussion was guided step by step to cover a range of subject about the found object and it’s context leading to a conclusion with the most important qualities of the object.
Day two was to take these most important qualities and form them together into a future scenario. This story was translated in to a comic and presented together with the research at the end of the day. The emphasis was on the thinking of the future context of the object rather then visualising the object itself. In this way it was very important for the students to think and discuss the future use, surrounding and possible developments.
Both days where about working together, discuss and reflect. And in this really short time create a research and future scenario (comic) as a shared project with the different disciplines that worked within the group. We think it was a successful workshop in creating confusion and stimulate to find successful and not quick, obvious answers.
QUESTIONS/ RESEARCH
You cannot find good answers if you don’t ask yourself the right questions.
The questions we provide as a general structure of the research are to enter a subject and to open a discussion on all related topics within each of the questions. After these questions we can see the interests of the group. We re-organised the results to find out what, according to the group, where the most important topics they talked about. These most important topics than where taken to form the basis of the story line for the future scenario (comic).
