This week, Yu-seung and I worked on the content for our design research workshop. We spent a while reflecting back on our own processes through Super Studio and worked around the idea of creating a mini Super Studio scenario that would fit within a 1 hour 40 minute workshop.
We are using the Social Studies Design Educators Conference as a reference point to help us construct our workshop. The workshops at the conference are limited to 50 minutes, but the conference organizer informed us that we could make a proposal for a 100 minute workshop. We are constructing our workshop to fit a 100 minute time frame because we felt that 50 minutes wouldn’t suffice.
Our target audience will be mainly design educators and some design students interested in design education and design research, so we decided that the question should be closely related to the main theme of the conference:
Conference Theme
This AIGA design educators’ conference addresses the social life of design. Graphic designers work with clients, institutions, users, and communities to make things happen in the world. Yet education often focuses on the individual voice. How are we preparing students for a lifetime of working with and for other people? How are our students connecting to the world?
In order for us to formulate workshop activities, relevant questions and proper guidelines, we really had to look back at our own experience going through Super Studio this year. What could we take from our experience? What was important for us? What could we modify? How has our process helped highlight what we should focus upon in the workshop?
Currently, we have developed a basic outline for the workshop:
• a “hello” introduction (5min)
• an individual introduction activity (15min)
• a small group activity – which is the main portion of the workshop (45min)
• reconvening and presentation/ discussion of the small group activity (30min)
• and a short “goodbye/thanks” outro (5min).
We want to provide enough information to stimulate the participants, but we want to leave it blank enough so that we don’t lead the participants to feel like they have to think or create in a certain way or method. Our introduction will start with a blank bare bones activity that will act as an icebreaker and creative juice stimulator, but our main activity will be more intense. We’re even anticipating a little frustration – a common feeling that followed us through Super Studio this year. Frustration…argh! It made us emotional, but it really pushed many of us to create more meaningful work.
The main question for our workshop will be: How can a sustainable space affect design students?
Why did we choose this question? The audience will be primarily design educators, so we thought that presenting them with a question about students would be relevant, as well as something that might be food for thought once they leave the workshop setting. We chose “sustainable space” because 1) sustainability is one of the topics for the conference and 2) it’s a perinent and challenging topic for designers right now. We even realized that it’s an issue that runs through our own studio space.
Coming up with this question wasn’t easy. We dissected our own Super Studio question in order to formulate this one.
The goal of our main activity surrounding this question is to present the idea of probes to our audience. We aren’t going to present our activity as probes, but rather as just assets that they can use to build devices to help answer the main question. We are planning on adopting some of the forms we used from Super Studio and creating blank versions of them. Since we understand that developing a probe from scratch in a short period of time may be difficult, we thought it would be better to present our audience with a sort of toy box or package of blank objects that may stimulate ideas for probes. We also decided to give provide three bounding terms for the main activity: responsibility, collaboration, and performance level. After the main activity, we will reconvene and open up the workshop for presentation and discussion.
Our goal for next week is to formulate a 250–word proposal to submit for the conference. We will also start working on designing the blank objects and package contents to be used in the main activity.
