Designblog

The bricks manifesto is a collaborative version
of ‘this is (not) a manifesto’ to bring people together
to discuss their education vision during DDW 2012.9

UnBornLab
Presented at the graduation show of the Design Academy Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2013, UnBornLab is a masters project, initiated by Eugenie de Lariviere, looking at design education from a design student’s perspective.

It was important for me to understand education from my own perspective; as a student and a designer.
Mixing both a field research on a local level, and an academic research on a more ‘global level (that is the European level), I felt the need to always bring the theoretical part into practice, by organizing workshops, discussions, lectures, interviews (etc), in order to grasp an understanding of the big notion that is education.

One way to do so was to analyze how the system functions. I was able to get an overview of it by breaking it down into four ‘elements’, which together, represent the main ‘pillars’ forming our schools. These four elements being; community, structure, content and environment, the interactions they have together shapes the different academic institutions we know of.

(For example: Structure = Content implies that if structure makes content, it induces a top-down approach of knowledge, raising the question of knowledge accreditation, knowledge hierarchy, as well as of formal vs. informal knowledge. Whereas Content = Structure implies that if knowledge forms structure it leads to a more bottom up approach of producing and sharing knowledge for example; crowd source and open source systems. The same goes with structure = community vs. community = structure and so on.)

To communicate the concept clearly, I visualized these methods of the ‘four elements’ by quickly sketching them into volumes. It was once again a means of bringing the theory into practice by giving shape to the research. Making it physical also enabled me to reach people who did not feel strongly about the subject.

Community = Content  vs.  Content = Community

Following on the idea of ‘rethinking’ education from a student’s perspective, I chose to look further on recent shifts in the relationship between ‘content’ and ‘community’, focusing on students as the bearer of contemporary knowledge.

With the faster availability of information the world is transforming at a greater pace and students are often proven to be quicker to adapt to these changes, may they be social, economical, political (etc). The content they bring in the school, as an addition to the curriculum, comes to show more applicability regarding the world they evolve in. In this process, schools go from being knowledge distributors to becoming intermediate spaces where a dynamic cross-pollination of knowledge happens.

The UnBornLab functions as an experiment to document students’ working processes as the basis for renewing design curricula.
The first step of the project was a blog to bring student’s current research (in this case their thesis topics) outside of schools.

DAE Masters Blog

Believing in the importance of students’ self-taught expertise as a school’s temporary knowledge, the idea evolved in the motivation to create a dynamic archive of this knowledge by building a self-generating library of past researches.

Through a series of short video-interviews students present their work, focusing on the research rather than the outcome. Considering students as temporary ‘experts’ of their subjects, the videos can be seen as short introductions on given design topics. One topic leading to another UnBornLab intends to be the start of a dynamic knowledge database of ‘UnBorn’ designers.

[publication of graduation essay by Laura Pappa 2012

 
In the spotlight is a collection of books and book-related projects that are introduced through the subject of this essay: the erratic life of texts made public. This text takes a look at what happens to books after they’ve been published, and in what forms can they continue their existence. For this a narrative of sorts has been put into practice where at each step texts are subject to more and more deformation and alienation from the original content. This order defined the selection of projects to be introduced as well as the context for their analysis. This curated collection of books is subject to a close study through examining the different ways material can be treated and made use of, weighing the ups and downs of it and defining the core of these projects.
The text is divided into several different chapters titled by the act material is exposed to and under each title a handful of projects are introduced. Aside from individual critique of the selected examples, the text touches upon subjects such as publishing, authorship, appropriation, reading and books in general.
…… Alongside the disappearance of the material, somewhere between sharing and creating, uncommon types of publications and projects emerge that infuse (parts of) existing texts with new layers of information that begin interacting with the chosen content. The additions can be textual, image- or form-based where the selection of the source material can also often have a key role to play. All the models, no matter how simple or perhaps seemingly worthless, provide numerous possibilities for the creation of new publications. Through questioning and implementing the “originals” newer and better formats may emerge.
 
Download this thesis: The Erratic Life of Texts Made Public

[image thesis flyer by Laura Pappa]

from the jury rapport: “The Erratic Life of Text Made Public” by Laura Pappa of the Graphic Design department is an outstanding thesis because it is well written, has a good outline and gives original examples. The thesis describes and researches everything that can happen with a text, which takes flight from Laura Pappa’s own discipline of graphic design. The jury only found one blind spot in the thesis in that it doesn’t question what the – sometimes devastating - effect of the graphic designer him/herself can be on the text. Still it is a remarkable thesis in that it is one of the few that really shows an independent manner of thinking and a train of thought that is taken to its utter consequences.

…a friend of mine told me at dinner that I eat really slowly. I was surprised , have not really realized that everybody but me was already finished. It bothered me.
When I was still living at my parents place the tempo of eating was always an issue. Everyone but my father ate really fast. From time to time I could even keep up with my mother and was proud to sit in front of an empty plate while anybody else was still eating. It was like a competition.

So what happened from then until now? Am I slowing down or are people getting faster? Is it me or my environment which changed? Who influences whom?
posting by Charlotte Beek