Workshops
Biodiversity by Visual Communication Design: Speculations about Endangered Plants
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Margaret Rynning
Human activity has altered our planet to the extent that scientists have declared a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, or the age of humans. Drawing on critical design (Malpass, 2017) and discursive design (Tharp and Tharp, 2018), this paper presents a design project inquiring into the UN´s SDG no. 15: ‘Life on land’ and the recent IPBES rapport (United Nations, 2019) of how species extinctions accelerate, with grave impacts on people. Invasive, imported plants displace more vulnerable, native plants and disturb local biodiversity in Norway and globally. Visual design itself does not solve the vast problem of changing conditions on our planet or species extinction, but design may have the authority to inform and engage people through critical imageries and visual storytelling, leading to engagement, commitment and action. The paper discusses critical and discursive design through a design project in which invasive and endangered species are juxtaposed and visualizes the specific deficiency created. Design activism, where visual design interact with the local community is an important part of the project. The growing problem of plant extinction due to human activity is illuminated through visual design and the role of visual communication is analyzed based on theories of critical and discursive design.
Forming Agile Cultures of Inquiry: Integrating Platform Design, Organizational Culture, and Leadership to Decentralize Teaching View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Peter Martin
The scope and forms of design practices are increasingly in flux as new technological capacities are negotiated within evolving social, environmental, and political agendas. This provides design education with an imperative to activate pedagogies that enabling students to become sense-makers able to navigate the expanding complexity and ambiguity of emerging design agencies. This obligates design educators to reposition themselves from being central organizers of learning processes to becoming facilitators of agile cultures of inquiry that engage students as active agents of investigation. This imperative has inspired a new critical and extra-disciplinary graphic design curriculum organized around four pillars of making, collaboration, research, and cultural literacy in the workshop facilitator’s university. The workshop introduces a pedagogical integration of a platform design model, an organizational cultural development framework, and a decentralized leadership perspective being used within the new curriculum’s implementation. To provide a context for the workshop’s content, the facilitator begins with leading participants in identifying their values and aspirations for engaging design students with learning within a seminar or studio culture. The facilitator then presents an outline of a system of integrating platform design, organizational culture, and leadership as an approach to forming a course’s agile culture of inquiry. This overview provides a brief example of its application. The remainder of the workshop is a guided discussion on how this system, or aspects of it, might be used by the participants as they pursue some of their values and aspirations identified at the start of the workshop.
Alphabet Soup: A Materials Workshop
Workshop Presentation Richard Lombard
The world of materials is both vastly incomprehensible and yet necessary to hold in one’s hands. Drawing on the culinary metaphor – the ephemeral and intoxicating soufflé is the result of four simple ingredients that everyone has in their kitchen at this very moment. The key is in the handling of the materials. The same is true for the built environment, where practitioners who are skilled in the use of materials are able to conjure fantastic forms from humble and/or novel materials. Like cooking, a combination of proportion, timing, and familiarity with the ingredients all come together to ensure success; but, unlike Shigeru Ban or Jean George Vongerichten, most of us settle for off-the-shelf solutions, whether cinder blocks or frozen dinners. Our session hopes to change this. The exercise will expose participants to a wide variety of “ingredients” – materials emerging from the DIY (do it yourself) and ICS (Interactive, Connected, and Smart materials) worlds – and will invite them to investigate their properties through physical interaction. The workshop will also ask them to consider their inclusion in “recipes” that could result in new hybrid/composite materials with novel properties.
