::] Social Studies Conference ][ MICA [::

Screenshot capture of the Social Studies Conference’s website.

A typical scene in my life…

April 2008… I decide to submit a draft for the Social Studies Conference: Educating Designers in a Connected World to be held at MICA this upcoming October. Deadline for submissions… July 15th. Yup, I got time.

July 14th: 6:00pm… Dammit! It’s been raining all day, internet connection has been down, and I have to submit the abstract! Tic, tock… Tic, toc…

hehehe

I submitted the abstract on time (see below)(and I even got a happy confirmation e-mail from the conference).
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::] Funny moment in Design Camp [::

::] Design Camp 08 ][ It’s a wrap…[::

::] Design Camp 08 ][20][ Parent's visit…[::

As conclusion to the week… a small exhibit of all student work was made for parents to see and for the students to pick up their projects to take them home.

::] Design Camp 08 ][19][ Projections [::

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::] Design Camp 08 ][18][ Collaborative Posters [::

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::] Design Camp 08 ][17][ Airplane design [::

A little afternoon break… Since students basically worked on the poster from 12:30 – 4:00pm… around 3:00pm I had a little exercise where we sent airplanes over into the landscape architecture area. Landscape never retaliated… hehehe

::] Design Camp 08 ][16][ Working on Poster [::

• The poster had to announce a new feature of the CAM museum
• Each team member had to be traced onto the posters

I was very happy to see how this project got groups working together almost instantly. The engagement level was very high and the atmosphere just felt positive all time around.
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::] Design Camp 08 ][15][ Post-Its [::

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::] Design Camp 08 ][14][ DVD Covers [::

These are some of the DVD Covers designed by the students during the last three days of camp. Half of the samples are scanned directly from their work, while the other half is photographed inside a case (you know, to give it a more realistic look). Most of the movies should be easily recognized, and those that are not, may just need a bit of a creative push… :)
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::] Design Camp 08 ][13][ Working on DVD [::

In this new version of my camp session, students now designed the cover for a DVD of their choosing. It was very interesting to see the movies that this generation cited… (I felt a bit old)
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::] Design Camp 08 ][12][ a small change… [::

Well, after the first two days of design camp, I decided to make a change in strategy. In retrospect, I wonder how many of my concerns were legitimate, or me just being hard on myself, but no matter the case, the end result came out for the best. During the last three days I had the students design a DVD cover in the morning, then we would break for lunch, come back, work on the ideation session, and a collaborative poster. The results were amazing…

::] Design Camp 08 ][11][ Exquisite Corpse [::

about the time that I sensed that making the students work individually was not working perfectly, this particular group ended the exercise ahead of time. I had an extra hour with them, so we carried out an exquisite corpse exercise. Some of the notebooks ended up looking amazing!
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::] Design Camp 08 ][10][ Projections [::

At the end of every work day, once the posters were ready, I would ask the camp counsellors to take the students out on a walk for 20 mins. During this time I would scan in all of the posters and prepare them for on-screen projection. When everyone came back, I would hold a small feedback session were each student explained what they had done. At the end of their explanation, we would have a small chat about how graphic design can be re-purposed from one media to another, and as a fun example, I would project their posters onto themselves.

Pedagogical reasons for this decision? Design lesson? More than anything, all I wanted was for the students to understand that graphic design is not only about photoshop or computer work. It is much more. With this exercise I hoped to at least introduce such idea into them.

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::] Design Camp 08 ][9][ Posters [::

The idea behind this poster was art that could be interacted with by the audience.

Here some examples of the posters that various students from different groups did during the first two days of me teaching the exercise. The originals are 8.5″x11″.
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::] Design Camp 08 ][8][ CamTeen [::

As part of their office group dynamic, I asked them to design logos or marks for CAMTeen, a made up program that would address their age group.

Here some more examples.
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::] Design Camp 08 ][7][ Poster work… [::

After the ideation session… (during the first two days of me teaching the exercise), I divided the groups to work on their posters. It’s a bit confusing (and it involves math… hehe) but this is how it worked:

• Every office was made up of 4 students, and all of them participated in the ideation session together. (The less engaged groups must have come up with about 20 ideas, while the more engaged ones generated over 60).
• Students where then asked to pick the 2 ideas that they liked the most from all of the post-its and which they thought would work best for the museum. (Remember, some of these were pretty wild… like anti-gravity chambers to experience modern art.)
• The 4-student groups were then divided into 2-student teams, and each of the subgroups had to work on one of these two chosen ideas. Each student made their own poster, so in the end, we had two posters on every idea.

Following are more images of the students working.
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::] Design Camp 08 ][6][ the mistake [::

At this point is where I committed the teaching mistake for the week.

For the first two days of the week, after the ideation session, I divided the students to work individually on their posters. In retrospect, this was a bad call. The momentum that I had gained with the office and ideation exercises was suddenly completely lost. Students still made posters, and actually some very good ones too, but the energy level dropped substantially.

Having gone from group to individual was not a good call. For the last three days of the exercise I changed it a bit… and had them work as teams, which not only kept the energy levels going, but also produced larger scale work.

::] Design Camp 08 ][5][ Ideation… [::

One of the biggest challenges of my design camp experience circled around getting teenage strangers to work comfortably with one another.

I remembered how hard it was to speak and share ideas with others at that age, specially others whom you not know (not that it is really easier now, but at least I’ve gotten better at hiding the awkwardness). In order to attack this problem, and in anticipation to the larger project of the afternoon, students were divided in groups, pretending to be offices, and in five minutes they had to come up with a name and gesture sketch to serve as their logo.

At first, I was skeptical of my own strategy. Part of me thought that separating them into offices was to be received with critiques of being lame or stupid, but actually, students surprisingly engaged very well at the opportunity of creating a name and a mark for themselves. I gave them only one rule: anything was allowed other than pornographic. I even joked with them a bit to get them loose. I gave them an example: if they had be dumped this past weekend, they could call their office I Was Dumped Design. It was impressive to see how they came up with names. Some of the ones I remember were taken from: the brand of the pencil they were holding, the initials of their names, their favorite foods… to name a few.

After their office inauguration, I gave them a wall, which became their work space for the day, and the first exercise was a moderated ideation session. During this portion of the day, I gave them a topic (always related to the CAM museum) and they wrote ideas on post-its and placed them on the wall. This session was high energy and moderated a bit crazy, to get them thinking wildly about museums. Some of the recurring ideas were a petting zoo in the museum, water slides, night parties, coffee shops, better shopping stores and more do it your self art.

I have to say that this was a hit. It may not have generated a pool of realistic ideas for the museum, but it got all team members talking and working together.

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::] Design Camp 08 ][4][ Working time…[::

After the t-shirts were made and various ice-breaking games were played, it was time to get started. In addition to all of the visual materials available on the walls, students had a photocopier, stencils of many kinds, color patterns, different color cardboards, black and silver sharpies, crayola markers, x-acto knives, glue sticks, elmer’s glue, scissors, post-its, and (only later in the week) glitter paint.

::] Design Camp 08 ][3][ The beginning… [::

The official start for Design Camp, once it has done the initial orientation, really happens once the students separate into their groups to customize their camp t-shirts.

This year I was particularly proud of the t-shirt design for the Camp since it was last fall’s Practicum GD 400 class that I TAed with Santiago Piedrafita who designed the content for it, while it was Stewart Bean and Nick Schlax from the sophomore Imaging Class I taught this past Spring who actually produced the final piece. I was very involved in the whole process, which produced a great feeling once I got to see the actual shirts.

The shirts are customized with spray-paint, cardboard templates and sharpies.

::] Design Camp 08 ][2][ Starting point…[::

I was originally planning on framing a collaborative project around collages, texture, stop-animation photography and visual depth. Factors came into play that led me to re-structure the project, the most crucial: now I had to teach the program by myself. (Gretchen you were missed!)

[In retrospect though, it was a good that the project was re-thought because the animation studio also used the stop animation photography technique, and the original strategy may have felt repetitive to the students. Anyway…]

In this rethinking process, Santiago Piedrafita gave me some advice. He suggested I provide the students visual content from the start, and not have them start from scratch. This strategy, he explained, would lead to more elaborate work. With this advice, as you can imagine, also came a solution. He loaned me copies of the Neubau Welt and Neubau Modul books, which are visual compendiums of type, icons and patterns that I could use on my exercise.

[If you read the post about the project I did while in Nice with Massimo Vignelli and Armando Milani, you have already been exposed to some of these silhouettes.]

Well, it turned out (and to my luck for that matter) that probably the same advice was given to Marty and Rebecca, who ended up creating contact sheets and print-outs for the students to work with. I inherited such sheets which saved my project, my week and my life. If you took a look at the classroom set-up photos, you probably noted that some of the walls were covered with icons or patterns. These were Marty’s and Rebecca’s doing. I just played along inside the great template that they provided.

Here some other samples from the Neubau books that we all used in our exercises.
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::] Design Camp 08 ][1][ Getting Ready… [::

This is the project sheet that the students received from me this past week. The letter-sized print-out was distributed as part of a set of five briefs, each describing a soon-to-be-carried-out project. My presentation is succinctly explained, purposely skipping over details, just so that I could still surprise them during the session.

Here a better quality image of the setup where I worked during the week.

::] Design Camp here we go… [::

One of the reasons for the stay in Raleigh this summer is my participation in Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum’s (CAM) Design Camp for High School Students. I will be teaching the Day Camp (week 2) of the three week program hosted at the College of Design in NC State University.

My classmates Marty Lane and Rebecca Tegtmeyer already set the bar very high by carrying out an exciting, unique and AWSOME project in the first session! (See here & here)

I posted here some photos of the set-up where I will be carrying out my exercise this week. I have to credit Rebecca and Marty, for basically I am working within their template (with just some minor modifications to the physical space). My project will be different to theirs and tomorrow I get the chance to try it out for the first time. Let’s see how it goes…

Let’s see how it goes!

::] The Essential Principles of Graphic Design [::

Debbie Millman just announced the publishing of her new book The Essential Principles of Graphic Design.

The book, designed by the amazing Rodrigo Corral, was published by Rotovision and distributed in the U.S. by HOW Books. It contains 35 case studies by designers, featuring a look at how they work and come up with ideas…

…AND SOME COMMENTS OF MINE HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE PUBLICATION!

The book is described by the author as both visual and verbal journies of projects from concept to creation. It also includes basic primers to the principles of Graphic Design, written by experts in each discipline. Some of the other designers included are Stephen Doyle, Marian Bantjes, Fabian Monheim, Peter Buchanan-Smith, Vault 49, Yves Behar, Hillman Curtis, Jacob Trollback and many, many more…

I have not seen it yet, but I just hope that I have not embarrassed myself next to all of the other great designers showcased in the publication.