Studio and Entrepreneurship
In this weeks lecture, we listened to a couple of podcasts from Alec speaking to Kenjrio Kirton, Hato and Axel Permoeller & Rita Matos, New Studio discussing their studio practice life from peers to client experiences where collaborative tasks are processed to complete projects day by day. Hato is a studio that believes in when doing a task, field research is the key in unlocking potential ideas were communicating with the audience is vital to their research. Focus groups with clients and their audience allow them to open up doors to routes that they would never think to explore and also brings solid evidence to the table to whatever outcome you choose. Design through making brings the potential in solving problems through trial and error until you find the solution. So creating tools that ables you to think differently through tasks at hand will unlock the creative spark in those that ain’t full time creative. This will bring new insights and perspectives in a field that may hold the key to the answer of any project where you can create something really magnificent for the cause.
New Studio is a collective that is open to creatives on a global scale that focus on the task ahead with the expertise and experience of the designer that will fit with any project. Only a handful of designers are the founders of New Studio, but it’s their catalogue of freelancers that make the business successful where they can choose and task projects to the people that fit well for the project. This brings more skills and diverse thinking into the collective that can make the most of any project. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this method but as long the people are highly motivated and truly enjoy what they’re doing then it will be a success as projects can be picked up at any point when people are sleeping in one part of the world to another.
I really enjoy both these studios as they give a great insight into how studios and projects can be managed. The collaboration is clearly down to great communication and trust in people to be motivated on completing a task. I believe you can tell by the type of people you meet you can learn about their character to judge if they’re the right fit for a job or two, but trust is something you have to build from the person bring their skills to the table and show how much it means to you when working on a project that benefits the client and the team to succeed the task at hand.
Mucho: A conversation with Rob Duncan & Brett Wickens
David Turner (Turner Duckworth) interview
In this article on David Turner, Turner Duckworth speaks strongly on competitive collaboration that achieves great outcomes. I enjoy the process of his method as it can really help speed up the outcomes and get people to sprint on ideas. I’ve always thought the competitive side of working on ideas has always been a little frightening as it can either make or break designers depending on the character of the person. I believe I was frightened of being on the spot in coming up with things which made things easily shy away from answering a brief question. The thing is you have to embrace it and absorb the pressure to drive your own ability and believe this can be trained into people as long they have the motivation to go one step beyond their true ability. I started to look at it as a competitive sport rather than competitive thinking where you have to keep trying until you find a solution to get better at what you do and adapt the way you think to find the answers. Whatever the case, just put your ideas down whether they’re right or wrong and go with the flow of the competitive nature where your ideas can only just get better.
David also speaks about keeping an open mind in the industry as there are many niche specialists in the field of design, which I believe I’m still open and only know that branding and digital are my interests but open to other disciplines to work on my skills. I really like David’s response on how the quality of design is being produced today, he highlights how now everyone has everything as a reference point, which means it’s not about being, ‘in the know’ it is all about what you do with the knowledge. These are great words to be reminded of how we deal with the vast amount of design work that is out there, and to use it to our advantage on how we deal with that in our own practice.
Library of Facilitation techniques
Came across Session Lab which provides resources for multiple workshops that can help with using collaboration tools that will help to create ideas and discussions. Many techniques truly show in this resource from LEGO challenges, Doodling Together, Walking Questions, Rollercoaster Check-In and many more tools to choose and experiment from for your workshop. Reading through these techniques has given me some strong ideas on what subject I want to challenge in this weeks workshop challenge.
Workshopper
Workshopper is a brilliant site with tones of resources from starting your first workshop to facilitating a group in creating discussion and moving ideas forward. This was a great find as it’s open up plenty of resources that needs questioning to learning to start a workshop for projects going forward. This is absolutely a keeper in my bookmarks as it’s many benefits and information in challenging a workshop on an audience that wishes to benefit in creating solutions.
Workshop Challenge
I have gathered my thoughts on several ideas that can work towards helping others within my community. There are four ideas that stood out for me in my research, which I feel can reflect on issues today.
Dementia Care,
Loneliness in People with Disabilities,
Helping Homelessness Through Creativity
The Big Beach Clean
These all have a great potential in creating conversation, awareness and engagement with the community. There are ongoing issues on these topics that can lead to finding new evidence in pursuing strong communications in social change.
Loneliness in People with Disabilities
I found Loneliness in People with Disabilities a very interesting subject as it was my choice in the workshop challenge the week before when creating a podcast. So it was due to this conversation made me wonder how we could tackle this and create focus groups to help solve the problem of making the connection for people with disabilities to make new friendship groups. It was a great insight in my discussion with my chosen person for the podcast that sparked this idea of using this opportunity through this process of making the conversation on the topic.
I chose to deliver my interest in the topic of ‘Loniless in People with Disabilities’ and produced my one-minute elevator pitch video. I believe I have invested my interest in this area due to the research I have gathered from week 6, conducting an interview with Vivek Joshi on this subject.
I can see an opportunity in making a form of engagement in making people’s voices heard in communities through workshops to share their experiences. I believe there is great value in this area of interest that can create great engagement in making something that has longevity for social change. Please enjoy my one-minute pitch via the link below.