THE EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOP ON DESIGN NATURALLY
I held this workshop on the 7th of March as part of the Form, Aesthetics, and Meaning Making course at Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts, and Design. This workshop was held to present the theory of Design Naturally to 10 participants among which were Industrial design Ph.D. candidates and design researchers. It is noteworthy that seven of the participants had not been acquaintance with the idea of this project at all. The workshop took 3 and a half hours in total. It took place in a simple room with a big rectangular table in the middle and chairs around it. Despite my first workshop at Konstfack in 2012, I managed to be there in person this time and therefore, I could have a close observation on the process.
I started the session with a short introduction about myself and continued with the presentation of the theory of Design Naturally. It took almost 45 minutes to introduce all parts of the theory before a short coffee break. I decided to skip the hands-on exercises of Design Naturally Principles, because of the time limit. After the break, I described the form-giving method and asked the participants to choose from the available products on the table to start their own redesigning process. These products were two different lighters, a hard disk, one iPod classic, a metric ruler and a flash memory.
Since the two first steps of the forgiving process, writing the growth story and the use story turned out to be a bit confusing for the participants, most of the them preferred to work on these steps in pairs. Everyone were supposed to go through the first 4 steps within almost 40 minutes and use the rest of the time for the 2 final ones which are about applying the forces and shaping the final objects. Although most of the participants were more enthusiastic to work in pairs at first, all of them had their own clay model based on an individual story by the end of the workshop.