The Dashboard

Schools out but I've kept working with one of the students from the Institute, Mark Watson, to develop a project that started with the Costa Rica work, namely the Dashboard. It's been a nice couple of weeks developing the materials and building a website that I encourage you to take a look at:

www.thedesigndashboard.com.

It's going to be launched officially in a few days, but what the hell...

The Dashboard work inform the curriculum at the Institute Without Boundaries next year and will strengthen a growing number of very useful design tools that the Institute is producing. If you're studying next year, I encourage you to take a look. We also hope that it gets discussed by the design community and that people will try to adapt it (just let us know what you come up with).

The Dashboard was a spin off from the main work that we did on Costa Rica which you'll find uploaded to the main Institute Without Boundaries site in the future, or you can check out the exhibition in San Jose, Costa Rica, that's being planned for 2009. Keep checking the Institute's website...

So there's just time for a quick update on the Costa Rica Project. My team's work, the masterplan, became a magazine that explored different ways that the community in Matapalo could negotiate with globalization. It's a fun read and we expect that it will be printed for the exhibition and will also be available for a download. It also includes the work of the other teams. On that note I should tell you that the town square's results will also feed into the exhibition and, we hope, will be taken up by the community. Finally it looks very promising that the housing design will be taken up by the government of Costa Rica. It would mean that the unit could go into production in a big way. All the signs are very rosy, so fingers crossed.

Well it's nearly time to put this blog to bed. I'll do one more post with some thoughts on how next year's students at the Institute Without Boundaries can make the most of the experience, if only because I'd have appreciated that. And that'll be the last post.

Dashboard preview

As promised, here's a few images from the Costa Rica work at the Institute without Boundaries. It's a 164 page magazine that includes a new design technology. The work will be released in the near future and will inform an exhibition in San Jose, Costa Rica, in 2008. You get to see (a little bit) of it first.

Done

I'm done. The project was handed in today and I'm pretty proud of it. I'll share some samples of my stuff next week but this blog is winding down...

Costa Rica Project

Here's a new image from the Costa Rica Project. Hope you like it:

Canühome

A few of the students popped into the Design Living Exhibition today to see an Institute Without Boundaries project called the Canühome. It's a sustainable housing unit that features lots of green technology and got a lot of attention from visitors.



Nice pictures are available here on Treehugger.

Laneway revisited, revised and re-done.

Hmmm well my laneway took a divergent course. There was some wailing and gnashing of teeth but what the hell. In the end I created a product that would introduce nature back into the city. This is nature as product. It puts ecology in terms that consumers understand: shopping.















Or maybe it could be more organic...

blog sliders

So I 'm just back from a yoga class. This usually leaves me a bit spacey. Back bends are mindbending.

Anyway, today was the first day for ages that the three groups presented their Costa Rica projects to each other. I thought that it was the best presentations yet. The housing group produces a really interesting housing system based around materials, the town square group showed a brilliant design, and my lot showed one aspect our 'learning from Matapalo' approach - the community roles system (or Dramatis Personae perhaps) that I've blogged about before. The three projects are so different! One is a system, another is a design and the last an exploration.

In our group debrief afterwards, my lot discussed how much doing our project has changed our thinking. Originally we were tasked with creating a masterplan for the region but our, now exploratory, approach is creating a funny kind of masterplan. We believe very much is not being prescriptive but ended our discussion wondering whether we're not prescriptive enough. Silvio (faculty member) pointed out that you need something, a design, to engage people and get them started on a project. Is he right? Can you do this without disempowering people?

So we're now going to try to think of it as a slider. You've got non-intervention at one end and completed solutions at the other. Depending on where you push the slider, a project will be very different. Creating a system for people to make their own designs probably sits somewhere in the middle, for example. So as we move forward with our exploration of learning from Matapalo, we're going to play with the slider a bit. Some outcomes from our work will be prescriptive designs, some systems and some straightforward learnings. I'll post an examples from my group's work soon so you can decided whether we've been successful at this.

OK back to blissful post-yogic staring at the ceiling.