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.

Laneway revisited

So my 'laneway' house is now a spa for the homeless. I know, I know stupid idea but it does throw up a lot of challenges that are fun to work through. I'm starting with a series of mood boards to get a feel for it. Here's one:

Blog Chalk Boards

I've not written anything about Toronto. I should really as it's part of the experience of being at the Institute (at least for a foreign student like me). Well, these chalk boards that stand outside many stores caught my eye. Using language that is at times enticing, comical, impassioned and surrealistic, they brighten up my rambles around the city. So thank you anonymous Torontoian writers and poets.

Role playing

My group is currently looking at the roles played in the community of Matapalo, Costa Rica, that is the focus of the Institute's work this year. We want to create a different kind of 'masterplan' for community renewal that respects and takes account of the way people are living.

We've come up with about 18 roles, distilled from a lot of information. Here's a sneak preview of the icons that we've created for just three: The Organizer, The Visionary and The Representative:

Blogged

Here's some blog coverage of the IDS booth. I take offense to the 'not sustainable' comment. We recycled the paper and repurposed everything else. Certainly we did better than the other booths. Still, it's a nice piece.

torontoist.com

Unordinary day

Teresa, one of the Institute's students, wrote a piece for the newspaper that we gave away at the Interior Design Show saying that there's no such thing as an ordinary day at the Institute. She has a point. It changes all the time, we have to juggle projects and experience wildly-fluctuating emotions in the pressure-cooker atmosphere. Still I would like to give prospective students a flavor of what it's like. So this was today's unordinary day:

We're lucky to have Jamie Ibbett teaching us in the mornings. He is a top notch product designer and was brought in to help us with visualization of our ideas. Today he showed us how understanding the user for a design produces much better results. Obvious? Well he gave us a technique for doing this that doesn't require a long ethnographic study. He was actually working a lot like a novelist - developing a character that would inhabit a space or use an object. And then he started to show how this character can be visualized with some simple sketching techniques. Well he made it look simple. As my colleague Mark mentioned, it's amazing what you can learn just by watching someone really good at what they do.

In the afternoon Luigi Ferarra, the program director, worked with us on design theory. It's a regular weekly session that tries to explore systems thinking in design and generate new ideas. It's not about rehacking old theories and is nothing like a design history class. I think that we regularly disappoint him but it's not easy to do this stuff. It's going after something very deep in design and may not actually be there at all. I like it though. He's getting at something.

This was immediately followed by a one-off workshop with him and Monica (another faculty member) on pro forma in architecture. This is about budgeting buildings. It sounds dry (and it is) but it helps to check for the viability of building. More importantly it's a box that you need to think outside of. If you follow the pro forma you quickly realize how expensive building is and the need to cut corners. And one of the first corners to cut is always the expensive sustainability features that we all want. So then you realize that you need to game the system.

Still with me? Well after Luigi and Monica's lecture the groups come together to work on their Costa Rica projects. You can see how the evenings start to fill up. My group snatched just a few moments because two of us are also doing side projects for the Institute. These require more meetings with Luigi (the poor man must be sick of us). Mark goes in first to talk about a computer system of some mind bending complexity that I don't even want to think about, and then I'm up for something being cooked up on design theory.

Tomorrow's going to be different. And so it goes. As we're pushed and pulled in different directions it's easy to get a bit snappy if not downright sour (if any students are reading this, you have my apologies - I love you really).

Pier Giorgio

There's a good lecture this week being hosted by the Institute. It's open which means that you can come too. Pier Giorgio, the Poet Laureate of Toronto, will giving a talk on urbanism and creativity. It will be worth making the trip because Giorgio has a subtle urban philosophy. This isn't about planning and creating structures but about spontaneous creative eruptions. I've been waiting for this for months.

Oh and it's on this Thursday evening. Call the Institute for details.

Blog Monday

Right now we have someone who promises to be a very good lecturer on product design. Unlike architecture, its something that really interests me. Trouble is he's supposed to help the students progress their laneway house designs (that I wrote about back in November) and I don't have one any more. I dropped out of that project to work on a design theory book with the program director. My role in the laneway project is to write it up in some form. It seems daft to me. So now I'm trying to think up a project that I can work on for the next three weeks in his class. I need something to visualize. If I'm allowed to do it, I'll let you know what happens.

PS.

The Blog in the title is just to see if it makes a difference to the google rankings. I apologize if this annoys you.

Blog Interior Design Show

Here's a pic (taken by Melissa I believe) of the interior design show booth. That's Brad up the ladder putting the finishing touches to the bloody thing.

Booklet

So I wrote a little booklet for the Institute. It tries to explain what the Institute is and what it's for. It will be used in the marketing of the institute to partners and next years crop of students. I guess that it does the trick.

Visuals

So here's something to look at. My team at the 'Onsite Online World House Charrette' did a wonderful job with their home design. Asked to look at the social aspect of housing, they created a scalable design for community creation. I had no part in this, as I just fetched the coffee and helped out with the graphics a bit.

Blogger unmasked

The original idea with this blog was that everyone studying at the Institute could make posts to the site. This never happened, so there seems no point in 'we-ing' anymore. The blogger is unmasked. Hello I'm Mark, student at the Institute. Nice to meet you.

So this is a now a more personal account of my experiences at the Institute and therefore just a single perspective. Others will see things differently. There, you've been warned.

The last couple of weeks were hard. There was the four day onsite online charrette. Yes that's really what it's called. (See the previous post.) And then there was the Interior Design Show exhibition to put together. This was thought up, designed and constructed in just a week. God but that was difficult.

The concept was a newspaper that describes the Institutes's recent work that is displayed on a kind of 'printing press' stand. There were also print outs to give away. Yours truly supplied the concept and frantically tried to put the content together in a couple of days. A couple of students pitched in big time on content creation and design. (You know who you are, you wonderful people you.) And another team put together the stand which looked awesome.

The opening gala was last night for the lucky few students that had tickets (the ticket story is worth another post but I won't go there as my blood will start to boil). The show runs until Sunday, so pop along if you're in town.

Well that's it. More tales from the fun house soon.

Leading

Today were each leading a group of architecture technology students from George Brown. The idea is that they benefit from the IwB's systems approach to design and we get a lot more brains working on the Costa Rica project. It's exhausting, quite frankly. If you're thinking of applying to the Institute, beware that you'll have to do this kind of thing from time to time. So far we've workedg with school children to teach them about social and environmental issues and had a charrette with architecture students at Veritas University in Costa Rica. This time the charrette lasts four days, swallowing up the weekend. We get Monday morning off though...

Interdisciplinary design experiments

So the interdisciplinary experiment continues. One group of students are doing their Costa Rica project by tying out different multidisciplinary techniques and recording what works. The idea is that they'll have some kind of process by the end of the next four months. Right now an urban planner is trying to get a philosopher/advertising guy and a mathematician/computer scientist/cartoonist guy to do urban planning. Amusingly their work gets very conceptual, not to say freaky, very quickly. So in round two they have all promised to be very practical. You'll be the first to hear if anything comes of it...

Online charrette now open

ANNOUNCEMENT: Join the Institute in creating housing solutions for the rural province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. Participation is open to all professionals, students, and design enthusiasts from every country in the world. Visit the Official World House Costa Rica Online Charrette site to learn more. END OF ANNOUNCEMENT

If (like many folks) you're wondering what 'charrette' means we can save you a trip to Wikipedia - it's an intense period of design activity. Anyway have a go.

New websites

There are two new websites attached to the program:

Institute Without Boundaries which gives some info on the program

World House which, funnily enough, provides info on the World House Project

As always, comments are welcome.

Interdesign

You're invited.

Re-thinking

We're often told that IwB is an experiment. And it's the nature of experiments that you don't always get the answers you were expecting. Our recent trip to Costa Rica threw up more than a few of these. For example the community of Matapalo, the small town that is the case study for our work, was most concerned about social issues like alcohol abuse. To be honest we'd arrived with some great town planning ideas, some beautiful schemes for the town square and some great housing concepts. We hadn't thought so much about tackling social issues directly and it was with some trepidation that we started to explain our ideas. Thankfully our thoughts were well received but it really did make us stop and think on our return to Canada. What are we really trying to achieve with this project?

So this last month has included a lot of discussion and rethinking. We're just coming out of this process clutching new project briefs and sunnier dispositions. The projects have changed quite a bit and (if we get our shiny new briefs approved tomorrow) we'll have something to start shouting about.

Rural Studio

Most of the IwB team headed off to OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design) last night. They had a great presentation from Rusty Smith on the Rural Studio. You can read about it yourself so suffice to say that his talk and their work was very inspiring. It was of particular interest because the IwB is currently in the middle of its World House Project. On the face of it it seems that we're trying to do similar things (affordable housing) but listening to the talk made the students aware of how different our approach is. The Rural Studio is an architecture studio. If the IwB was to be described (and we're still working this out) perhaps it is a multidisciplinary design studio. This means that it mixes different kinds of designers together and also brings in experts from other fields. The thought here is that complex problems can't be solved from within only one discipline. That's that hypothesis - you need to bring lots of different skills together to get rounded solutions. But just how you do this is being worked out while we work on projects. Right now the students are thinking about how to experiment and uncover what kinds of interdisciplinary practices work best. Should we look at a problem through the lens of a particular discipline lead by an expert from that field? Should we work in pairs from very different disciplines (computer science and interior design)? Should we try to find some common approaches and all work together? We'll let you know how the experiments go over the coming months.

Blog slackers

APOLOGIES for the silence. It's a been a hectic start to the new year and we haven't quite factored in writing the blog. We'll get better. Promise.

We're back

After a nice long Christmas break, the Studio reopens and the usual frantic pace is resumed. Everyone is busy putting together a research report following our trip to Costa Rica. It's an important document that will inform everyone taking part in a online charette (of which more later). We're also continuing work on the laneway house concepts from last semester. This time the designs have to be fleshed out more, right down to the furniture. We'll post some pictures soon.

Oh and you may have noticed that the worldhouse.ca website is under construction. We hope to have this up and running in the near future. We'll make an announcement here when it's functioning.

Back soon

We're on vacation. Normal service will resume shortly.