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...