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).