Summer School 2013 – Creation Phase

Forschung · Studium · 16. Oktober 2013 · Technisches Design ·
Schlagwörter: 2013, Damascus Room, Damaskuszimmer, Methoden, Schaffenspozess, Summer School

So we reached the middle of the week, only two more days left to get as far as we can in our workshop Summer School 2013. What have we done so far? And what is there to come? After getting to know each other at the vernissage on Sunday evening, we visited the Damascus Room on Monday and did a lot of really cool methodic knowledge and idea creation. In Yesterday‘s entry, I mentioned the drawing workshop where we were asked to gather as much information as possible in form of scribbles. In contrast to writing information down, it’s very easy to come up with new questions because it is a process of creation where you use the information you just got and, by processing it to get a visual output, you will eventually come to a point where you want to add something to the picture but you don‘t know how it looks like. A new question evolves. A very quick and productive method.

 

After a short break and having refreshed the mind with some more coffee, the so called collective idea escalator was started. Sounds a bit dangerous, doesn’t it? But the only danger there lies in the power of interpreting another persons statement in an intended positive or negative way. The result remarkably resembles a Chinese Whispers. It starts with a neutral statement of every participant on the topic, marked with a number. In the next step, everybody gets a different number and finds a positive and a negative interpretation of the given statement. So far this might be quite a common method and at this point we already had interesting ideas and views collected. But we took it a step further and exaggerated an in a positive or negative way interpreted idea of the step before, that we found appealing. As a result, we got a lot of really strong statements that showed either problems or possibilities. The last step of this method is picking 2 statements of both sides and somehow combine them again to a neutral statement with keeping in mind how this idea could help to reach your aim. That was a lot of thinking and we were surprised what we got out of it.

 

What did we do with all the new ideas and conclusions?  After having spent Wednesday morning learning about Augmented Reality, what we can learn from the Old Masters like Vermeer for creating digital environments and how people to people interaction with objects can enhance the creative process in a playful way, Jun.-Prof. Jörg Rainer Noennig presented us with three principals that are somehow related to the Damascus Room: Magical Mathematics, Pattern Language and Memory Theater. We then used those three principals to figure out where our ideas from the collective idea escalator would fit best, formed groups and used the principals as a starting point for the actual creation phase. There we are right now. Come back tomorrow to find out about the great Workshops we had today: „Making Ideas interactive“ (Arduino basics), „Idea Models“ (Visualization and exploration of ideas via simple models) and „Concepts, Mood-& Storyboards“ and eventually a sneak-peak on fridays finissage? We will see!