Workshops

Unibz Design Festival 2012 will offer six workshops lead by international designers. The workshops last two full days, and will be free and open to design students from the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano as well as to students from other schools.

Deadline to register for workshops expired on September 8.

List of workshops that will be offered:

The Truth of Falling Upwards (Red) and the Echo of Everything (Blue)
with Daniel Eatock and Flávia Müller Medeiros
Workshop description: Day 1: Formation of a plan/route. As a group we will plan a very long walk (25 miles minimum) in the mountains to breath fresh air and talk. Will will plan and discuss: food; clothing; foraging; exercise. Please bring local maps, destination points, ideas for adventure. / Day 2: Talk and Walk. We will undertake the walk, reflect on the things we find, change the route, eat well, sing, stop for lunch, walk and walk, end tired.

To Wonder
with Formafantasma
Workshop description: Design is a discipline in constant evolution and adaptation to the needs and changes in society. Knowledge has never been more accessible than today, thanks to the Internet and to a growing propension between humans to share information and experiences. On the other side the amount of data and visual stimulus we are producing as a society is often overwhelming.
In opposition to this complex scenario, the most ancient learning process is becoming the more and more relevant: Contemplation. Contemplation implies the need to slow down, to find the time to wonder, to observe, to analyze. The natural world itself, is no longer observed as a sole aesthetic inspiration. Designers are not interested anymore in the mimesis of nature, and are rather interested in translating the nature’s processes into production. Designers are further developing a tentacular creativity, and expanding their curiosity towards other disciplines in order to offer solutions or advance utopian proposals.
During the two days of wokshop, students will be invited to observe how natural physical phenomena work and to translate this process into design proposals. Observation, intuition and already aquired knowledge shared between the students will be the only learning tools used.

Teacher’s College
with Rob Giampietro
Workshop description: A syllabus is a document. Photocopied, staple-bound, and generally up to a dozen pages, it is often produced by an instructor and includes a course’s most basic information: time and location, schedule, learning objectives, grading, rules for conduct in class, introductory text, reference figures and imagery, and an overview of the course’s readings and assignments.
The goal of this workshop is to produce its own syllabus. Over two days, we will collaborate to assemble a document that outlines a future course about design education, drawing from examples both within design and beyond. On day one, each designer will arrive ready to present for 5-10 minutes on a topic of their choice. Of particular interest are educators like Socrates, Ivan Illich, Maria Montessori, and Norman Potter, educational institutions from the Bauhaus to TED, and prior syllabi like those from David Foster Wallace, Milton Glaser, and others. Following these presentations, designers will be put in teams of two, with each team contributing a single page to the course syllabus – from timelines, annotated reading lists, taxonomies, learning tools, reference aids, and more.
Following a favorite teacher of mine, the syllabus will begin with an image and end with a list, forming points A and B of the document. How these points connect, and how future designers might make use of them, will be our collective concern and ultimate project.

Tales from the Street
with Cynthia Hathaway
Workshop description: Working around a common everyday object, the students will be guided in the development of research methods that create inspired scenarios of usage, context, persona in relation to common and sometimes unexpected consumptive behaviour. The first day will be research-based, with students acting as sleuths and scenario builders, followed by a day of production and a final exhibition.

Design with the Cloud
with Metahaven
Workshop description: Books were and are the start of any learning process. During this two-day workshop we will recreate a physical book, using the ambiguous legal space we find ourselves in: the Cloud. The Cloud is Google, Amazon, The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks all at once.
By using online resources we will, on a 1:1 scale, recreate and reprint a number of famous books, finding ourselves on the fringes of international copyright laws. Hold tight for amazing design results, with an internet that is more limited, and free, than you could ever imagine.

Asking Questions – Seeking Answers: Learning through Imaginative Projections
with Mischer’Traxler
Workshop description: Without questions and without imagination we would not learn, evolve or improve. Questions help us to refine our skills, to picture different scenarios and to start discussions. Moreover, they help us to come up with ideas and solutions. Questions are never wrong and there is hardly just one answer. This workshop invites to search for answers to various questions and to slowly embrace the possibilities of asking. 
Every participant is asked to bring one thing/object (soap, chair, egg, paper clip, candle, bottle, toaster, pillow, aubergine… basically anything apart from animals/insects). Working in pairs, the items will be analyzed and various questions will lead to tasks of transformations, translations, copies, predictions etc. Assignments will include quick model making with basic materials as well as coming up with imaginative concepts. This hands-on approach and many discussions will lead to new objects/scenarios/alternatives/graphics/artworks or installations.