I am going to take alot away from the week sprint. One element for me has been centred around listening. This is both in terms of the the people who I am working with but also the people who have come to talk to us about what they do. For me personally day three had two really interesting speakers. First up was Dick Penny (MD of Watershed). The watershed has been going now since 1982 and so it was facinating to hear his thoughts about place and what he thought made a space fertile, for creating realtionships and projects. The journey of how the watershed added the internet to its building way ahead of most other establishments. I think from memory they were watching full 25 frame a second video over ten years ago. I think the belief was that they would be able to create friends and forge collaborations and indeed that has happened but what I thought most interesting is that the physical meeting up and seeing someone face to face is still the way that we want to have our relationships. As Dick put it "you want to smell people".

We then had Mike Bennett who came to explain what he does in Bristol Council. His job title is placemaker director and his role is to advertise Bristol as a cool place to the world. He then took us to see one of last years events "see no evil" which was a big grafitti and music festival. I think both talks really helped the understanding of the project we are currently working on and in some ways for me at least it helped me develop a different way of analysing it. We had always wanted a social / urban responsibility element to the project and it was really interesting to see the similair themes that we had spoken about throughout the two talks.

In terms of the project. I think that it has been a bit up and down, in a way we have suffered from having an idea and concept that we were all happy with a bit too early. The project itself has a lot of technicality that has ment instead of physical prototyping it has been more theory based. With traditional making taking a back seat to some extent. Which brings me to 'making' and how making and thinking is viewed. As a group we are all very different and therefore have different perceptions of making, or maybe a better word is prototyping. The challenge I think for us has been finish or the perception of finish. As a designer I regularly work in programmes that to many would make the visuals/products/brands look finished yet for me they are used to develop my understanding, and to prototype. I think it was always going to be like this. However the main issue is to try and understand each others practice and to try and therefore work with these beliefs to try and create something that is as good as it can be, within the group dynamics. We have two more days now and I hope we can get some trials of technology in to see how feasible these things are. 

* I would have put some images in this but at the time of writing flickr was down.

 

Julian  

 

Posted by Julian Sykes