#designworkout

Play Type Zine-2020_Sergey_Petrov (Serko)

_2017

Our first meeting landed right on the 1st of September, with a solid crowd of 4 students, 1 professor and 2 teaching assistants attending. We’re hoping more participants will join the team after the course selection is done- we could use a few more good (wo)men!

This productive class lasted a little over 2 hours, and can be divided into 3 crucial parts, based on the 3 important issues that were discussed.

1) What are we actually doing here?

Besides working towards making a great EXPERIENCE ( not just exhibition ) for the night of the museums on the 29th of October, we concluded that we would equally be concentrating on learning goals. Primarily going through a systematic and iterative design process, as well as documenting the process in as much detail we can along the way- this very post can be seen as an example! And lets not forget personal skill growth. This is something each of us has to strive to develop on our own throught the project.

2) What do we need to consider for the success of the class and the exhibition?

A number of different things, such as the amount of time people spend at our location during the night of the museums, what they expect to see, what we can offer them and which projects we can chose to exhibit, how can we connect current topics with themes related to KISD and the principles of the school…

3) These thoughts were mapped out during our brainstorming process under the categories: VISITORS, CONTENT and EXPECTATIONS. During the brainstorming session, we individually got to express our understanding and hypothesis in these three categories. Some interesting questions that came up were as follows:

VISITORS- are visitors mainly: designers? Design students? Artists? Cultural enthusiasts? Non-designers who casually wandered in? KISD students? Friends and acquaintances of KISD students? People who live nearby?

CONTENT- Should the topic be related to: global issues? European issues? Regional issues? Should it be related to internationality? Design? Controversial?

EXPECTATIONS- Do the stakeholders expect the exhibition to be a: - school ad? A discussion trigger? An interaction facilitator? A people connector? Youthfully Different? An inspirational display of works? Fun and entertaining? Casual and relaxed atmosphere? Elegant and simple in design? Something knowledgeable and smart?

We should add that prof. Mager was at the first meeting, urging us to make it easy to make and create, not very time consuming, but at the same time effective and pleasurable.

We left with the idea in mind that we should really talk to people who had visited different museums as well as KISD before during the long night, to see what their opinions and expectations were. Primarily we understood we needed to gain clearer picture of our target audience in order to be build up our themes, topics and experiences for that specific visitor group(s). We’ll be conducting and analysing our user interviews for next time, after which we’ll be turning them into personas for discussion. Stay tuned!