A research proposal from Workplace Co-operative 115
What follows is a proposal that some members of Workplace Co-operative 115 put forward in response to an open invitation from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts & Humanities Research Board (AHRB) to form a research cluster around the theme of ‘Designing for the 21st century’. We were the only non-academic institution to put forward a proposal. It helped us to refine some thoughts about sharing ideas, working together, and working across boundaries. For example, it includes a plan for a series of practical workshops and a summer school. Though the plan was not taken up by the EPSRC / AHRB, we are still interested in developing these kinds of activities in the future.

The EPSRC / AHRB’s report on its initiative can be seen at Designing for the 21st century website.

Contents:

Summary (Back to top)

This proposal is for a series of meetings and discussions between different artists, designers, architects, writers and teachers. It will take place over the course of a year, with two one-day workshops at the beginning and end and four shorter sessions in between.

The purpose of these meetings is to make the participants think more carefully about some of the familiar ideas and skills that they use every day in their professional work and ask them to employ this expertise to do different tasks.

Here is an example of how this might work:
Photographers normally produce single images that are frozen in time and will carefully manipulate colour and lighting as well as focus and composition in order to produce exciting images. For them the act of taking a photograph is not just a way of passively recording things, but an active process which involves making a lot of quick decisions. These choices transform and often radically change the way things look. When we view a photograph however we often ignore the fact that somebody has taken it, we forget about all the editing and selection that has gone on and perhaps even think of it like a window directly onto the world. In a similar way, the photographer can become so acquainted with his or her working methods that they become completely automatic and routine. In some ways this is a good thing because professionals are expected to work to exacting standards and to have a high degree of knowledge in their chosen field. However, habits and routines can sometimes hinder enterprise and experimentation and make people lazy. The pressure of financial and commercial deadlines can often result in the same techniques and devices being used unquestioningly over and over again.

The research cluster meetings will address these issues by asking participants to rethink the ways in which their work is normally done. Firstly, participants will make short presentations to the whole group that describe the main ideas and processes that are essential to their profession. Then, after some discussion, a series of partnerships and collaborations between different sets of people will be set up and the participants will be required to think about how the methods they use in their own occupation can be applied to a completely different creative activity. So, for instance, the photographer may collaborate with a book designer and have to work on the layout of a scientific book for young children. Taking ideas such as ‘light’ and ‘focus’ or even ‘speed’ and ‘stillness’ and translating them to the challenges of another task may create some original ways of thinking about the construction of the book. This may involve reinventing the overall form of the book so that it folds out like a sequence of stills on a roll of film. Or it may result in the decision to use translucent, see-through paper in which the images and text gradually appear and disappear, like turning the focus ring on a camera. The photographer might even suggest that the book be printed using light sensitive inks, so that the words and pictures only gradually become visible as the pages are turned.

This is just a quick example of some of the ways in which people working in different areas of art and design can co-operate with each other to develop original ideas and perhaps even produce new products. Once this process has been started it can keep on growing, creating chains or networks of people and joining together many creative professions. A book designer for example might start to work with a landscape gardener who in turn may collaborate with a composer. In this way fresh ideas can slowly flow through a web of individuals and groups and across different creative disciplines until they eventually start to change the design and production of things that we use in our daily life.

Objectives (Back to top)

Graft: ways of doing, a designing for the 21st century research cluster will activate a series of unique collaborations that aim to develop experimental ways of thinking and working across areas of professional practice and enquiry that are traditionally separate.

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It will seek to stimulate enterprising and original research, design and production by ‘grafting’ or ‘cross-processing‚ conceptual and structural principles between distinctive creative disciplines.

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It will pursue a deconstructive strategy of translation, in which one activity is ‘rewritten’ into the language of another, revealing symbolic meanings and relationships encoded in cultural archetypes, constructions and representations.

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It will initiate a variety of micro-projects that explore how alternative and apparently unrelated operational methodologies can overlap and interact to produce new ideas and inventive outcomes.

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It will work to identify similarities and differences between processes, materials and technologies with the intention of rethinking and developing existing practices.

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It will promote increased awareness and understanding of creative systems, frameworks and models across a range of specialised areas of discourse, encouraging effective and practice-led results.

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It will provide an opportunity for individuals and small groups from across the spectrum of the design community to work in new and unfamiliar contexts, fostering the emergence of flexible and expanding networks of artists, designers, academics and consumers.

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It will respond to the contemporary imperative to actively pursue communication, innovation and new learning that bridges cultures, languages and media in order to nurture inclusive and socially responsive design solutions that meet the challenges of the 21st century.

When (Back to top)

Graft: ways of doing, a designing for the 21st century research cluster will be structured as two one-day workshop/conferences and four progress presentations with the timescale proposed as follows:

January 2005

In January the programme will begin with keynote speeches addressing contemporary and historical precedents underlying the inter-disciplinary displacement of ideas across mediums, genres and traditions. Invited practitioners and academics from a diversity of art and design sectors, including all named investigators will then give short presentations outlining their core working processes, skills and theoretical approaches. From this introductory session a number of possible partnerships will be identified (for example, a screenwriter may attempt to ‘write’ a building in the form of a script, revealing potential dramatic aspects to architectural practice whilst also disclosing new structural processes behind narrative construction). Through negotiation these collaborations will be formalised and objectives clearly defined.

March, May,
July and
September 2005

Bi-monthly presentations (in March, May, July and September) will give the opportunity to view and monitor all ongoing projects. They aim to provide an occasion for reflection and evaluation by the entire group. These will be dynamic and open forums that explore emerging ideas and seek to implement new partnerships.

December 2005

In December all developments will be discussed and reviewed with the outcomes promoted initially via a web site and small publication. Future working collaborations and areas of research will be defined and further research priorities and challenges identified.

Who: core members (Back to top)

Peter Brawne

an independent typographic designer for over twenty years of predominantly printed matter for a wide variety of organisations and individuals mainly, though not exclusively, in the not-for-profit sector. Previously he worked at Windhorse Associates, a graphic design co-operative and the London Borough of Hackney as it’s senior designer. In 2000 he exhibited specially commissioned work for the Look Out: art/society/politics touring exhibition organised by Art Circuit. Recent work includes design for the Cultures of Consumption research programme funded by AHRB and ESRC at Birkbeck College.

Cleo Broda

is an artist and lecturer. Her work is often site-specific and concerned with peoples’ usage of space and ways that this is controlled and represented. She is interested in the authority that certain representations of information carry and frequently borrows the forms of other disciples in making her work. Recent pieces have employed the languages of cartography, tourist postcards, signage and company brochures. She has lectured at Surrey Institute of Art and Design since 1999 and is a senior lecturer working in the School of Design.

Katherine Gillieson

is a designer, writer and researcher with experience in communication design for print and screen. She has worked for clients in the cultural and hi-tech sectors in Canada, USA and the UK and is active in self-initiated projects. She is a visiting lecturer and researcher at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading where she is also conducting doctoral research.

Duncan Kramer

trained as a furniture designer in the mid-1980’s, subsequently making a living producing furniture, exhibitions, and finally buildings. He recently undertook an MA in Design Futures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, achieving a distinction for his project on colour use in three-dimensional design and the built environment. He is a founding member of Workplace Co-operative 115 and lives and works in London.

Roderick Packe

is an audio-visual artist. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are held in both public and private collections. He has collaborated with composers, choreographers and filmmakers and released sound works on numerous CDs. Recently he curated a large exhibition of contemporary abstract colour photography and edited the accompanying Optic Nerve book. Since 1999 he has worked as an associate senior lecturer in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at Leeds Metropolitan University as well as guest lecturing at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and the European Exchange Academy in Berlin.

Who: cluster associates (Back to top)

Maarten de Reus

trained in public art in the Netherlands, where he has worked and taught for many years. He has produced a large body of site-specific and situational work, much of it in collaboration with other artists and designers. He now divides his time between London and Amsterdam.

Robert Jones

has been a scriptwriter for 15 years, working mainly in TV across a wide spectrum of genres. This year he won a Bafta award for the prison series Buried as he did for Cops in 2001. Previously he worked in publishing, housing and teaching. He lives and works in London.

Robin Kinross

is a writer, publisher and a founding member of Workplace Co-operative 115. He runs Hyphen Press out of the co-operative building, publishing books on typography, design practice and theory, including the late Norman Potter’s seminal What is a designer: things, places, messages (Hyphen Press 1980). He is a frequent contributor to numerous publications and conferences on typography and design.

Dan Monck

is a designer and founding member of Workplace Co-operative 115. He has a degree in architecture and a diploma in independent study (politics and the art of engineering). Having worked as a carpenter, plumber, labourer and textile printer, his skills lead him to work for many years in community arts before turning his full attention to designing ‘things and places’ some 15 years ago. He occasionally teaches architecture students at London Metropolitan University.

Jack Schulze

is a practising designer and design consultant. He works mainly in interaction design, but also in print and other media. Some of his current work includes Looking and mapping, a project that explores issues of mapping complex urban spaces and animate!, an animator’s resource that has recently received substantial development funding. He is also active in developing the Central Lettering Record, an online learning resource on public lettering. This is based at Central St Martin’s School of Art and Design, where Jack also teaches.

Mathilda Tham

is a fashion designer and trend forecaster living in England but working in Sweden. She also teaches design students at Goldsmiths College, London, and is pursuing a PhD examining fashion design and sustainability issues. With Noemi Sadowska she is presenting a paper The Stored Wisdom: artefacts as gap minders between the ‘professional self’, the ‘personal self’, and other individuals at the Research into Practice conference at the University of Hertfordshire. This paper addresses the ability or inability within design practice and design research to communicate with other designers and researchers, or to those outside the design profession.

Beneficiaries (Back to top)

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The immediate beneficiaries of the Graft: ways of doing, a designing for the 21st century research cluster will, of course, be the participants in the two workshop /conferences and four presentations /seminars. This will include members of the Workplace Co-operative 115 as well as the wider communities of artists, designers, engineers and technologists. Professionals from other creative disciplines, such as members of the academic, teaching and writing communities will also be involved in the series of events.

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With the emphasis on a radical rethinking of the borderlines between separate disciplines it is hoped that all participants will benefit from receiving conceptual and practical insights into their own ways of working as well as generating new perspectives on the methods of others.

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Networks, collaborations and partnerships that emerge through the research cluster will be encouraged to flourish, eventually spreading to wider cultural and social spheres.

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Prominence will be attached to applied research with attainable and practical results. These outcomes will be disseminated in a range of multidisciplinary forms, from innovative product design to educational projects, as they filter through to the clients and consumers of each participant’s work.