We believe strongly in the connection between design academia and design practice. The two are mutually beneficial and we feel it’s a mistake for design consultancies not to nurture and foster new creative talent.
Every year since we graduated from the
Design Studies course at Goldsmiths, we have set the students a project. The brief is usually based around a familiar brand for the students to research. We then run a midway workshop and finally invite the students to our studio to present their finished work. This hopefully gives them a great piece of work for their folio and gives us a chance to discover the new stars and find the ones we like to take part in our placement scheme, and potentially offer future employment as well. Over the years a number of the students have gone on to work for our previous companies and we hope this will be the case with Kin.
This year’s project was based around a long-standing client of ours – Nokia. Nokia’s mantra is to create ‘very human technology’. This gives consumers a sense of trust, consideration and the awareness that technology is really only an enabler. Nokia strives to own the “human” dimension of mobile communications, hoping to leave its competitors wondering what to own (or how to position themselves), having taken the best position for itself.
Our fictitious brief was based around a new service for their devices, one that enables users to broadcast where they are and what they are up to. The concept of ‘social location’ combines technologies such as GPS sensors and electronic compasses to allow devices to intuitively understand their geographical position. This also makes it easy to update social networks automatically with real-time information and giving approved friends the ability to update and view their ‘status’ and share their ‘social location’ as well as related pictures or videos. (
http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1274500)
The students were to create a launch event for So-Lo, aimed at cool young Londoners, at a fictitious new technology exhibition to be held in Brick Lane this summer. We set the students the task of building a 5m2 space, designing a way of communicating ‘social location’ and thirdly to think about how to attract a visitor’s attention and sustain it for at least 5 minutes. How do you engage a hot, tired delegate/visitor and get them excited about yet another ‘new technology’? What they would take away (physically and emotionally)? And how do you keep the conversation with a visitor alive post-event? Although this was a technology based brief, we didn’t want to limit the media they could choose for their solution. Using digital media was not a prerequisite of the brief as we were keen to see solutions that use different disciplines, whether old or new.
We held the final presentation in our new third floor development space and were wonderfully surprised and proud of the high standard of work. After running the live project with the college for over 14 years now, it was without doubt the best year we’ve seen. Each team presented strong concepts, beautifully communicated through rich visuals, models, animation and film work. We were delighted with the results and the evening affirmed our belief in keeping the yearly live project scheme going at Kin. Congratulations to all the students involved (listed in their teams below) and special thanks to the tutors Charlotte, Belinda and Jimmy.
Stephanie Alexander, Simon Cordery, Jane Taylor
Philipp Faehndrich, James Petith, Albrecht Birkner, Chris Simcock
Avril O’Neil, Claire Neal, Des Wong
Livia Rossi, Marianne Heide, Maja Matkowska
Ben Barker, Rada Lewis, Rob Allen
Lizzie Burt, Vilma Jaruseviciute, Michael Richardson
Charlotte Harrison, Rachel Howe, Matt West
Emily Harthern, Ellie Edwards, Annie Greevenbosch
John Sutton, Sophie-Rose Daintree, Rachel Cockburn
If you'd like more information about this or any other kin project, email us at:
questions@kin-design.com
