We were invited by long time collaborators onedotzero to co-host their Cascade workshop in Beijing in December 2011. Together with Sophie Walter and Chris Huang we wrote a series of exercises and activities that explored the theme of collaboration. The most interesting of which was 50 ways brief on the first day. There were around 40 participants that we split into groups of 5–6. We then asked them to find as many ways as possible to join two everyday objects with similar uses but great cultural and historical differences – we chose a fork and a chopstick. The task is designed to examine two notions; firstly, the way we read an object and it's potential uses; then the breadth of possibilities there are in using exploration as a design technique.
Strelka invited Kevin Palmer and Matt Wade from Kin to host a 10 day workshop at Stelka in September 2011. The workshop was designed to teach a group of 15 participants how to create a web concept for a virtual museum. This was in response to a real brief proposed by the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow. We designed a series of tasks that demonstrated how a design problem can be broken down into a series of studies that form the basis for a design process. The aim was to find a rich understanding of the design problem and to find a unique and engaging response to the brief.
The workshop took place at the institute. We were given a dedicated room to work and used it as a immersion space. The participants were encouraged to cover the space in their thoughts, ideas and workings.
The group we were working with represented a diverse slice of modern Russian life, from young architects, to museum professionals, to middle aged mothers. This was an exciting prospect, as in effect, our participants represented the audience for the piece. With this in mind we designed a series of activities and exercises that explored a design process that could be used to tackle the brief. The aim was for each exercise to build into the next, creating an iterative approach and a holistic understanding of the concept, context and texture of a solution. Our greatest achievement with the project is we uncovered a huge amount of passion about the way the organisation would behave and communicate in the future. The group on the whole became totally immersed in the problem.
In partnership with the National Maritime Museum we created a brief for this years Goldsmith’s live project. We asked the students to create a travelling exhibition, that communicates the Longtitude Problem to children between the ages 7–11.
The students delivered a diverse range of responses, from beautifully crafted objects to performance pieces. After final presentations at Kin, a selection of project were taken to a presentation at The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
We were invited in to sit in on the Digital Ecologies module of the MSc in Adaptive Architecture and Computation at The Barlett. The work was as ever really inspiring. Among the favorites was David Di Duca's inferring faces project. Video here: http://vimeo.com/22594024
For the first workshop, at Camberwell, in this series we set students the task of creating one sequential image out of the handheld devices, which they had on them. The second workshop challenged students to create a sequential film out of a continuous picture of the room.
The students produced a lovely film, in four groups, around the themes earth, wind, fire and water.
For the past few years we have been apart of onedotzero’s cascade, a set of workshops which brings graduate, from varying in disciplines, together for a collaborative experience. This year the projects revolved around the theme of ‘utopia’.
We were asked to give a talk about collaboration, be involved in discussions with groups and be apart of the industry panel to feedback to the groups about their ideas. The final presentations were apart of the onedotzero_adventures in motion festival at the BFI.
Images courtesy of onedotzero
For the past three years we have acted as external examiners for the Visual communication BA at The Dublin Institute of Technology. Every year the students offer an exciting range of ideas and work. Similarly to previous years students were divided between us and Yves. Yves concentrated on those students who were stronger in illustration and we took on the students who were interested in graphics and interaction.
Thanks DIT for asking us along, for the past few years, your students have produced some lovely and inspiring work. A few student have also come to Kin on work placements, including Claire Campion who now works for us full time.
For this years live projects with Goldsmith University we generated a brief, again based around our clients Nokia. However, this year we provided students with the challenge of creating a series of pop up shops to promote the launch of the Nokia N900.
The project asked students to adopt four disused sites around London for their proposed installation, taking into consideration the connections between these spaces and how their ideas may work across them.
Students Ben Redford, Chris Thomas, Harriet McDougall and Henry Flitton created a series of ‘physical apps’ to illustrate the potential of social technologies through physical forms.
In the lead up to the launch of their now world renowned digital film festival, Adventures in Motion, at the BFI this year, onedotzero ran an education project called onedotzero_cascade. This was a 10-day workshop, run at the p3 space at The University of Westminster, with students from a number of leading art colleges studying different design disciplines. The students worked in teams working on a brief in response to Jason Bruges Studio installation and sustainability work. We were asked to come in and present our work and talk about interaction design from our perspective as a cross-disciplinary practice. We then worked with the students to discuss their ideas and share some, hopefully useful, insights into our working process. The outcome of the workshops was presented at the BFI delegate centre and the results can be seen on the onedotzero_blog.
We spent a day with Colchester University's 1st year BA Graphic Media students. We set them a project where they had to source 20 objects from around the College and look at three different types of relationships between them. They then had to organise and compose the objects to tell the story of that relationship. Lastly they had to photograph and document the arrangment as a record of relationship.
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.
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.
