Design Lab
An exploration of interdisciplinary collaboration and the artifacts of design via process as product
Responsibilities
Prep work for the course and installation included significant coordination of guest participants, securing grants for funding, working with the gallery to design the exhibit and marketing materials, setting up a new course within the College of Built Environments, creating a course syllabus, and teaching/facilitating the weekly seminars.
Project
Design Lab was a multi-pronged investigation into interdisciplinary collaboration that included a university course and live-action gallery installation. It invited participants to examine the way they worked, instead of just the outcomes, and shone a spotlight on the rarely-seen messiness of the design process.
Born from a collaboration with the Henry Art Gallery, the project featured a series of design charettes held within the gallery that put the design process on display and week by week populated the gallery with the artifacts of design.
Students participated in the charettes—known in some fields as design sprints—as part of a quarter-long course on collaboration. Part of their weekly assignments included sharing their design process via orchestrating the charette or expanding their knowledge of collaboration by observing the charette. Each week, new professional collaborators from a different field were brought in to share their working methods while working alongside the students to tackle an urban renewal project from different angles.
Outcome
Design Lab brought together dancers, historians, landscape architects, transportation professionals, social workers, urban planners, and UX designers. It had a hashtag, a livestream, and a site-specific dance. It provided a unique networking experience within the insular College of Built Environments, and allowed participants to interrogate what it means to collaborate and how they could improve their own practice, giving soft skills, for once, equal weight with hard skills.
After the exhibit, Design Lab was invited to participate in the Seattle Design Festival and led attendees through a design sprint of their own.
The class was renewed for a second session as a Professional Practice selective offered by the College of Built Environments and secured over $5,000 in outside funding from local firms.
Stats
Design Lab brought together 18 students from 3 colleges and 6 departments for a 10-week long course with weekly design charettes hosted in the Henry Art Gallery.
Over 20 working professionals ranging from recent grads to VPs shared their collaboration experiences and working methods via guest lectures and the weekly design charettes, where they worked alongside the students.
The practice is not the end product, but the cultivation of an inner capacity or awareness…The collaborative process requires an effort that faces out, toward the world, toward cultivating the potential for an entire group. – MB
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Details
Location: Seattle, WA
Organization: University of Washington—College of Built Environments, Henry Art Gallery
Year: 2013 - 2014
Skills + Programs
Teaching, Facilitation, Scheduling & Organization, Speaker Coordination, Project Management, Curation, Exhibit Design, Marketing, Graphic Design, Instructional Design, Grant Writing, Collaboration
