Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.
Thinklab, unveiled in January 2012, is an institution-level experimental learning environment, kit of structured creative thinking tools, and technology-rich platform for participatory, interdisciplinary and/or community-engaged learning in education. It was created both to host design courses and university-community learning initiatives as well as to serve as a model for future learning spaces in higher education. The lab is currently exploring, using and integrating the following types of media tools: video conferencing; interactive conference table, wall and multi-touch presentation surfaces; mind-mapping and collaborative brainstorming tools; systems modeling software; assessment tools; diagramming, mapping and visual modeling tools; programming and (Kinect) development tools.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
With regard to our interests in the conflictual aspects of collaboration (see answer to "a-ha" question below), the notifying email came in the midst of one of our most conflictual days ever. Too many collaborations. Too many positions. Not enough Thinklab spaces to go around.
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
Based on the work we have completed with Thinklab, we were invited to conceptualize and design a next-generation architectural design studio at Syracuse University, underwritten by Steve Einhorn, FAIA, CEO of Stardog consulting and founder and former CEO of Einhorn Yaffe Prescott Architects. Phase one of the studio will be opening in September 2013, updating a classic academic design studio into a highly flexible, collaborative, and digitally interactive design environment.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
Taking 81mg of aspirin a day helps the heart.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
Early in the development of Thinklab, in prototyping its first laboratory environment, it became immediately clear to us how profound was the impact of articulating conflict (visually, aurally, or otherwise) as a central part of collaborative work. Individuals come to a collaboration with their own future expectations, personal legacies, and local perspectives.
Aha!
In discovering the significance of this temporal knowledge—the legacies, past projects, history of conversations, evolving conflicts, and changing contributions within a large collaborative conversation—we discovered an important capacity for our archive. The idea of strategically and richly archiving all contributions to a collaboration was born.
Project Name: Greening Campus: A Collaborative Design with Children Designers: Design Team of Scott Sutherland School of Architecture & Built Environment, Robert Gordon University (Collaborator 1); Robert Gordon College (Client & Collaborator 2); Fiona Thaddeus (Design by Research); and Dr. Quazi Zaman (Project Coordinator)
The Greening Campus is a collaborative design project reinforcing educational initiatives, involving primary and secondary school children through ethnographic design process coordinated by Scott Sutherland School of Architecture students. The collaborative design process used 'ethnographic' method documenting children's ideas, language, aspirations, visions, interpretations and collaborations with the help of STITCHING URBAN VISIONS (SUV) tool based on theoretical strands and research on 'children and city' to determine how children visualize and interpret 'place making' attributes. This helps designing children's place making for educational environment. The project uses ideology derived from the seminal work of Kevin Lynch's 'Growing up in Cities' theory.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
I was informed by email (notified automatically about the announcement over web, but I couldn't make it to hear the live announcement due to time difference). Later I checked the web page of Core77 and listened to the jury, followed by an email sent by Core77 (Sarah).
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
The project Help.KIDS is an ongoing action oriented design programme working closely with Spanish, Nepalese and Bangladesh together with Scottish schools and children. We have done many action-oriented projects—one which was to regenerate an area in Bangladesh through participatory project convincing Mayor to stop development that was against the urban context and socio-cultural conditions. We have recently done in Madrid, working with children of refugee from Romania by closely working with them and developing a planning agenda for their future settlement. We have been active in Kathmandu (Nepal) to understand the future ambition of children for their city and desired attributes.
We have now expanded our scope to a Foundation (HelpKIDS Foundation). We are also generating huge research information and elements of intellectual enquiry for our ongoing research. Currently, I am preparing a monograph gathering all our past activities using the title: Stitching Urban Vision (SUV)—a state of art ethnographic enquiry into children participation in cities—Madrid, Aberdeen, Dhaka, Kathmandu.
In 2014: we have prepared materials for an international symposium on 'Children in Cities'—by inviting all the participants from Nepal, Spain, Bangladesh and home cities in Scotland—together with international invitees to discuss on researches and cases. We would be honoured to link to Core77 as co-organiser, if this is of any interest to the Core77 organisers. We have some of the key organisers as target participants: UNICEF, UNESCO, CIB, World Bank, Gates and Ford Foundation and some local bodies.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
Help.KIDS unfolds many unknown territories exist within the children that shows us a new path to reform the challenging dimensions and ambiences of social, physical and moral-material aspect of our future city.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
HelpKIDS acts as a bridge to fill the gap exist between decision makers and future generation—a fundamental of 'sustainable agenda.'
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