Philosophy: We want to capitalize on an opportunity to create environments where cross discipline collaboration can proliferate. A place where students, clients and professionals can work passionately towards a shared goal, regardless of their technical competencies. The real driver for innovation is the combination of an individual’s active pursuit of relevant ideas and their own experiences supporting that pursuit. The value of creating a networked environments like this is it’s ability to bring these individuals together with a shared commonality, thus creating a place where teaching and learning can co-exist, without the restraints on creativity typically created by the ever-present pressures of strict hierarchies. In essence, we would like to develop a system that represents the antithesis of prestige.
"The successful company is not the one with the most brains, but the one with the most brains acting in concert."
- Peter Drucker
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Identity: Experience/Creation Myth
ROUGH VERSION>>>>>>>>>>SHORT VERSION>>>>>>>>>>>COMMENTS ON CONTENT (not grammar)>>>>>>>>>
[ A MULTIDISCIPLINARY NETWORK ]
ENVISIONING RELATIONSHIPS,
EMPOWERING PEOPLE
The Experience: I’d heard about the Sommardesign Kontoret from several of my more trusted classmates. Each one of them at the top of their respective classes in one way or another. There was; Clarke the diligent, Josh of sound concept, Yasu the workhorse, and Suzie the outsider inside. I respect them all, so it only makes sense that I would place a degree of prestige on the SVID summer offices. When the opportunity for me to participate in the program was brought up by my teacher, who had arranged the previous excursions, I was, excited? By this I mean full of disbelief tinged with self-doubt. Insecure as I felt, I decided that this was something worth pursuing, especially with the new exchange program that had been started with a small school in Halmstad. I told myself ”self, going on this exchange will give you some time to really get comfortable in Sweden so you can be at the top of your game when you work in that design office, and even if you get rejected from the office at least you’ll get to have a tremendous and life altering experience.” And so I bided my time, paid for the trip and promptly pushing the whole thing out of my head, continued with the daily grind. What can I say, I get really nervous, catatonically anxious even, when things I don’t fully understand just seem to fall in my lap. But, before I knew it, and truthfully almost without realizing it, I was boarding a plane, with five of my classmates, bound for Sweden.
For about a month after arriving I acclimated. I remember it taking me a while to warm up to my new situation, possibly because it was one of the coldest winters I’d ever experienced (later I would find out that it had been the longest winter Sweden had seen in the last twenty-five years). But, gradually I became more comfortable in my new surroundings. Things turned out to be better than expected. Living in a house with about forty people, from some twenty countries couldn’t possibly be all bad. Strangely though, no Swedish students lived within a mile our residence. It wasn’t a huge issue, really it gave all of us foreigners more time to get to know each other. There where these two Austrians that I got along especially well with. They’d come to Halmstad to participate in the new design exchange program as well. I just have to say Ronnie and Peter are quite possibly the best student designers I have ever encountered. They really understood every part of the process, and had tremendous follow through. Every project they’d worked on looked more than professional. More importantly though, they where really very interesting individuals. Ronnie has an affinity for shoes, a true “sneaker freaker”. He has something like two hundred pairs of sneakers. His shoe fetish was fueled by a love for all things old school hip-hop. I mean, his understanding of hip-hop as a culture was surprising considering the fact that he was from Vienna. In a lot of ways it was naïve, but so pure, he really loved it as an idea. Peter was just as passionate, but not as involved in a style or movement, he just loved to learn. He had a way of analyzing any type of situation almost effortlessly, and he loved documentation. Always taking pictures, but not in an annoying way. Every time you saw him pull out his camera you knew you wanted to see what he was seeing. Suffice to say I was excited to work with them.
On the first day of classes we found out that because all of us exchange students had arrived a little late, we where going to be working on a different project than the Swedish students. I thought this was a bit strange, to get a group of exchange students then stick them on a project together, completely separated from the rest of the design students, but I wasn’t to upset. It gave us the opportunity to work together, which is something the group I came over with doesn’t get the chance to do very often. Besides that, working with Ronnie and Peter seemed like it could be more than interesting. The project turned out to be pretty intriguing; a small museum dedicated to the sketches of Scandinavian artists was moving into a newer facility, and wanted a re-brand to try and attract more tourists. They also wanted concepts for utilizing the new space; allocation of space, furnishing, visual aides, community activities. We pretty much had free reign over how to run the project.
This proved to be as difficult as it was advantageous. At first we discussed generally what opportunities and issues seemed the most prevalent. We were having difficulty deciding on a course of action, the project seemed to be a mile wide and an inch deep. At this point the Austrians stepped up, describing methods for situational and market analysis they had learned at their university. Which, apparently, places much of its emphasis on teaching front-end research and analysis. This was my first glimpse at the value of integrating different approaches. We Americans had worked on group projects before, but because they really only involved our ID classmates the value of an outside perspective was known of, but not really known. This was an opportunity for all of us to exploit our individual tool sets to maximize our output. Wow, makes perfect sense, but how do we plan the organization for something like this? Because of our similar understanding of the design process we had come to rely on a fairly specific chain of events, one that we knew how to plan for and against. But now, we had a new element that we had little experience integrating into our version of the design process. Our saving grace, I would say, was the use of a simple four-stage divergent/convergent model. A little graphic that represents how to move a problem through a research phase, analysis phase, idea generation phase, and finally a refinement phase. It can be generally applied to just about any problem-solving situation as a kind of vague path. So we started to represent our plan as a series of these graphics leading us towards goals we discovered along the way. I’m making it sound like all of this just occurred to us in a dream, when, in reality, we struggled with it for nearly two months. Honestly, the final presentation may have represented a family of concepts that, by the way, delighted our clients, but to us it represented a shift towards understanding what really drives good design. We may not really be sure how it all worked out, but we’re more confident simply because it did.
Just after the project ended, our teacher, Hans Skillius, mentioned that the application process for Sommardesign Kontoret was about to begin. We had about a month to prepare our answers, which, in retrospect, seems like a bit too much time to stew over yourself. I was nervous, the questions seemed so open ended and I wasn’t sure what types of answers would be appropriate. So, I over did it. Several outlines, rough drafts, and three completely different approaches led directly to a handful of revision sessions with my friend Ellie. After a couple of these meetings she finally calmed me down, and reminded me that all I had to do was tell them what I’m interested in. It went from a formal statement about my education, to a conversation about what I enjoyed about design. After I had submitted the application I was relegated to the, anxious but confident, position of an excited hopeful.
It took a while to hear back, but I finally got the phone call. It took me by complete surprise. I didn’t even have the chance to think about what I was saying. I had to recap the whole thing in my head afterwards to make sure I hadn’t said anything too terribly stupid. Apparently, I handled it well, and about a week later received a call back from Anna asking if I wanted to work with her and seven other students on eight projects dealing with accessibility and existing environments. I said “yep,” and she said “good.”
Over the next month or so, while finishing an infinitely less interesting project than the one described a paragraph ago, I slowly planned my trip to Fårösund on Gotland. Which, by the way, is an incredible little island off the East coast of Sweden, full of sheep and all sorts of natural goodness (and if you’ve never heard of it that’s good, but now you have and should, at some point in your life, plan on spending an entire summer there). The adventure would take me through Göteborg, then to Stockholm where I would board a ferry, cruise the Baltic Sea and arrive in the medieval port town of Visby, all in just over ten hours. It didn’t sound too awful, after all, I’d made twenty hour straight drives to Georgia at home. Alas, I underestimated the entire “traveling across a foreign country by yourself carrying everything you own” scenario, and by the time I had arrived in Visby, was completely exhaused. After I picked up my luggage, I began to survey the terminal looking for Anna. She noticed me first, a haggard looking twenty something who appeared to be carrying everything he owned, called my name and directed my attention to the big neon yellow sign that read “Sommardesign Kontoret”. Rescued at last.
She had already picked up two of the other students, and we were apparently in a bit of a rush to catch the fourth. So, we did a bit of rearranging in the trunk of her Saab, sat on the hatch until we heard the click and drove into the city to pick up the last person for the day. After acquiring the final student we set off on the forty-five minute drive north to Fårösund. That’s when it really started, that first conversation. The two students with Anna at the ferry terminal had been, Emi Tsutsuhiro a Tokyo native who had moved to Milan to study interior design, and Anders Gäddlin a landscape architecture student from Uppsala. The last person picked up was Johanna Enger, an industrial design student in Visby, who had grown up in and around Stockholm. I was already getting the feeling that, if nothing else, working in this office was going to be interesting.
As we pulled into the drive of our house/office I was immediately awe struck. We were to be living and working in the old officers quarters of a decommissioned coastal artillery base, and because it had been a relatively hidden, for obvious reasons, everything was shrouded by vegetation. Which is why I hadn’t noticed that the four other students and our project manager were awaiting our arrival. As we stepped out of the car we were greeted by the smell of good food, and offered “peoples” beer. For me, a hot grill and a couple of beers happen to be the keys to my heart; the situation couldn’t have been more natural considering. Thus, I commenced a mingling. It all happened so quickly I can’t remember who I met first. I think it was Elisabeth Lilligraven, our project manager, an architect from Bergen, Norway, with a beautiful cut glass English accent. Then I met Linus Godet and Björn Syse, who were working the grill. Linus was an architecture and urban planning student at Chalmers in Göteborg, who had grown up splitting time between Paris and Göteborg. Björn, like Johanna, was attending the design program in Visby, and had grown up in Uppsala. Finally I met Catarina Nordbladh and Marie Lendendal. Catarina is a soft-spoken architecture student, studying in Copenhagen. Marie was finishing up her masters in design theory after getting her undergrad in textile design at the university in Borås. I felt like I was on the Real World, minus the pretentious, arrogant pre-madonnas and social timebombs.
The first week was delightfully intense. Not because of any work, there wasn’t much of that going on, but because we were all so interested in getting to know each other. I swear I gained ten pounds in those first seven days, thanks mostly to Linus who has the greatest nervous habit I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. We were all nervous though. Everyone was so anxious, almost begging to know what projects we would be working on. It felt like waiting in line for a carnival ride when you’d finally grown tall enough, “What’s going to happen, I’m so scared, man, this is going to be intense, how are we going to get all this work done, what do you know, me neither, this is going to be great”.
By the time the first week ended we were all so stir crazy, like hungry cats, all hunkered down, ready to pounce on anything resembling work. The computers and other equipment showed up? Let’s set up the office! Oh, we’re going to need a way to organize all of our information! Let’s network the computers and design a file management system! It felt so liberating to be such huge nerds! Finally Anna sat us down, and proceeded to introduce the projects. She could hardly finish describing each one before someone would start talking about a way of dissecting and discovering for it. It was like a design methods orgy, ideas here, a of couple thoughts there. Really incredible, seeing all of these tools and experiences freely flowing together to create this collective creative force. At this point none of us new that Anna and Elisabeth were planning on assigning each of us one of the eight projects, to act as a kind of facilitator/mediator/liaison. Looking back on it, it makes perfect sense, throw eight different bones to eight different dogs. Some of our preferences and abilities fit perfectly with certain projects, but what they looked for was which one was the most intriguing to each of us. Anna and Elisabeth knew that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you necessarily want to do it. They had chosen us, and already had confidence in our abilities; they wanted to discover how we could work best as a group. As long as we worked, happily, in a complimentary manner, it wouldn’t matter who was the “contact” on any of the projects, we would find a way.
The rest of that week we set up workshops to discuss our various interpretations of “The Design Process”. It took about a half an hour for us to realize our individual processes were separated by terms, simple semantics, not much more. What it really came down to was the specific situational tools we used. So we began to go through the individual projects, one by one, offering up whatever pertinent information or strategy we knew. By the end of a couple of sessions we had a pretty good foundation built, and so we started to have small workshops to cover methods or concepts that were unfamiliar to some, in an effort to give everyone an introduction to ideas that had the potential to be very useful.
After several days of workshops Anna and Elisabeth called another meeting. We knew that we would be spending this week meeting clients and visiting various project sites and manufacturers. What we didn’t know was that they had decided on who was to be each projects contact. They wrote the name of each project on the dry-erase boards, handed each of us markers and told us to write our names beneath the two projects we were most interested in. Almost everyone picked the project that was related to their core competency first, and the project they were most intrigued by second. Exactly what Anna and Elisabeth had expected, it got to a point where they were laughing about how well they had guessed. So, naturally they assigned each person to the project they weren’t as comfortable with, and then placed us in secondary positions by our technical strengths. They chose to create an environment that necessitated collaboration. A situation that was, effectively, fueled by conversation.
The time had come for us to meet our clients and receive the project briefs in their entirety. Each person we worked with seemed excited to be involved with the Sommardesign Kontoret. Though many of the clients didn’t seem to know exactly why they’d decided to work with the office, all of them seemed to be confident in our abilities and excited about the possibilities. You could rightly attribute their open arms to the exposure the offices had received the year before, during Sweden’s national design year (you heard right, Sweden had a year devoted to the promotion of design, I wonder what that’s like?). Each time we met with a new client you could watch, over the duration of our visit, them loosen up, as if they were a bit hesitant about the situation they were getting themselves into, but by the end of every one of those meetings they were talking with us as if we’d been working together for years. There was something strangely non-threatening about our group, all smiles and pointed questions. I think that these folks probably hadn’t interacted with people who actually enjoyed “working” for some time. Maybe it was just because we’re young and excited, maybe it gave them a glimpse back in time. Deep down I think/hope their enthusiasm was stimulated by a refreashing look to the future.
The meetings with our collaborators fueled the fire. We now had a stronger sense of direction, of purpose really. Working for people who believed in our abilities, people who really wanted us to succeed, not just for their personal success, but also because they believe in what we represented. I have to reiterate the fact that we weren’t just a group of students looking to make money and pad our résumés, though definitely not a bad situation for us to do just that. I think we represented a glimmer of hope for a lot of these people. We were, in essence, a vision for the future of design; a mash up of cultures and ideas dead set on finding socially responsible answers to common problems. We didn’t work on anything that itself was world changing, but I do believe that how we approached many of the projects could be, should it become a more standard practice. I digress; what I was getting at was the sense of empowerment we were all riding high on. We now had only a week until our month long break. A renewed sense of urgency overcame all of us. We frantically began learning everything we could about the individual projects, looking for ways to minimize time spent on each individual project by overlapping the research and group work. I don’t know what we would have done if we wouldn’t have had “accessibility” as a unifying theme. Several meetings and a couple of workshops later, with homework assignments in hand, we left the office for our break.
Everyone headed back to their homes, except me. I stayed at the office with the intentions of working on my thesis, and soon realized that I would drive myself insane if I spent a month completely inside my head. So, I met up with Björn and his girlfriend Hannah in Visby. The next two days were filled with copious amounts of all things relaxing. We hit the beach, cooked food and drank beers. Hannah had been planning to go back mainland to Karlshamn, to visit her parents, and decided that we should all go. We met up with one of Hannah’s friends who had come to Visby from Stockholm, on a break from classes at Konstfact, to travel the rest of the way with us. In Karlshamn, we went to nature reserves, a play called “Mio mi Mio” by Astrid Lundgren, cliff diving, and sailing during the days, while at night we went to various little bars to meet up with some of Hannah’s old friends. Who, by the way, were all very interesting; several of them were currently studying art or design at Konstfact, one girl was studying fashion at the ________ in London. It was so relaxing and everyone was incredibly hospitable, especially her parents, who treated me like family. It was a sad day when I left for Göteborg to visit Linus, I really didn’t ever want to leave. I felt it was time though, and so they helped me book my trip, and dropped me off at the bus station with a sack lunch and big hugs.
The trip to Goteborg was awful. I missed my first train, luckily I still made it in time for the next one, which ended up being mislabeled. I did have the good fortune of getting on that train with about thirty other confused Swedes, so it was sorted out quickly and we were put on another train, the right train, without me needing to do any talking. When I arrived it was pouring down rain, and I didn’t really know where I was going, so Linus came and picked me up. Everything got increasingly better from that moment on. Linus worked most days so I had the chance to just walk around the city and really get to know it, and on the days he was home we visited all the places he thought I’d like. At night we would meet up with his friends for drinks. It was great to step into someone else’s world and just exist, no pressure, just a whole lot of spare time. Most of the people I met through Linus were artists, musicians, architects or designers. It seemed like I had hit the interesting person jackpot over the break. Everyone had grand plans and hopes for the future. It seemed like each person was preparing to go work and live in some interesting place. It was incredible how they treated their friendships, a sincere version of the “I’ll see you later” mentality. After about a week my friend Blair, a fellow KU exchanger, called to see how my break was going. It turned out that she had been planning a trip to Göteborg, so she came up. That was a lot of fun just because now I had the chance to show her around, and it gave me an excuse to do everything all over again. Another week passed and Blair and I decided it was time for us to move on. We decided to go visit the office she, Marc, Kevin and Reid had been placed at in Unnered. As luck would have it our other friend Brian would be able to come at the same time. We were going to have a mid term reunion.
After all of us had arrived at the office, we took the opportunity to compare our situations. It seemed that Brian and I, the only ones separated from the group, were having an infinitely more interesting experience. The four others were having a rough time with their office. It must have been because they hadn’t been separated, or made uncomfortable. Brian and I, and for that matter, everyone involved in our groups, had been cut off from their direct support network and had taken advantage of the opportunity to really connect with each other as social people. At the office in Unnered I noticed a kind of rift between the Swedes and the Americans, there wasn’t any real connections being made.
I spent most of my time there talking with everyone about our upcoming thesis project. No one was really sure of what they wanted to do, and I was no different, but I was starting to see an opportunity based on our current situation. What was it we were participating in? Why did it seem to work better in different situations? What was the real value of all this? It was obvious why we were involved, but there had to be something bigger.
I arrived back in Farosund to an empty house. Worn out physically and mentally, I began a short vacation from my vacation. Slowly, over the next couple of days, everyone began showing up, and things started to happen again. We started to have a lot more visitors; the head of “Design for All”, a senior designer from Electrolux, several national politicians, plenty of local politicians, and a handful of academic researchers. It was incredible to see how many people had an interest in what was happening in our house. That what we were doing was so closely related to, what I thought of as, separate professions. When in reality they were so similar, so tightly entwined. Such an eye opener, not to mention a very good reason for us to work hard on our projects. Each person who came through had something valuable to offer us, and was more than happy to share their knowledge.
The projects were progressing well. Everyone was working hard on everything. Anna and Elisabeth had, for the most part, let us manage it all, but that outside perspective helped keep us in line. Whenever they saw an opportunity for one of us to help each other through a rough patch they played a little matchmaker. There were times when it all got too overwhelming, but that’s why we had each other, so it never got out of control.
As we neared the end it got more intense. A house full of creative perfectionists trying to format all of the information accumulated for eight projects into a consistent and concise visual presentation. We spent some late nights, even the night before our final presentations, trying to tighten all of it up. The day we presented our deliverables to the clients is a bit hazy. Most of us were sleep deprived and loaded with caffeine. The office was full of clients and the various other people who had been involved with the projects along the way. An air of eager anticipation from all parties filled the space. No one really knew what was in store.
One after another the presentations went off without a hitch. Clients were enthusiastically asking questions, and students were confidently answering. You could see the proud looks on client and student faces alike. After the presentations conversations continued, about the projects, their future, and the future of us students. Something big had happened, something very honest and sincere.
Later that afternoon I had a conversation with Jan Augry, the SDK project coordinator at SVID, that solidified the direction of my thesis. What just happened? Followed by: How could this happen in the United States? I had found a valid pursuit. Something I felt represented the most positive qualities of design. Finding a way to create an environment not only founded on communication between cultures and disciplines, but one that would rely on these interactions to remain relevant. This as an idea is nothing new, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that this type of collaboration has the power to drive the next generation of designers towards an era of exceedingly relevant innovation.
[ A MULTIDISCIPLINARY NETWORK ]
ENVISIONING RELATIONSHIPS,
EMPOWERING PEOPLE
The Experience: I’d heard about the Sommardesign Kontoret from several of my more trusted classmates. Each one of them at the top of their respective classes in one way or another. There was; Clarke the diligent, Josh of sound concept, Yasu the workhorse, and Suzie the outsider inside. I respect them all, so it only makes sense that I would place a degree of prestige on the SVID summer offices. When the opportunity for me to participate in the program was brought up by my teacher, who had arranged the previous excursions, I was, excited? By this I mean full of disbelief tinged with self-doubt. Insecure as I felt, I decided that this was something worth pursuing, especially with the new exchange program that had been started with a small school in Halmstad. I told myself ”self, going on this exchange will give you some time to really get comfortable in Sweden so you can be at the top of your game when you work in that design office, and even if you get rejected from the office at least you’ll get to have a tremendous and life altering experience.” And so I bided my time, paid for the trip and promptly pushing the whole thing out of my head, continued with the daily grind. What can I say, I get really nervous, catatonically anxious even, when things I don’t fully understand just seem to fall in my lap. But, before I knew it, and truthfully almost without realizing it, I was boarding a plane, with five of my classmates, bound for Sweden.
For about a month after arriving I acclimated. I remember it taking me a while to warm up to my new situation, possibly because it was one of the coldest winters I’d ever experienced (later I would find out that it had been the longest winter Sweden had seen in the last twenty-five years). But, gradually I became more comfortable in my new surroundings. Things turned out to be better than expected. Living in a house with about forty people, from some twenty countries couldn’t possibly be all bad. Strangely though, no Swedish students lived within a mile our residence. It wasn’t a huge issue, really it gave all of us foreigners more time to get to know each other. There where these two Austrians that I got along especially well with. They’d come to Halmstad to participate in the new design exchange program as well. I just have to say Ronnie and Peter are quite possibly the best student designers I have ever encountered. They really understood every part of the process, and had tremendous follow through. Every project they’d worked on looked more than professional. More importantly though, they where really very interesting individuals. Ronnie has an affinity for shoes, a true “sneaker freaker”. He has something like two hundred pairs of sneakers. His shoe fetish was fueled by a love for all things old school hip-hop. I mean, his understanding of hip-hop as a culture was surprising considering the fact that he was from Vienna. In a lot of ways it was naïve, but so pure, he really loved it as an idea. Peter was just as passionate, but not as involved in a style or movement, he just loved to learn. He had a way of analyzing any type of situation almost effortlessly, and he loved documentation. Always taking pictures, but not in an annoying way. Every time you saw him pull out his camera you knew you wanted to see what he was seeing. Suffice to say I was excited to work with them.
On the first day of classes we found out that because all of us exchange students had arrived a little late, we where going to be working on a different project than the Swedish students. I thought this was a bit strange, to get a group of exchange students then stick them on a project together, completely separated from the rest of the design students, but I wasn’t to upset. It gave us the opportunity to work together, which is something the group I came over with doesn’t get the chance to do very often. Besides that, working with Ronnie and Peter seemed like it could be more than interesting. The project turned out to be pretty intriguing; a small museum dedicated to the sketches of Scandinavian artists was moving into a newer facility, and wanted a re-brand to try and attract more tourists. They also wanted concepts for utilizing the new space; allocation of space, furnishing, visual aides, community activities. We pretty much had free reign over how to run the project.
This proved to be as difficult as it was advantageous. At first we discussed generally what opportunities and issues seemed the most prevalent. We were having difficulty deciding on a course of action, the project seemed to be a mile wide and an inch deep. At this point the Austrians stepped up, describing methods for situational and market analysis they had learned at their university. Which, apparently, places much of its emphasis on teaching front-end research and analysis. This was my first glimpse at the value of integrating different approaches. We Americans had worked on group projects before, but because they really only involved our ID classmates the value of an outside perspective was known of, but not really known. This was an opportunity for all of us to exploit our individual tool sets to maximize our output. Wow, makes perfect sense, but how do we plan the organization for something like this? Because of our similar understanding of the design process we had come to rely on a fairly specific chain of events, one that we knew how to plan for and against. But now, we had a new element that we had little experience integrating into our version of the design process. Our saving grace, I would say, was the use of a simple four-stage divergent/convergent model. A little graphic that represents how to move a problem through a research phase, analysis phase, idea generation phase, and finally a refinement phase. It can be generally applied to just about any problem-solving situation as a kind of vague path. So we started to represent our plan as a series of these graphics leading us towards goals we discovered along the way. I’m making it sound like all of this just occurred to us in a dream, when, in reality, we struggled with it for nearly two months. Honestly, the final presentation may have represented a family of concepts that, by the way, delighted our clients, but to us it represented a shift towards understanding what really drives good design. We may not really be sure how it all worked out, but we’re more confident simply because it did.
Just after the project ended, our teacher, Hans Skillius, mentioned that the application process for Sommardesign Kontoret was about to begin. We had about a month to prepare our answers, which, in retrospect, seems like a bit too much time to stew over yourself. I was nervous, the questions seemed so open ended and I wasn’t sure what types of answers would be appropriate. So, I over did it. Several outlines, rough drafts, and three completely different approaches led directly to a handful of revision sessions with my friend Ellie. After a couple of these meetings she finally calmed me down, and reminded me that all I had to do was tell them what I’m interested in. It went from a formal statement about my education, to a conversation about what I enjoyed about design. After I had submitted the application I was relegated to the, anxious but confident, position of an excited hopeful.
It took a while to hear back, but I finally got the phone call. It took me by complete surprise. I didn’t even have the chance to think about what I was saying. I had to recap the whole thing in my head afterwards to make sure I hadn’t said anything too terribly stupid. Apparently, I handled it well, and about a week later received a call back from Anna asking if I wanted to work with her and seven other students on eight projects dealing with accessibility and existing environments. I said “yep,” and she said “good.”
Over the next month or so, while finishing an infinitely less interesting project than the one described a paragraph ago, I slowly planned my trip to Fårösund on Gotland. Which, by the way, is an incredible little island off the East coast of Sweden, full of sheep and all sorts of natural goodness (and if you’ve never heard of it that’s good, but now you have and should, at some point in your life, plan on spending an entire summer there). The adventure would take me through Göteborg, then to Stockholm where I would board a ferry, cruise the Baltic Sea and arrive in the medieval port town of Visby, all in just over ten hours. It didn’t sound too awful, after all, I’d made twenty hour straight drives to Georgia at home. Alas, I underestimated the entire “traveling across a foreign country by yourself carrying everything you own” scenario, and by the time I had arrived in Visby, was completely exhaused. After I picked up my luggage, I began to survey the terminal looking for Anna. She noticed me first, a haggard looking twenty something who appeared to be carrying everything he owned, called my name and directed my attention to the big neon yellow sign that read “Sommardesign Kontoret”. Rescued at last.
She had already picked up two of the other students, and we were apparently in a bit of a rush to catch the fourth. So, we did a bit of rearranging in the trunk of her Saab, sat on the hatch until we heard the click and drove into the city to pick up the last person for the day. After acquiring the final student we set off on the forty-five minute drive north to Fårösund. That’s when it really started, that first conversation. The two students with Anna at the ferry terminal had been, Emi Tsutsuhiro a Tokyo native who had moved to Milan to study interior design, and Anders Gäddlin a landscape architecture student from Uppsala. The last person picked up was Johanna Enger, an industrial design student in Visby, who had grown up in and around Stockholm. I was already getting the feeling that, if nothing else, working in this office was going to be interesting.
As we pulled into the drive of our house/office I was immediately awe struck. We were to be living and working in the old officers quarters of a decommissioned coastal artillery base, and because it had been a relatively hidden, for obvious reasons, everything was shrouded by vegetation. Which is why I hadn’t noticed that the four other students and our project manager were awaiting our arrival. As we stepped out of the car we were greeted by the smell of good food, and offered “peoples” beer. For me, a hot grill and a couple of beers happen to be the keys to my heart; the situation couldn’t have been more natural considering. Thus, I commenced a mingling. It all happened so quickly I can’t remember who I met first. I think it was Elisabeth Lilligraven, our project manager, an architect from Bergen, Norway, with a beautiful cut glass English accent. Then I met Linus Godet and Björn Syse, who were working the grill. Linus was an architecture and urban planning student at Chalmers in Göteborg, who had grown up splitting time between Paris and Göteborg. Björn, like Johanna, was attending the design program in Visby, and had grown up in Uppsala. Finally I met Catarina Nordbladh and Marie Lendendal. Catarina is a soft-spoken architecture student, studying in Copenhagen. Marie was finishing up her masters in design theory after getting her undergrad in textile design at the university in Borås. I felt like I was on the Real World, minus the pretentious, arrogant pre-madonnas and social timebombs.
The first week was delightfully intense. Not because of any work, there wasn’t much of that going on, but because we were all so interested in getting to know each other. I swear I gained ten pounds in those first seven days, thanks mostly to Linus who has the greatest nervous habit I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. We were all nervous though. Everyone was so anxious, almost begging to know what projects we would be working on. It felt like waiting in line for a carnival ride when you’d finally grown tall enough, “What’s going to happen, I’m so scared, man, this is going to be intense, how are we going to get all this work done, what do you know, me neither, this is going to be great”.
By the time the first week ended we were all so stir crazy, like hungry cats, all hunkered down, ready to pounce on anything resembling work. The computers and other equipment showed up? Let’s set up the office! Oh, we’re going to need a way to organize all of our information! Let’s network the computers and design a file management system! It felt so liberating to be such huge nerds! Finally Anna sat us down, and proceeded to introduce the projects. She could hardly finish describing each one before someone would start talking about a way of dissecting and discovering for it. It was like a design methods orgy, ideas here, a of couple thoughts there. Really incredible, seeing all of these tools and experiences freely flowing together to create this collective creative force. At this point none of us new that Anna and Elisabeth were planning on assigning each of us one of the eight projects, to act as a kind of facilitator/mediator/liaison. Looking back on it, it makes perfect sense, throw eight different bones to eight different dogs. Some of our preferences and abilities fit perfectly with certain projects, but what they looked for was which one was the most intriguing to each of us. Anna and Elisabeth knew that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you necessarily want to do it. They had chosen us, and already had confidence in our abilities; they wanted to discover how we could work best as a group. As long as we worked, happily, in a complimentary manner, it wouldn’t matter who was the “contact” on any of the projects, we would find a way.
The rest of that week we set up workshops to discuss our various interpretations of “The Design Process”. It took about a half an hour for us to realize our individual processes were separated by terms, simple semantics, not much more. What it really came down to was the specific situational tools we used. So we began to go through the individual projects, one by one, offering up whatever pertinent information or strategy we knew. By the end of a couple of sessions we had a pretty good foundation built, and so we started to have small workshops to cover methods or concepts that were unfamiliar to some, in an effort to give everyone an introduction to ideas that had the potential to be very useful.
After several days of workshops Anna and Elisabeth called another meeting. We knew that we would be spending this week meeting clients and visiting various project sites and manufacturers. What we didn’t know was that they had decided on who was to be each projects contact. They wrote the name of each project on the dry-erase boards, handed each of us markers and told us to write our names beneath the two projects we were most interested in. Almost everyone picked the project that was related to their core competency first, and the project they were most intrigued by second. Exactly what Anna and Elisabeth had expected, it got to a point where they were laughing about how well they had guessed. So, naturally they assigned each person to the project they weren’t as comfortable with, and then placed us in secondary positions by our technical strengths. They chose to create an environment that necessitated collaboration. A situation that was, effectively, fueled by conversation.
The time had come for us to meet our clients and receive the project briefs in their entirety. Each person we worked with seemed excited to be involved with the Sommardesign Kontoret. Though many of the clients didn’t seem to know exactly why they’d decided to work with the office, all of them seemed to be confident in our abilities and excited about the possibilities. You could rightly attribute their open arms to the exposure the offices had received the year before, during Sweden’s national design year (you heard right, Sweden had a year devoted to the promotion of design, I wonder what that’s like?). Each time we met with a new client you could watch, over the duration of our visit, them loosen up, as if they were a bit hesitant about the situation they were getting themselves into, but by the end of every one of those meetings they were talking with us as if we’d been working together for years. There was something strangely non-threatening about our group, all smiles and pointed questions. I think that these folks probably hadn’t interacted with people who actually enjoyed “working” for some time. Maybe it was just because we’re young and excited, maybe it gave them a glimpse back in time. Deep down I think/hope their enthusiasm was stimulated by a refreashing look to the future.
The meetings with our collaborators fueled the fire. We now had a stronger sense of direction, of purpose really. Working for people who believed in our abilities, people who really wanted us to succeed, not just for their personal success, but also because they believe in what we represented. I have to reiterate the fact that we weren’t just a group of students looking to make money and pad our résumés, though definitely not a bad situation for us to do just that. I think we represented a glimmer of hope for a lot of these people. We were, in essence, a vision for the future of design; a mash up of cultures and ideas dead set on finding socially responsible answers to common problems. We didn’t work on anything that itself was world changing, but I do believe that how we approached many of the projects could be, should it become a more standard practice. I digress; what I was getting at was the sense of empowerment we were all riding high on. We now had only a week until our month long break. A renewed sense of urgency overcame all of us. We frantically began learning everything we could about the individual projects, looking for ways to minimize time spent on each individual project by overlapping the research and group work. I don’t know what we would have done if we wouldn’t have had “accessibility” as a unifying theme. Several meetings and a couple of workshops later, with homework assignments in hand, we left the office for our break.
Everyone headed back to their homes, except me. I stayed at the office with the intentions of working on my thesis, and soon realized that I would drive myself insane if I spent a month completely inside my head. So, I met up with Björn and his girlfriend Hannah in Visby. The next two days were filled with copious amounts of all things relaxing. We hit the beach, cooked food and drank beers. Hannah had been planning to go back mainland to Karlshamn, to visit her parents, and decided that we should all go. We met up with one of Hannah’s friends who had come to Visby from Stockholm, on a break from classes at Konstfact, to travel the rest of the way with us. In Karlshamn, we went to nature reserves, a play called “Mio mi Mio” by Astrid Lundgren, cliff diving, and sailing during the days, while at night we went to various little bars to meet up with some of Hannah’s old friends. Who, by the way, were all very interesting; several of them were currently studying art or design at Konstfact, one girl was studying fashion at the ________ in London. It was so relaxing and everyone was incredibly hospitable, especially her parents, who treated me like family. It was a sad day when I left for Göteborg to visit Linus, I really didn’t ever want to leave. I felt it was time though, and so they helped me book my trip, and dropped me off at the bus station with a sack lunch and big hugs.
The trip to Goteborg was awful. I missed my first train, luckily I still made it in time for the next one, which ended up being mislabeled. I did have the good fortune of getting on that train with about thirty other confused Swedes, so it was sorted out quickly and we were put on another train, the right train, without me needing to do any talking. When I arrived it was pouring down rain, and I didn’t really know where I was going, so Linus came and picked me up. Everything got increasingly better from that moment on. Linus worked most days so I had the chance to just walk around the city and really get to know it, and on the days he was home we visited all the places he thought I’d like. At night we would meet up with his friends for drinks. It was great to step into someone else’s world and just exist, no pressure, just a whole lot of spare time. Most of the people I met through Linus were artists, musicians, architects or designers. It seemed like I had hit the interesting person jackpot over the break. Everyone had grand plans and hopes for the future. It seemed like each person was preparing to go work and live in some interesting place. It was incredible how they treated their friendships, a sincere version of the “I’ll see you later” mentality. After about a week my friend Blair, a fellow KU exchanger, called to see how my break was going. It turned out that she had been planning a trip to Göteborg, so she came up. That was a lot of fun just because now I had the chance to show her around, and it gave me an excuse to do everything all over again. Another week passed and Blair and I decided it was time for us to move on. We decided to go visit the office she, Marc, Kevin and Reid had been placed at in Unnered. As luck would have it our other friend Brian would be able to come at the same time. We were going to have a mid term reunion.
After all of us had arrived at the office, we took the opportunity to compare our situations. It seemed that Brian and I, the only ones separated from the group, were having an infinitely more interesting experience. The four others were having a rough time with their office. It must have been because they hadn’t been separated, or made uncomfortable. Brian and I, and for that matter, everyone involved in our groups, had been cut off from their direct support network and had taken advantage of the opportunity to really connect with each other as social people. At the office in Unnered I noticed a kind of rift between the Swedes and the Americans, there wasn’t any real connections being made.
I spent most of my time there talking with everyone about our upcoming thesis project. No one was really sure of what they wanted to do, and I was no different, but I was starting to see an opportunity based on our current situation. What was it we were participating in? Why did it seem to work better in different situations? What was the real value of all this? It was obvious why we were involved, but there had to be something bigger.
I arrived back in Farosund to an empty house. Worn out physically and mentally, I began a short vacation from my vacation. Slowly, over the next couple of days, everyone began showing up, and things started to happen again. We started to have a lot more visitors; the head of “Design for All”, a senior designer from Electrolux, several national politicians, plenty of local politicians, and a handful of academic researchers. It was incredible to see how many people had an interest in what was happening in our house. That what we were doing was so closely related to, what I thought of as, separate professions. When in reality they were so similar, so tightly entwined. Such an eye opener, not to mention a very good reason for us to work hard on our projects. Each person who came through had something valuable to offer us, and was more than happy to share their knowledge.
The projects were progressing well. Everyone was working hard on everything. Anna and Elisabeth had, for the most part, let us manage it all, but that outside perspective helped keep us in line. Whenever they saw an opportunity for one of us to help each other through a rough patch they played a little matchmaker. There were times when it all got too overwhelming, but that’s why we had each other, so it never got out of control.
As we neared the end it got more intense. A house full of creative perfectionists trying to format all of the information accumulated for eight projects into a consistent and concise visual presentation. We spent some late nights, even the night before our final presentations, trying to tighten all of it up. The day we presented our deliverables to the clients is a bit hazy. Most of us were sleep deprived and loaded with caffeine. The office was full of clients and the various other people who had been involved with the projects along the way. An air of eager anticipation from all parties filled the space. No one really knew what was in store.
One after another the presentations went off without a hitch. Clients were enthusiastically asking questions, and students were confidently answering. You could see the proud looks on client and student faces alike. After the presentations conversations continued, about the projects, their future, and the future of us students. Something big had happened, something very honest and sincere.
Later that afternoon I had a conversation with Jan Augry, the SDK project coordinator at SVID, that solidified the direction of my thesis. What just happened? Followed by: How could this happen in the United States? I had found a valid pursuit. Something I felt represented the most positive qualities of design. Finding a way to create an environment not only founded on communication between cultures and disciplines, but one that would rely on these interactions to remain relevant. This as an idea is nothing new, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that this type of collaboration has the power to drive the next generation of designers towards an era of exceedingly relevant innovation.
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