Workshop on childlike design with design students at AHO

Last Monday (21.09.09) I held a workshop with the Master's level class of Technoform in AHO.

The workshop was on childlike design and how can we apply the elements that constitute that morphology.

The participants was 18 (4 female- 14 male) and with different ethnical background.

The participants had a variety of chosen design fields (automobiles, furniture, lighting, food related design, urban design, oil-spill related products (sic!), dry cleaner's apparatus)

The workshop lasted approx. 3hours.

The workshop was divided in 4 tasks (2 individual tasks and 2 group tasks):

• Task 1: First application of the 9 words that reference to the morphological characteristics of products (3min per word, approx. 40min)
  
• Task 2: Second application of the 9 words that reference to the sense related qualities (emotions or intellectual) (3min per word, approx. 40min)
  
• Task 3: Description from the teams of forms, materials, colors in relation with the intellectual properties that has been described in the task 2 (10min)
  
• Task 4: Finding 3 existing products that represent these relations and choose the best examples for presentation (10min+ 5min per team for presentation)
  

Task 1: The words the student invited to interpret were small, round, smooth, partial distorted, fragile, light(weight), flexible, stretch, colorless-colorful.

Task 2: The words the student invited to interpret were joyful, energetic, exciting, curious, fantasy-like, playful, friendly, optimistic, fresh, cute, childlike.

The students produced around 320 drawings and 40 mock-ups in clay. There was not a limitation on their choice in tools of representation and they came out with different techniques as collage, small 3d clay models, use of color pens or combination of all the above.

The actual drawings and photos of their models will be on hand this Friday.

The goals of the workshop were:

• To see how the designers unconsciously can apply childlike characteristics to products.
  
• To see how the designers consciously can apply childlike characteristics to products.
  
• To see how ethnical background can combine with the phenomenon and how ethnical background can affect the design process in the concept of pedomorphosis.
  
• To see which fields of product design are more compliant to the intrusion of childlike qualities.
  

The photos are from the workshop in action. Sketches and the rest of material will be uploading when I will have it on my hands.

Thank you guys! You are awesome!