Hi Nicolai,
this sounds like a very nice initiative indeed. Back in the days I was at the Design Academy Eindhoven, I remember that Li Edelkoort organised ‘improvisare’ session during the Milano Design week. It is a bit of a different topic, as it occurred during a design festival gathering large crowd and the DAe students participating were ’selected’ by Li Edelkoort, but as the core idea of improvisare was to test and display designer’s skills in action, without academic direction, it turned out to be fun for participating students. During that week they did not feel that the education was a endless succession of prepared educative sessions.
This memory might be a bit off track regarding what you try to achieve, but what if you were to tell students “you have one week + this (tiny) budget + this empty space in the city center. By the end of the week, you have to make something meaningful out of it. Now, think about it and tell us what you need from us (the academic staff) and we will see how we can guide/support you.”
Do you think it would spur students’ agency?
Kind regards,
Marc
Kind regards,
Marc Chataigner
070-4451-9069
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?
京都大学経済学研究科
経済社会学の博士課生
シャテニエ マーク
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> On Feb 5, 2021, at 23:43, Nicolai Steino <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dear PhD-Design list,
>
> At the architecture and design programme where I teach, we are currently contemplating the possibility of introducing a recurring yearly thematic course week for students across semesters and specialisations.
>
> I would therefore like to call for experiences and advice concerning how to organize and run a thematic course week.
>
> For the time being, what we consider is to have one week in early May reserved for joint extracurricular student activities such as
>
> ? Study tours
> ? Workshops
> ? Design-build
> ? External collaborations (with business og public partners, nationally and internationally)
> ? Joint activities with other design programs, nationally and internationally
> ? Research-related activities
> ? Cross-disciplinary activities
>
> The motivation for choosing May is that it is a good time for outdoor activities such as study tours, which may at the same time represent a break from other activities before students hand in their studio project reports in late May, followed by exam preparations and exams in June.
>
> Our motivation is threefold:
>
> 1. To foster a stronger identification with the architecture and design programme among the students through joint activities. We have issues with stress among students, and the feedback we get from them is, that they see the education as one endless succession of courses following more or less the same format. Doing joint activities could be a way to address this. But also a way to have serious fun without compromising learning objectives. A kind of learning festival…
> 2. To inspire the students with new perspectives on their learning and budding profession as designers by changing away from ordinary learning formats, and thereby to motivate them to have new takes on their studio projects which, at times, tend to converge towards a certain level of conformity.
> 3. To profile the programme, both among existing and prospective students, through the outcomes of (some of) the activities carried out through the thematic course week, both tangible and immaterial, possibly in the form of publications, exhibitions, or in varoius online formats.
>
> We can easily envisage a host of challenges to the idea, both organizationally, financially and in terms of the allocation of time and resources, not to mention curricular and credit constraints. Nonetheless, the idea has widespread support among faculty members, who also see a thematic course week as an opportunity for themselves to shake up from their everyday doings and get inspired through activities and collaborations in new and different constellations.
>
> While several of the mentioned activities already do take place across the programme, they are not coordinated and may often happen locally at individual semesters without much attention from students from other parts of the programme. While this makes it difficult to open them up across semesters and specialisations, it also leaves them with little gestalt in the public and student image of the programme.
>
> Despite all challenges, we therefore imagine that a recurring thematic course week would respond positively to a number of issues on which we want to improve. As we have been discussing it so far, we think in terms of something which is baggy and scaleable, in the sense that it might be restricted to select semester/specialisations and select activities at an early stage, only to expand in scope with time.
>
> What we don’t know at this point, is what the students might think of the concept. Therefore, a next step will be to have discussions and brainstorming workshops with student representatives to have them co-create the concept.
>
> All constructive feedback is much appreciated!
>
> Regards,
>
> Nicolai Steino
>
>
> NICOLAI STEINO
> Associate Professor, PhD, GDBA
>
> AALBORG UNIVERSITY
> DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN and MEDIA TECHNOLOGY
> Rendsborggade 14 ・ DK - 9000 AALBORG
>
>
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