When Savannah College of Art and Design gave us an open invitation to conduct a series of workshops on a topic of our choosing for a mix of graduate and undergraduate Industrial Design, Systems Design, and Furniture Design students, we began our planning by asking ourselves a few simple questions:

“What kind of experience would be valuable to such a broad range of design students?”
“What sort of experience is our studio uniquely equipped to give to design students?”

Solution

These questions fueled a productive dialogue in our studio, providing opportunities for us to reexamine our own processes and assumptions. Our area of focus emerged as we identified a frequent gap in design education between instruction of technical skills and instruction of critical thinking.

It occurred to us that this relationship between craft and visual thinking is a common point of friction for students, design educators, and professionals alike. Despite the perceived difficulty of balancing these elements, our own attempts yielded the best results when technical skills and critical thinking were practiced together as an interrelated set of techniques.

We began referring to this practice as “thinking through making” and it became the foundation of our workshop pedagogy. We wished to convey to the students that design was both intellectual and physical; fetishizing either element would only result in thin blood.

To communicate this concept, we planned a series of exercises in designing and prototyping elemental objects (paper products and, eventually, simple lighting devices) as an armature for uptake of our “thinking through making” lesson.

The first part of the workshop was conducted over three days on campus in Savannah, culminating in a design competition with the prize being admission to the second workshop. That heralded second workshop took place two weeks later in our own studio in Atlanta.

Results

We sought feedback from the students (through video interviews) and many of them viewed our workshops as a welcome opportunity to step out of their ordinary routine and explore fundamental boundaries of their philosophies and processes.

We were also pleased to see the students emerge with new practical skills (book-making and prototyping) and, in some cases, portfolio-worthy product outcomes.

Melissa and People of Resource have a brief but vivid history together. When we’ve needed extra hands and brains on deck, Melissa has enthusiastically pitched in. Her talent and intelligence have been a boon to us and we were honored that she would trust us with the fabrication of her lamp prototype, a project many months in the making.

The video above details some of the work that went into bringing this piece to life. For more on the concept, see Melissa’s description below:

“I started out trying to create a lamp that would also function as a calendar. Wanting to get something that dealt more with form than numbers, I thought for a long time about the ways that we’ve marked time throughout history, and how we experience time in seasons. I also didn’t want to limit the accuracy of the lamp by location, and in the end what sifted out was the concept of the solstice. It’s just so wonderfully ancient, and the length of the day marks our lives in an innate way that transgresses barriers of culture and location.

From a form standpoint, it breaks the year into two segments of continuous movement as we move closer and further from the sun. The diameter of the nested hemispheres reflects the eclipsis, (the arc of the sun through the sky) which becomes measurably longer and longer, as the length of the day increases.”

We were impressed by the students’ enthusiasm, ideas, and skills. On top of that, they are stellar people conducting their studies in some incredible facilities.

The first part of the workshop was conducted over three days on campus in Savannah, culminating in a design competition with the prize being admission to the second workshop. That heralded second workshop took place in our own studio in Atlanta.

We have to confess – we had a blast and the workshop was revelatory in terms of providing opportunities for us to reexamine our own processes and assumptions. We’ve gotten a lot of traction out of the conversations that have emerged before, during, and after.

We’re busy combing through the mountain of documentation we created, but as soon as we have a handle on it, we’ll be posting a more comprehensive study of this endeavor.

Obscura is an exhibition of new works that are created to be self-illuminated and thereby only fully revealed and understood in an environment of total darkness. Stephen will be showing his series of lighting designs called “Origin of Species.” We don’t want to give anything away, but it involves concrete, suspension, and taxonomies of lighting devices. It is, in short, very SK.

Obscura will open this Saturday from 6 to 9 pm. We hope to see you there!

Our work encompasses industrial design, interior architecture, photography, film, art direction, graphic design, and interactive design. This transdisciplinary approach creates a rich, energetic studio environment and helps us to see the gamut of possibilities in a new light.

Our purpose is to work alongside our clients to dissolve their creative problems. Our commitment to doing our best possible work builds trust and reputation, transcending disciplines and categories. We are change agents and our propulsive positive attitude brings out the best in the people we work with. We share a desire to collaborate with companies, individuals, and institutions who are interested in making things better.

Located in a renovated telephone factory on the Eastside of Atlanta, People of Resource is a lean office, able to offer stronger results and accelerated schedules at highly competitive rates.

We work side-by-side with our clients to envision, research, design, prototype, and deploy experiences, products, and services.

These solutions can take the form of:

-Strategy
-Workshops
-Art Direction
-Branding
-Graphic Design for Print and Web
-Interactive Design
-Photography
-Filmmaking
-Product Design
-Furniture Design
-Interior Architecture for Offices, Retailers, and Restaurants

Our Clients

We are humbled to work with an ambitious and diverse group of leaders. Our client list includes:

-Savannah College of Art and Design
-Georgia Institute of Technology
-Malcolm Fontier
-Deviant Ventures
-Jonathan Adler
-The Jones Group
-Modern Atlanta
-Info Retail
-Armchair
-SEEDR
-Coca-Cola
-Fossil

David’s work has garnered numerous design awards and recognition from blogs, publications, and design institutions. His firms have served a wide range of clients, from giants like Coca-Cola and Fossil Inc. to innovative start-ups like the Center for the Visually Impaired and No Brakes Atlanta.

Stephen likes people, carrying things, and is something of an amateur cartographer.

Luckie Food Lounge is the restaurant debut of visionary club entrepreneur Mike Boles, the developer and former owner of Atlanta’s Compound night club. Benefitting from an ideal Centennial Hill location that brings in locals and visitors alike, the enormous eatery features a fantastic world of the latest technology and clever new service industry twists.

While Creative Director at thing farm, David VanArsdale, along with thing farm Designer and Operations Director, David Ringholz, designed and fabricated custom interior furnishings and lighting for the sushi bar area of Luckie. The initial vision for sushi bar seating entailed multiple tables and a continuous overhead box light. This brief, though it accommodated some of the needs of use, failed to answer some of the more exciting questions related to community, privacy, and interaction.

Solution

Understanding the context of the space, the design team approached the volume as a sedate oasis in an otherwise intense dining and entertainment experience. The alternative plan that emerged consisted of a single, unified bamboo table and multiple overhead lighting pieces.

This approach fueled a reconsideration of the entire sushi bar area on the owner’s side and resulted in their request for the design of a flowing bamboo ceiling that interacts with the structural steel used in the building.

With our clients’ approval and full confidence, we produced our proposed twenty-foot bamboo communal dining table along with twenty-nine custom light fixtures.

Each ‘Luckie Blossom’ light pendant was designed, machined, and hand-assembled in-house from aluminum, delrin, and silicone. The pendants actively respond to movements in the space below. As people move beneath the blossoms, they magically open up to welcome and bathe guests in a soft glow produced by halogen bulbs resting in tubes of microscopic glass bubbles.

Results

The resulting sushi-bar area succeeds in allowing the refined, industrial aesthetic of the surrounding restaurant to cross-fade with the organic glow of the massive tropical fish tanks behind the sushi bar.

This project was honored with the 2007 Atlanta Downtown Design Excellence Award for interior space design.

Travis has been recognized by Modern Atlanta for his contributions to design culture in Atlanta. In a previous life, he was a painfully slow, perfectionist barista.