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.

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.