Rob Lycett - Conditional Design / Participation Seminar

Our seminar on Friday 16th October introduced you to a further 'reading' of the open work. Your reactions to Eco's text tended to focus upon individual acts of reading and perception of a work, thus making it open to interpretation(s). This idea is the subject of Roland Barthes seminal text 'The Death of the Author', which is well worth reading.

Some current graphic design thinking and practice is focussed upon the notion that the creative process itself can become an open system. These systems are often ludic (game-like) and participatory (with players). Negotiation and collaboration are key. They also allude to alternative designer/client relationships and the potential of participation being a valuable design research tool.

The visual experiments that we enacted/performed today were from the 'Conditional Design Workbook, (Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J., Wouters, R. (2013). Conditional design workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.)

-The Conditional Design Workbook “is defined by playfully designed sets of rules and conditions that stimulate collaboration between participants and leads to unpredictable outcomes”. The book takes you on a step by step journey through each workshop and the purpose is to prove that no matter how many groups of people you give the same set of rules to, with the same paper and the same pens, the outcome will always be interpreted in a slightly to a significantly different way - offering endless creative opportunities.


IV. The Beach
* play with four players
* each player has coloured pen:
red, green, blue or black.
* players take clockwise turns
1, First turn:
Place a dot.
2, Following turns:
Place a dot in the centre of the largest
empty space on the paper.
3, Stop drawing when you think the
beach is crowded.
This workshop was inspired by the concept of Charles Leadbeater, as
expressed in his essay ‘Te Beach Ethic’. “Beaches are ordered without being
controlled. No one is in charge. […] Underlying the beaches appeal is a simple
idea: the beach is a commons where people can self-organise and play […]
There are no zoning regulations, fences, nor white lines to tell you where to
go.” Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J., Wouters, R. (2013). Conditional design
workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.

I am a hands on kind of designer, so i don’t learn well just by listening, my mind likes to wander off after a very short period of time. I really enjoyed the Conditional Design Workbook task because it was a stimulating challenge, I had to consider each persons move before i could make my own. It made me think a lot about human nature and our urge to create patterns without even realising it.

This was my teams outcome for The Beach. We interpreted the rules slightly differently to the workbook but no one specified how big the dot had to be. Each dot is supposed to represent a family... My family like the spread themselves out quite a lot at the beach so i drew a few of my circles quite large. There was no rule breaking but it was definitely an interesting interpretation that hadn’t been seen before

I. Perfect Circle
* play with four players
* each player has coloured pen:
red, green, blue or black.
* players take clockwise turns lasting
30 secs.
* use a timer.
1, First turn:
Draw a filled-in circle in the centre of the
paper.
2, Following turns:
Improve the circle’s round shape by
enlarging its borders.
3, Stop when the circle is perfect.
Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J., Wouters, R. (2013). Conditional design
workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.