WORKSHOP NARRATIVES
This work is part of my graduation project ‘Workshop Narratives ’ at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Through this work I aim to apply the insights gained from my experiences in different workshop environments to the specific context of the Design Academy. By examining environments where the architecture and structure of the workshop clearly demonstrates the potential for creation, I ask what the workshops at the Design Academy reveal about design production, and whether the workshops are in line with the current discourse in design.
Multiple spaces are being observed from an internal or external position:
*Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE), Eindhoven, Netherlands
Internal - Indoor
*Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), Netherlands
External - Indoor
*VersHout, Almen, Netherlands
Internal - Outdoor
*Het Kloosterbos, Eindhoven
Internal - Outdoor
Point of reference:
*This work is intended as a conversation starter.
*Due to the nature of the research, it is rather impossible for me to clearly describe what a workshop is. So every following pages are about the why of this struggle.
*When the term ‘school’ appears, it refers to the Design Academy Eindhoven, where I conducted this research. .
* Each ideas must be extracted with care, as they do not apply to all environments and are very site-specific consequences.
*The work encourages looking beyond the functional definition of a space.
* One might ask what makes a good workshop. However, the aim of this work is not to define a good workshop, but to understand its potential: what it can do, rather than what it is.
Last year, I was asked to imagine what my favorite study format might be. Almost instinctively, I thought of getting closer to making. To re-appropriate a creative medium, to touch objects, to move away from theoretical design, and to work with the foundation of design: craftsmanship.
That same year, I did a low-tech project with my flatmate. We developed a methodology for managing our laundry in the collective living space of our five-person student house. We studied the personal dynamics at play in this ambiguous space, between individual behavior and community structure.
As time went by, I became interested in baskets, then in working with branches, and one thing led to another and I ended up working with green wood.
On a rainy summer’s day, I went to meet Job and Sjors, three hours by public transport from Rotterdam, to discover their creative space. We got to know each other. They give workshops three or four days a week. There are no buses, only a 40-minute bike ride from the nearest station. You can hear the sound of wood against axes, a few conversations, and birds.
The first thing they asked me that day was to mingle, get to know each other, and then try to touch the objects if I felt like it. That day, I made a fire for the soup. The first fire of a hundred. Summer came and went, and I met them again for five months. We worked together through the winter. Everyone made their
own spoons with just a knife and an axe. In this place, you work with the elements that surround you.
There is wood, space, and silence. There is no electricity or artificial light. We work with the blades of our tools and the strength of our bodies, depending on the humidity of the wood. We often take breaks to drink tea and eat ginger cakes. Depending on the season, we wait for mushrooms, leaves, and sunshine.
In these conditions, my work took on a whole new perspective. Cradled in an environment where structure is so much a part of creation, I tried to understand, finally, what are the factors that influence our ways of doing things.
There is proximity to resources, ecological beliefs, care for the craft tradition, the relationship with objects, and particularly the transmission of knowledge. There is the expression of creativity within the craft. The list is endless. I
It’s an exhaustive list of factors that only seek to qualify the space.
Each factor is linked to another. There is interconnectivity everywhere and at every scale.
In some spaces, it is easier than in others to define the
context that shapes our spaces and influences our behavior, and vice versa. In specific places, shaped for a specific function, it’s easier to deduce actions. Tue and Almen are places where the architecture quite literally indicates what can be done there. In their composition, the intentions are transparent. There is a visual coherence between the physicality of the place and the possibilities it offers to its users.
Tue is a university that encourages the production of technical prototypes. Almen is a self-managed, educational space where crafts are taught.
Although, of course, there is still the understanding of space. Each body has a different understanding. Our realities are situated but diverge. We interact differently with a given space depending on the interactions between the bodies present. Here, I mean bodies as human or non-human entities. As an illustration of spaces in the process of becoming, which is a continuous transformation rather than a fixed state of being, I could mention Het Kloosterbos.
“For me, Het Kloosterbos is like the bag in Le Guin’s theory. It contains all the relationships we have with each other and with this environment, as well as our connections with the surrounding elements. Nothing is fixed; everything is imagined, creating a field of possibilities. Our walls are the trees, and our tools are the earth and our methods. What we produce is a collection of these possibilities, constantly exchanged and evolving.”
In other places, the space has a more general architecture. In this sense, you could also say that the space
is designed to be more democratic. The Design Academy is a good example. Given that the school welcomes students of all ages and backgrounds with varied experiences, it is important to design an educational program that allows everyone to find their place and eventually position themselves in their practice. Above all, it’s a school where students define themselves, or at least redefine themselves, under the spectrum of design. As Raf told me, ‘The bachelor is about designing the designer and the master is designing design. Haha. You can say a lot of that. But this is about how you shape your own direction. You discover your interest but not more.”
At DAE, the physical space follows the traditional architecture of institutional creative spaces. An open space model that can be found in other design schools. A schema of space and objects inherited from the conception of making in the years of the industrial era. Ironwork and woodwork are central. The economy revolves around this core. Our school is organized on several floors. First, there are the workshops, then the administration, and finally the classrooms. An interesting pyramid. But above all, it shows a sharp division of the ‘areas’ that make the school what it is.
But then, after a few months completely immersed in my new working environment at Almen, I started to observe our behavior and our way of working. I wondered about the way we, Design Academy students, work. Do our methods correspond to the spaces we use?
With the arrival of winter, I spent fewer days there and more here, at school, in the warmth and technical
comfort of our spaces. I tried to find my place little by little. I even tried to do knife-work in the wood workshop. Unfortunately, I only stayed a few hours: I was taking up space, and other students needed to be in the workshop more than I did. They were going to use the machines. They had a precise purpose and a time limit.
Suburban workshops: improvised work areas in the nooks and crannies of corridors or at the back of classrooms. Many students have ended up taking over alternative spaces in the building. Is it for lack of space? Could it also be motivated by the nature of the materials used? I once observed a student working with stone, for example. Materials unsuited to the workshops and machines. These new materials don’t fit into the metal, wood, ceramic, or plastic categories. Is it a question of infrastructure adapted to few specific materials? Or out of a concern for responsibility? I’ve been refused the use of green wood in machines: we (us and the machine) can’t predict whether the wood has a knot in it and therefore whether it could cause damage to the tool and the students. So we mainly use wood that has already been processed, corresponding to industry standards.
I imagine that this desire and these new ways of interacting with space and layout are a consequence of the evolution of design. The demands for expertise are polarizing, expectations are increasing and diversifying, all while needing to happen as quickly as possible. We are expected to develop theory in only five months—a theory that must be represented and
produce more than just intellectual capital.
So, does being contemporary mean moving with the times or moving ahead of the times? I wonder.
In any case, the studios and educational structure are adapting, evolving, and shaping themselves in response to the rapid evolution of design while also contributing to it. The DAE seeks to remain relevant in the market and sometimes moves faster than students can adapt. Both students and spaces, for that matter. Our creative spaces have only changed with the addition of new machines.
But if we apply progressive thinking to issues of ecology, social equity, systems, etc., in our projects, are we ignoring the workshops in these equations? Aren’t the workshops our most extensive tools, the ones that shape and influence our work? Ultimately, the places where design practice unfolds?
These physical spaces cannot evolve as quickly as ideas. In the last 20 years, the school has seen the creation of seven new studios, and for the past two or three years, there has been an annual open call on their website.
These new studios tend to move away from purely product creation. Today, we are primarily taught to integrate theory and develop ideas. Design is everything, and the new designer no longer has hard
skills. Soft skills based on storytelling, research and speculative design. We emancipate ourselves from certain formats to develop others. Performance, sound, video, words, etc., become our contemporary tools because what we need is to articulate a critique.
The questions we have to answer are increasingly complex, and are a consequence of design becoming more and more split up into various sub-disciplines. Collectible design therefore comes into play as a response to the impossibility of answering these questions, but of drawing a story out of them, and materialising it with the production time that research would have spared.
If design tends towards research, analysis and so on, you could imagine that it would move towards a dematerialised approach, allowing spaces to be less overloaded. But I think the reverse is happening.
A number of instructors have told me about the pressure situation they find themselves in during exam periods: all the students have just a few days to produce a result related to their project.
But what increases the level of stress at this time is mainly the fact that the students are only producing very specific objects in the time available, in which
they have to combine: learning the function of the tools and producing. Mainly, nobody has time to take their time in this sense, production is done aggressively.
This notion of time is important here. It governs the way we engage with our projects. If we have 4 projects at the same time, it’s difficult to make a deep commitment to each of them. It’s difficult to devote the same amount of time to both research and making.
Of course, it’s a fact of life that we work under time and deadline constraints. Deadlines that we inherit from the pace of the market, to which we have to ‘adapt’.
But then, have the students (between first and third year) already finished any projects?
Designing on an individual scale, as we do here, requires a huge investment of time in organisation, production and reflection. Where outside of the school, projects on a larger scale, particularly collaborative projects, outside the DAE microcosm, in short, don’t all have the same pace that is imposed on us. Not least because these are projects that are confronted with reality... Projects that emancipate themselves from delocalised processes.
So where does this oppressive timeframe come from, which makes every relationship so complex?
Is it imposed by the market that we have created for ourselves at the DAE, does it come from the desire to be a renowned school, or is it simply the consequence of an approach and methodology that is illogical to the reality of our context?
Can the school and its spaces continue to move so quickly, if not creating distance between the different poles and players?
Can we spare our workshops by having a clear and coherent discourse between educational perspective and reasoned material practice?
As a second voice in that text, I would like to add this letter I received during the process of writting:
«Hello Clara
Here as promised some thoughts I had after we had our conversation last Wednesday afternoon about one of your Graduation projects around the topic of, if I got you right, “Design workshops’ (desired) development in alignment with (desired) developments in design education”
My thoughts and views below are only meant as (not fully thought through) suggestions of possibilities or possible directions of thinking and they give some answers to questions you had as well. They don’t take into account limitations in space and staff that of course are a reality.
The free and arty kind of approach to design, away from a more product design oriented design, -a conceptual approach to things was already present at the time-, established itself within our school more firmly in the running up to the Droog Design nineties. The Droog Design spirit/approach started out as a very playful, carefree and humorous(typically Dutch?) way of engaging in design. Later this mindset, which maybe had as its downside to be quite individualistic and competitive, developed at AIVE, later DAE, into a view on design with a more social and with a broader world view context, adressing more and more the increasingly more pressing problems in society on both a local and global scale. Very often problems that needed a collaborative spirit in its search for a way forward. The above came with, a maybe in the design world belated, growing awareness, growing (self)reflection and a feeling of responsibility. A much more open mind view on the design discipline was rising as being a discipline possibly useful in all aspects of life and encompassing all the fields traditionally
represented by the whole variety of disciplines in science. All of this with a more holistic view than in the scientific world, a view that tried to bring, with a common sense and hands on kind of attitude, the more and more diverging displines within the science world, back together again. Avoiding maybe in this way the danger of a limited and reduced view on things and bringing to the surface society’s non addressed topics as well, topics that might have been overlooked; being positioned in science’s blind spot. This ever growing move from a quite narrow personal ambition towards a more humble, collaborative dedication needs to be embraced, continued and more profoundlysupported.
An important feature of the workshops now at DAE is maybe a division mainly based on materials. Maybe there is a bigger and ever growing need for a more thoughtful/ careful choice of materials and techniques used in the production of anything from a first year assignment to a final exam project within DAE and in the (design) world at large. A more general area, not based on a particular use of material, for activities that can be done safely without a high level of supervision (like sanding for instance) is desirable with a focus sustainability. A focus on developing more low tech methods, lower energy consumption, lower material use and with an emphasis on circularity. It could maybe even include an outside space. Some of the advantages could be an easier and more relaxed communication, exchange and collaboration among the many different members of the DAE community using the workshops with this kind of expanded accesibility and visibility of what students are working on. Another advantage of this kind of a general workshop space could be the possibility to have it open during the general opening hours of school at all times. This could reduce time pressure for students consi-
derable I would think.
A general workshop area like this could be staffed with an expert/advisor regarding the choice of materials andtechniques being used for any project with a strong focus on sustainability, so you have the oppurtunity to discuss and consider any project you like to be closely watched through this lens prior to final decisions and execution. An expert in close contact to all workshop instructors who in in this way has an overview and basic knowledge of all possibilities and limitations of the techniques and materials available at DAE, including its footprint (like energy consumption for instance) with as goal a stronger focus on sustainability within DAE’s overall design education. This could also work in favour of more experimentation and knowledge building and preserving. An expert who could be available for advise for all students of all years Bachelor and Master alike and for tutors as well and available for tutors while preparing assignments too. A stronger emphasis on sustainability like this could strengthen the efforts that have been done already in this regard within DAE’s current design education. It would make sense today’s Material Bank area would be integrated in a future general workshop area like this, supervised by a staffmember of the DAE and working with student volunteers like it is the case now, but with a stronger tie to the DAE organisation. An incentive might also be needed somehow for more small scale model making instead of the present day very often used 1:1 scale in students’ project execution. A space (or an area within a bigger space) and staff focussed and trained in modelmaking would be helpful as well. In an ideal world, with sustainability in mind once again, the workshops at DAE would also have to include a staffed Bio Lab where the further development and experimentation with biomaterials can be secured. Maybe this would also
have to include the development of techniques and methods (low tech) and of tools and simple machinery for the production of these kind of materials. This could be a general point of interest for the workshops in general as well.
I hope any of this makes sense to you and can be useful for your thinking process and/or wil spark new ideas.
All the best, XX»
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
Annika Freye, THE NON-SCHOOL
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
Alfonso de Matos, Who Can Afford to Be Critical?
Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence
Keller Easterling, Organization Space
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
Tisch Zwei Verein, Ennenda Lunchtime Workshop
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
I would like to thank everyone involved in this project and all the people with whom I’ve had conversations, which has enabled me to gather all these learnings.