AUTOMATED DESIGN // WORKSHOP NO.1
“ Hello, I made an algorithm for my project that generates Goldsmiths Design project titles based on data from the last five years of shows. This Friday the 20th I’m running a one day workshop for anyone who wants to be involved, where you will be given a randomly generated title and will try and compress a whole project from start to finish in a day, hopefully showing research, idea generation, process, outcomes and reflection. The goal is for me to break down exactly how people approach designing, in an effort to better understand how Goldsmiths Design as an institution is reflected in the techniques of their students. If you would like to take your mind off your own project for a day and have a go with this then come along, you can do whatever you like with the title you are given and can work alone or in groups. I will of course be happy to lend some time to anyone who is involved when they need it, to say thank you. http://badprojectgenerator.deanpankhurst.co.uk
Dean “
“ We distilled the title: Are the maximum, down to the meaning of a superlative suffix. The tallest, fastest, strongest etc Where we initially looked to find the breaking points of materials or structures. In doing so this suggested the notion of limitation were we designed a scenario: A modern day flight crash lands on a desert island and a passenger survives with only a toiletries bag and a book, through these objects how can they construct their survival? This project looked at refined objects of hygiene and travel that we consider to be basic needs. By stripping the context of civilisation from the objects, their purpose must be reimagined to necessitate fundamental survival tools. Michael Price Matt Williams
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“ Some meat is disneyfied by removing all the process of how the meat came into being and its unsustainable process. Meat is represented to us in a pristine form and packaging. Mining explosives into ‘disneyfied’ meat, acts as a process to reverse the disneyfication transformation. The meat is induced with a tiny explosive, which reacts to temperature. On cooking the meat, it explodes to ruin its pristine, pleasant ideology through its aesthetic. Keith Bonnici
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“ Memories Edible War is a project that explores the bereavement and regeneration process of a community after being trampled by war. We are proposing through a series of collages and models that communities repurpose the fragmented architectures left behind by a war-zone as plots for growing crops. This act would be a mechanism of remembrance and honouring the deceased; literally eating off of the land that they fought for and died upon. We are speculating that the bodies that degrade on the land could effect the fertility of the soil and produce a richer crop. Clare Thompson Tom Wagstaff
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“ Knowledge is the most deadly substance on earth injected into their body, how far are they willing to go? Creating a series of interventions on the threshold between domestic and exterior space and an exploration of sound, through designing and running a series of experiments I have attempted to question how we earn a new national identity, and whether the current system I hope to question the way we view and experience the world. However, these determiners fail to take into account the fact that the process of dissecting my fantasy into objects and rituals, I am able to manifest my desired suburban delusion- celebrating the reassurance that is sought and found in the shallow suburban veneer. Galvanic skin response polygraph detector outputs sound to materialise untruths. Dean Pankhurst
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‘ There is a certain backwards logic at play within this workshop that strangely reconfigures what we understand as design process. It breaks down prior art into its most simple constituent parts and rebuilds them into something different, but ultimately familiar. It is this tangible familiarity that I aim to pick apart, using enquiries such as these to interrogate how and why we fall into particular design methodologies. To work out what is it exactly that makes a “Goldsmiths Project”. What’s in a name? Lots apparently. So much, that in six hours and three words, each of us were able to build a solid working project that either accidentally or with subconscious purpose, quite perfectly acts as a microcosm for Goldsmiths Design in its entirety. The core function of the workshop was to test if original conclusions could be reached from unoriginal source material. In this case, degree show titles derived from those which have come before. Furthermore, to work out if it would make any kind of sense to work backwards: to begin with the polished title and extrapolate meaning from those words. To decompress, to map and join, to establish obscure and tangential territorial links, and to understand what exactly to do with those things once you’ve built them. I was expecting to document this activity by breaking down what each participant did and understanding those actions as a set of processes that a machine could replicate, hoping that by laying bare the participants’ natural processes I would be able to create a kind of ‘designers toolkit’. Sometimes sketching would be appropriate, maybe collage or electronic coding. The truth however is that there is something deeper at work here, something that you cannot see and touch, or record using a scanner or a camera. There was a moment for all of us that wasn’t expressed with materiality, it came before all of the making and the doing and the mind maps. It came before the decisions we all took to materialise thought and it came before conscious thought itself. There is a distinct sense of what I would describe as an instantaneous decision making process, where every piece of knowledge we’ve ever known, every reference we’ve ever come across, and particularly our unique combination of these, enables us to come to specific and unique conclusions, which then in turn leads to action. It is this action that begins to employ the methods and processes that are utilised like tools, to visualise, communicate, build and iterate. To then be placed in the world, to be assessed and analysed and reconfigured. By shrinking a dissertation project into a day, there is an inherent reduction and compression of process. Being third year students, we seemed confident enough with our design techniques that they could be used fluently. This refined and targeted methodology is in many ways already automated. We know what does and doesn’t work for us and our practice, and we know which design tools are the most appropriate for the task at hand. What is disturbing is that I cannot think of any stage in this procedure that could not be distilled further and automated entirely by a machine. So then we have to ask ourselves, why aren’t we?
But that’s a question for another booklet. ‘
‘ Workshop held on 20th November 2015. Gratitude to the following participants for their time and energy: Keith Bonnici Charlie Evans Michael Price Clare Thompson Tom Wagstaff Matt Williams
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