I’m slightly worried that I haven’t really had a chance to reflect on this summer; I think this was probably seen and noted by a few in my placement presentation yesterday namely by Matt Ward.

I think The reason has been that I have only just stopped one day before coming back to uni; this meant that I haven’t had a chance to think about the stuff I have done…

So I guess I’ll summarise: Eco e Narciso was about 3 weeks in total though on and off, I worked for Dunne & Raby for 4 weeks, and was working on Made in 24hrs pretty much all the times in between, and sometimes during.

Eco e Narciso

This has definitely opened me up from a general pessimism about design, and although there were not so many tangible technical skills that have arisen as a result, there’s a couple of things that changed my perspective.

Presenting

Presenting in Turin was amazing, I think standing there and being confident or proud of the work and thoughts that I had was a big thing for me, and Nadine and Jo really helped to bring that out of me. This was especially strange because everything was being translated, so basically what you were saying didn’t mean anything, until it had been processed by the guy standing next to me. That was a strange thing to overcome, but also something quite unique and interesting.

I picked up on one thing that Nadine said which was; the RCA guys really owned their work, and thought it was the dogs. I don’t know how this happened because to be honest a lot of it was shit, and some were ideas that we had previously dismissed as not being interesting enough. This was so important though…because they presented in this way even a shit thought or piece of work becomes good, because of this ownership, it’s almost like telling people “listen to me, because this is gonna be awesome”.

Working with/alongside people

We worked in such a way that differed to how many people are working I think… As a  point of comparison we could look at how the RCA guys were developing ideas, and contrast it to us; there was far more richness in what we were doing because we had 6 people talking, drawing and thinking together.

This, as a learning outcome is pretty simple…I need to be around people to bring things out of my head (as i think most do), I think the last two years have definitely shown that; I feel a bit like my thinking was superior in foundation because I had a small group surrounding me that I could talk to and think with critically… This exists now, but for some reason it’s just not quite right, I think we need to tweak what is going on in the studio, and doing things like going to the pub to chat are so important. I know that when I’ve talked to Dan all night, drinking wine, some really interesting things are coming out of what we’re saying, but how do you translate that back into work/studio.

Being criticised/critically questioned by an elderly lady

This sound stupid, but it’s something I had never thought about, or maybe I thought about and dismissed before; I’m not good at talking to people who aren’t designers/artists about work. This is ridiculous; surely if you are designing for people you need to be critically engaging with those people.

This was a huge realisation when I was presenting for the second time in the Eco museum in Balme. I was basically shot down a little, by an elderly lady who said, “well i already do that, so what have you designed”. It was a pretty valid point; she was talking about the fact that the work I had done was to promote/celebrate/beautify the re-use of objects, namely glass bottles. I thought at the time, and this sounds terrible, “oh you wouldn’t get it”, but then on reflection I saw that this was the person I was meant to be designing for.