Jonas Piet, Yulia Kryazheva - "A one-day excursion into your own process" after process
On the 21th of January in the National Art Gallery in Vilnius, twenty-four responsive, thoughtful and creative personalities dived
into ‚A one-day excursion into your own process“. They asked and searched fo answers.
- How does creative process of an architect begins and ends?
-What are the usual habits of a student and how it differs from expierenced professionals‘?
-The main problems designers are facing?
- How important is not to forget eating?
-How to bake a squared cake?
Excursion- workshop was moderated by a designer, independent cosultant, Jonas Piet (NL) and Yulia Kryazheva (NL) who is an
architect and illustrator. Participants, divided into five teams (different occupations and age), started a conceptual trip into their
own working process.
The attributes of the journey – an empty map, bizzare photos, mixed-up personalities, loads of post-its, passionate discussions and
mineral water. While exploring the space of creative process, projects for taxi drivers, children and aged people were developed,
even a weddind ceremony took place.
A three-part workshop started with a „warm-up“ excercises, followed by shared expierences and sources of inspiration, which filled
those empty maps. In the end everything would be used for the final task.
So, what‘s the conclusion? Everything went just perfectly! The teams finally ended-up with various recipes how to stay creative:
become a child, do what you fear, prepare and foresee, share your ideas with coleagues and… don’t perspire!
J: So what do we like about this?
Y: I really like the maps actually. Wow, people made a lot of stuff, they worked hard!
J: I was very happy to hear participants felt it wasn’t a competition. That they could actually focus on the process. While in a competition you have to be very focused on the goal. People got to work in a different way – I think they weren’t used to working in groups with people from other professions.
Y: And they had to do something without understanding it on beforehand, which really got them out of their normal working pattern.
J: Hmmm. People really had to negotiate the process – it wasn’t easy for them. This also meant that every group did something different. While one group took the brief very literal, another one represented stakeholders working on the project together, whereas another group made an art performance out of their design brief.
Y: I like about the first phase with the maps that people initially didn’t understand how to do it – “But how can we place all these photos on the timeline that are so different? It doesn’t work!” But in the end all groups managed to do this. As they knew they had to present their work, a structure emerged, and when we asked them about the important moments they were all able to present them. One of the participants said: “I felt that I am right and the rest is wrong, but somewhere along the way we found a form of consensus.” Which is cool!
J: Yes, and some people said the tasks weren’t that clear. This is partly because we really wanted to challenge people to step back and reflect.Hence the appropriately crazy design briefs.
Y: It was also nice to hear in the end that people said that they had learned something.
J: And we forgot to write about the warm-up exercise to get people into visualising their process…
Y: Yes. So we asked people to pair with the person next to them and draw the process of how they had arrived to the workshop location. As one person was talking, and the other was drawing. And then they swapped roles. This made people think about a simple process, and to got them into the mood. First laughs arrived (:
J: I enjoyed the entire process of this workshop.
Y: And the entire group was great!
J: Even though they’re architects (: