The Stipulations

The Residence

A reflection of Naomi's and Kartik's G.UTS workshops

Naomi’s G.UTS workshop saw the honours cohort, including the honours theory lecturer Dion, interpreting and embellishing the symbolic weekly receipts Naomi developed from the beginning of her 2021 second semester honours year. Naomi sought to have the workshop participants communally reflect upon her weekly accounts of the honours design degree to provide the cohort with an insight into her intense experience. As the workshop cohort are all immediately engaging with the design honours degree, the workshop participants were able to resonate with the provocative material authored by Naomi. Furthermore, as the workshop facilitated the meeting of diverse perspectives on the singular subject matter, a deepened understanding of the design honours experience was able to be collectively generated.

Key Insights:

• By appreciating the emotionally tumultuous, communally shared experience of completing an honours degree in design, Naomi was able to better make sense of how she was feeling each week and what was consequently projected through the visual material she developed.

• By generating visual material in response to the images provided by Naomi, the participants were able to externalise the share emotions provoked by the design honours environment. This allowed the workshop participants to embed our emotions into Naomi’s design research work.

• An appreciation into Naomi’s deep emotional engagement with the research project was able to achieved through the workshop activity. By participating as an active workshop member, this insight was discernable. However, it is questioned to what degree this may be understood by the general public who observe Naomi’s G.UTS exhibit.

Kartik’s GUT.S workshop explored the role of participatory design in exploring and selecting design directions for his research project. Kartik engaged with user testing, with the workshop participants, in varying degrees. For example, the participants were asked to subjectively rank (1= poor to 5=best) the eight proposed seating arrangements against the criteria of “privacy” and “accessibility”. This saw limited engagement from the workshop participants, as we were provided with negligible activity autonomy beyond considering what number to rank each concept as. However, Kartik simultaneously engaged the participants with generating design features for the vehicle interface. This speculative activity saw the low fidelity display/feature control prototype, developed by Kartik, prompt the ideation of novel vehicle interfaces and passenger interactions. Kartik provided the workshop participants with no limit on which proposed features may be formally documented. This ensured that he, the researcher, was provided with a exhaustive submission of suggestions which he may then regulate post-workshop. The correlation between Kartik’s G.UTS workshop and his design research project is clear, allowing for the outcome of the workshop to directly inform the future design decisions he pursues.

Key Insights:

• Heighted workshop participation is achieved when participants are provided with a bespoke opportunity to have their critique and speculations documented.

• A workshop which seeks the validate the design decisions previously made by the designer offer limited advantage to the workshop participants.

The insights gain from both Naomi and Kartik’s workshops/exhibitions highlight the value and understanding gained from engaging with design for research. While it was evident that workshop facilitators identified different objectives from being provided with the opportunity to explore their design discourse through the honours cohort, it was observed that both workshop activities supported the advancement of its respective design research projects.

Additionally, the manner of exhibiting the workshop outcome to the general public highlights the importance of being able to materialise and document ephemeral workshop activities. While the workshop facilitators are likely to have benefitted from the experientially valuable record of their workshop activity, it is questioned whether the value of / insights from the workshops are clearly communicated to a wider audience by the exhibited outcomes generated. While Naomi provided passing audiences with a gallery of her embellished weekly receipts, the lack of contextualisation (i.e. the dating of the receipts) makes it difficult for fellow emotionally distressed students to resonate with the symbolically demonstrated experience. Conversely, Kartik provided minimal evidence of user-led decision making as the documentation of the proposed seating options faced inwards (away from the general public). This method of documentation reconfirms that Kartik sought to validate his design decisions with a select experimental group than to welcome extensive input from those who would engage with the design, the general public.

When developing the workshop activity inspired by the EAP, I will seek to demonstrate the learnings I gained from being a workshop participant within Naomi’s and Kartik’s workshop activities.