Committee [A]: second year BA Design project

In November, a group of second year BA Design students set up an exhibition in 13 Laurie Grove as part of a course project. The authors of the project are now providing us with a bit of insight into their process and the development of the exhibition:

“The idea for Committee [A] came about during a conversation that took place in the first week of our “-ism” project. Our group came together with a common interest in meta-realism and the possibilities of designing using a temporal axis that embraced the past and future whilst ignoring the present.

This idea made us reflect on how contemporary design processes use this idea of “now” in order to create an outcome; the communication that takes place, the mediums used and the efficiency of established ideals.

Once we had considered these our attention turned to the idea of natural selection and faults, or mutations, which naturally occur when making and how these could be encouraged and exemplified through a new set of methods and processes. From that point on we began to design without the use of schematics or diagrams, limiting the authority of each group member to a singular action; passing this authority back and fourth in much the same way that can be seen in production lines. This process became known as synthetic evolutionism as it took the idea of natural selection and accelerated it into a design process that required collaboration in order to become productive.

In time we widened our network of collaborators to include our tutors and colleagues; exploring authority and perception within larger groups; working towards the same outcome with only oral instructions to work by.

What became Exhibition A & B was the result of a more public application of these ideas; we invited our friends, family and fellow design students to come and explore our process before using a set of tools that we had created allowing them to manifest as Committee [B] and create Exhibition [B].”

The Committee [A] students are: Archie Harding, Tom Morgan, Panagiotis Tzortzopoulos, and Hugo Volrath.