Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.
- Project Name: ThinkLab
- Designers: KBL Studio / Brandway
Thinklab, unveiled in January 2012, is an institution-level experimental learning environment, kit of structured creative thinking tools, and technology-rich platform for participatory, interdisciplinary and/or community-engaged learning in education. It was created both to host design courses and university-community learning initiatives as well as to serve as a model for future learning spaces in higher education. The lab is currently exploring, using and integrating the following types of media tools: video conferencing; interactive conference table, wall and multi-touch presentation surfaces; mind-mapping and collaborative brainstorming tools; systems modeling software; assessment tools; diagramming, mapping and visual modeling tools; programming and (Kinect) development tools.
– How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
With regard to our interests in the conflictual aspects of collaboration (see answer to “a-ha” question below), the notifying email came in the midst of one of our most conflictual days ever. Too many collaborations. Too many positions. Not enough Thinklab spaces to go around.
– What’s the latest news or development with your project?
Based on the work we have completed with Thinklab, we were invited to conceptualize and design a next-generation architectural design studio at Syracuse University, underwritten by Steve Einhorn, FAIA, CEO of Stardog consulting and founder and former CEO of Einhorn Yaffe Prescott Architects. Phase one of the studio will be opening in September 2013, updating a classic academic design studio into a highly flexible, collaborative, and digitally interactive design environment.
– What is one quick anecdote about your project?
Taking 81mg of aspirin a day helps the heart.
– What was an “a-ha” moment from this project?
Early in the development of Thinklab, in prototyping its first laboratory environment, it became immediately clear to us how profound was the impact of articulating conflict (visually, aurally, or otherwise) as a central part of collaborative work. Individuals come to a collaboration with their own future expectations, personal legacies, and local perspectives.
Aha!
In discovering the significance of this temporal knowledge—the legacies, past projects, history of conversations, evolving conflicts, and changing contributions within a large collaborative conversation—we discovered an important capacity for our archive. The idea of strategically and richly archiving all contributions to a collaboration was born.
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