Hasta La Ideas

Some of our recent design education has come from instructors who have offered us exclusive inside looks at summer intensives: Francis Bitonti’s “New Skins: Computational Design for Fashion” Workshop at Pratt DAHRC and the Brian Anderson’s “Immediate Objects: Explorations in 3D Printing” at the SAIC. This time around, we have a guest post by a student, Vivian Chan of Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology. Under the tutelage of instructor Russell Taylor, she and a dozen of her classmates spent six weeks in Europe this summer, traveling halfway around the world from Vancouver to the Netherlands to film and research designers in a unique and unforgettable Field School program.

By Vivian Chan

As part of the bi-annual SIAT Dutch Design field school, we travelled to the Netherlands in order to interview and document Dutch designers, their work, their process and design culture. The field school is a part of SFU’s study abroad program consisting of three courses: IAT 395 in the semester beforehand to prepare and research, IAT 396 the in-field course, and IAT 397 upon return to synthesize our research and experience into the videos and website.

During our time in the Netherlands, we spoke with 20 prominent Dutch designers such as Piet Hein Eek, Phillips Design (above) and Ineke Hans, as well as some up and coming designers like Formafantasma and Scholten & Baijings. We have officially launched our website, and all of our work and research has been documented and is now ready to be viewed in the form of short interviews and cultural films.

We all had a part in the video editing process. For the interviews, we paired up and each pair had 3–4 interviews that they would conduct on our own. The pairings matched up a student that was more proficient with video editing and another that could help in less technical ways such as gathering the video content and helping determine the structure and story behind the videos. We studied the designers’ past works and design approach, then developed questions that would establish credibility, as well as get them to open up and discuss the ideas, the methodology, the challenges and the thought processes behind their work.

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