Week 59 - 31 March 2023

Sanaa and I are at the halfway point of the after school club we're running. The whole thing is walking a tight line between developing research methods as part of our masters, delivering on a brief for seating set by The Hub - a new community space in Peckham, and making sure the kids get something out of every session we run. The later being the most important.

The first session was, being a bit of a harsh self critic, terrible. I struggled to think about it in the week after. It was bad because the structure we laid out was suffocatingly tight - we tried to do too much, and introduced too many concepts and goalposts to get through.

By some miracle most of the kids came back for the second week, which was much much better - in part because we learned our lesson and left more room for stuff to emerge organically. Reading Victor Papanek's The Green Imperative at the moment, so this is framed slightly through that lens, and also Good Strategy Bad Strategy which I'm also reading at the moment - but it's so much, in more than just this project, about setting up good systems and pointing them in a good direction. Which is antithetical to the designer-ly impulse for control.

The kids made some great models in week 2, and were showing them to each other and developing ideas off the back of them. Was nice.

I was meant to be on a canal boat to celebrate my 30th right now, but we were just told that the canals are so swollen that we'd only be able to pootle around in a little circle rather than chug down to Oxford as we'd planned. Someone said it was because we wouldn't fit under any bridges with the canal so swole (?) but I find that hard to believe. We'll go in May.

Last update: 2023-03-31 14:22