Prompts/Briefs for workshops held in the first 3 weeks of first year:  

Everyday Choreography: Exploring how we experience space through performativity and movement.

Performativity is the acting out of everyday movements and gestures. It is one way in which we construct our sense of self. For example, consider the way you walk: we each have a unique stride, gait, footfall, and rhythm. Frequently, our spatial environments and the objects within them propose particular ways in which our bodies move. These ideas are crucial to the design and inhabitation of interiors. Beginning in groups, you will observe and document the human body as a site and explore the relationships between bodies. From there you will work individually to explore the movement of a body in relation to a specific context. This will lead to the design and crafting of a wearable apparatus that responds to your chosen movement. Understanding the close relationships between people and spaces is a key skill in the practice of interior design. This project will develop your observational skills of how people interact with each other and with objects in space. It is a chance to practice transforming your observations and ideas into a design at a manageable scale. By using a process-based approach you will open up new ways of thinking and practicing. You will be working through an iterative design process. This will include: group work, material experimentation, testing, photographing, drawing, giving peer feedback, making mistakes, speculating, playing, re-iterating. Students have a $10 budget for materials.

'Surroundings' is concerned with how we perceive interiors, and creating or revealing unseen or hidden readings of interior space.

Surroundings will build on the in-class workshop sensing spaces, visualising senses, and amplifying senses. This project asks you to undertake the close observation and documentation, research, and iterative testing process as well as video, photography, communication skill to explore and capture a compelling public interior in two different ways. You will draw on your developing understanding of how the body is involved in sensing space and produce a transformation that reveals another hidden or non-visible experience of the existing interior through in-camera effects, lighting, mirrors, scenography, staging, and other non-digital and temporary or ephemeral ways of creating a transformation in the way space is perceived. This project will develop your confidence and abilities in understanding and communicating immersive interior experiences, and consequently your ability to incorporate non-visual qualities into your interior design approaches. You will also develop an understanding of scenographic and analog spatial and camera technologies, installations, and spatial interventions that can produce transformative interior experiences. 

Passing Time introduces you to thinking more carefully about time in space and in the design process and introduces you to techniques of photography, drawing, and model making.

Passing Time is made up of three sections - Drawing Duration / Over and Over / Accumulation. In Drawing Duration, you will use drawing to look closely at how time manifests in interior space and its effect on material, perception, and atmosphere. Over and Over explores how interior design is not limited to the inside of a building but continually formed in relation to technologies and social, economic, and cultural forces. Interior design attends to the relationship between people and between people and their environments across a range of scales, mediums, and techniques. Over and over asks you to identify interiors that surround you that are not enclosed by four walls and then draw and photograph them 'over and over' to capture and communicate the qualities that make them interior. Over time everything accumulates (dust, experience, knowledge, belongings... and more) Accumulation uses photography and drawing to evidence the accumulation of understanding and to accumulate a collection of work that will then become part of a larger collaboration.