“West meets East”
By PDD
on November 6 2013
This September we returned to the London Design Festival (LDF), making the journey across town from West London to set up home in a large gallery space on Redchurch Street. This enabled us to run our Human-Centred Design (HCD) taster workshops and showcase two other installations: cultural insights on graffiti from five global cities on large format posters and an interactive trend map, exploring different approaches to beauty around the world.
Visitors looking at the poster and exploring the interactive map.
Featured Image: Human-Centred Design taster workshop at the PDD pop-up space, Redchurch Street.
Sensitive to our location, as part of our LDF preparations our team researched into the changes that have affected Shoreditch. 20 years ago it was home to Young British Artists such as Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, but now the locality is at risk of becoming a victim of its own success. Fame and fortune for a small select group has increased interest in the area which is great for business but not for the future community of ‘starving artists’ for whom rental prices are increasingly challenging.
Idea generation at our PDD Human-Centred Design workshop.
This conflict became the inspiration for our HCD workshops where we challenged participants to generate ideas for a fictional pitch for funding from the Arts Council for a local project to increase community participation in the Arts. As we always find in these workshops the teams produced a wide range of solutions and had a lot of fun in the process! Despite having never met before, the level of collaboration impressed us. Having come to consensus on one project, each team created a concept poster, with which they passionately presented their funding pitches to each other.
Concept posters.
As we closed up the gallery and packed away our things we wondered what could have happened if the topic we had chosen was for a real funding pitch instead of a fictional scenario. Ah well, there’s always next year! If anyone has any connections to the Arts Council, get in touch!