ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION CONFERENCE

15-16 SEPTEMBER 2005, NAPIER UNIVERSITY, EDINBURGH, UK

Alex Milton
Ben Hughes

ABSTRACT
This paper explores the use of playful, collaborative design modelling as a catalyst for
creativity. Play is an unavoidable and essential element in the design process, but one
which is largely ignored. The dry, reductionist view of design that seeks to promote the
designer as an objective, emotionless entity struggles when looking for explanations of
recent design trends.

Traditional design methodologies and disciplines focus on design realisation. The paper
argues that the playful use of symbolic, conceptual and physical models is an essential
part of the design process, and one that is ignored at great cost. This is illustrated
through a series of mass-participation creative educational workshops entitled
Claystation.

Claystation is a mass-participation format for creative experimentation. The Design

Transformation Group (DTG) devised it as a means of encouraging normally passive
audiences in active participation. It is heavily influenced by theories of play, which the
creators believe is key in the development of creative thought.

The paper will display and discuss the design methodologies developed by the group
and employed within its cross-disciplinary workshops and events, and begin to explore
the role of an audience in the appreciation of design practice, theory and thinking.
Suggesting that sole authorship is not always everything, and that design creativity can
be explored through the playfully ephemeral.

Keywords: play element in design, modelling, participation, creativity, user-complicity.

During the 1990s the blurring of design specialisms, the merging of digital media, and
fluid patterns of employment transformed the design industry. Opening new
opportunities for designers capable of communicating with a wide range of specialists,
adaptable to new technologies, and above all able to conceptualise and creatively
respond to commercial and cultural change.

In response to this paradigm shift, a number of designers and educators founded the Design
Transformation Group (DTG). The DTG operates as a distributed design collective
consisting of interdisciplinary designers, who regularly collaborate with other
practitioners such as architects, artists and sociologists. By utilising new design

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methodologies and new media the group set out to transcend physical, ideological and
cultural boundaries.

The philosophy of the DTG is rooted in the belief that 21st Century designers should be
capable of crossing traditional disciplinary barriers and be able to respond creatively to
a volatile commercial and cultural environment. Accordingly, the group aims to
promote new thinking in design through symbolic, virtual, physical and scenario
modelling. This new paradigm offers greater opportunity for more broadly based design
interventions and debates than is typical in design discipline-specific methodologies.

The psychologist Carl Jung tells us: “The creation of something new is not
accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The
creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” [1] This argument seems fairly natural
and familiar to designers, although the play element of their work may be ‘underplayed’
in the professional context. This paper attempts to explore the notion of creative design
modelling and introduce a series of projects that attempt to engage audiences for design
in creative, playful, physical design activity and creation.

Traditionally design aims to realise a solution through an adherence to a proven

discipline specific design methodology. From brief to practical outcome, realised
through professional specification and detailing, and an understanding of specialist
production technologies.

By contrast, design modelling offers a useful and practical way to describe design as a
process of re-conceptualisation that, for example, may transpose physical modelling in
clay to environmental critique, collaborative interaction to diagrammatic analysis,
conceptual scenarios to graphic imagery. Thus, the outcomes of design modelling may
be both concrete and abstract. Thus, the aims of the Group are to interrogate, re-
interpret and re-envisage material culture through interdisciplinary design modelling.
Exhibiting their output to the general public.

One of the problems of the designer is how to effectively engage their audience who are
more comfortable with consuming design in the same way as art – at a comfortable
distance. This is one of the issues that has been tackled recently by the London-based
organisation Designersblock. Since 1994 their events have been a showcase and proving
ground for up and coming design talent in a variety of disciplines. It has emerged as the
most influential and exciting forum for the promotion of innovative work that it has
earned a worldwide reputation. Exhibitions have so far been held in Milan, Seoul,
Barcelona and Tokyo, as well as London, with founders Piers Roberts and Rory Dodd
being brave enough to experiment with the format and presentation of design. Creating
events that are in the process of constant reinvention, whilst maintaining a core
philosophy of pioneering the interests of the designers it exhibits.

As a result, Designersblock have taken the initiative to start to innovate in collaborative

design. They have deliberately introduced elements into their shows that are intended to
draw their audience in and encourage participation and debate. Along with the
promotion of designers in their exhibitions, Designersblock have an agenda to try and
engage people with design thinking at a deep level. Co-founder Piers Roberts explains

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the choice of title for their events: “The name reflects where we are at in the sense of
overcoming blocks and obstacles that stand in the way of progress in design and design
thinking… I am interested in the interaction with place in particular, and offering spaces
outside the conventional where people can engage with design at a new level [2].”

During the 2003 Milan Designersblock, there was a park bench exhibited alongside a
variety of engraving and carving tools. Visitors were encouraged to gouge names and
messages in the chair during the course of the event. During the 2003 London exhibition
a giant paint-by- numbers picture was hung in the entrance, which was gradually
coloured in by visitors. At the same event the Design Transformation Group were
invited to present an interactive installation, titled “Claystation,” (Figure 1) at which
visitors’ creative energies were focused towards the creation of a giant, narrative-free
claymation film.

Over the duration of the exhibition visitors were encouraged to purchase a lump of
Plasticine and to spend as long as they wanted carving, sculpting, and forming it into
whatever they desired. The group consciously chose plasticine over other media because
of its ease of use and evocative childhood qualities and design industries qualities.

Figure 1. Claystation 2003

Plasticine is highly redolent of childhood, and synonymous with the unfettered playful
experimentation and modelling of youth. It is also a material used in a more refined
manner by the highly specialised Car and Product Design industry, having been
introduced as a modelling technique by Harley Earl, the originator of the studio system,
mass obsolescence and first Head of Design at General Motors.

The resulting objects were placed on a ‘stage’ where their creators could manipulate
them and interact with others’ design creations. A camera mounted in the ceiling of the
venue recorded these objects’ positions every 30 seconds. These were then compiled
into a film of the whole event. With a complete absence of narrative, or constraint in
expression, participants were completely free to experiment with the format. Piers
Roberts observed: “Claystation fits our model of interaction as it is an invitation for
people to cross a bridge where they can involve themselves with design ideas and

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processes. Play is an important element in these processes and one that is a strong
motivating force when attempting to get people involved.” [2]

Over 300 visitors participated in this event over the course of the exhibition, creating a
spectacle that was made into a film lasting more than 8 minutes that revealed emergent
design collaborations and playful group working. No attempt was made to record
individual visitor’s contributions, but most stayed for between 20 and 40 minutes, with
many returning after having visited the other parts of the exhibition. The film was
deliberately left in an un-edited state, and, with the exception of the addition of a
soundtrack, was left to unfold as it happened. As a result there are short bursts of plot
line, but these quickly degenerate and decay as fresh participants take over.

The subject, techniques and narrative of the animation could be studied endlessly, but
the key lesson is one of how active engagement in an environment previously reserved
for contemplation may be facilitated and encouraged. There is no doubt that a more
beneficial appreciation of the experience was achieved. The format was shown to be
versatile and engaging within the context of a design exhibition, and displayed
sufficient promise for further development.

Figure 2. Claystation - Remodelling London

'The permanence of even the most frivolous item of architecture and the instability of
the metropolis are incompatible. In this conflict the metropolis is, by definition, the
victor; in its pervasive reality architecture is reduced to the status of a plaything.'Rem
Koolhaas [3]

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Following the success of Claystation at Designersblock 2003, the Design
Transformation Group returned the following year with a new device for encouraging
visitors to get involved in design. The title of the event was '
Remodelling London:'On a
scale model of the city, the format took on an architectural spin as the authors invited
wannabe Fosters and Wrens to indulge their fantasies in the creation of a new London
cityscape. Designers, Architects and the general public interacted and collaboratively
produced a symbolic redesigning of the city, its infrastructure, products, services and
iconography.

Each participant paid £1 for a lump of plasticine, and a random square (out of 100
squares) on a 6’ map of Central London (square determined by throwing two ten-sided
dice). The group was interested in exploring a collaborative mapping of the city,
enabling the individual concepts, narratives and designs of over 400 participants to
contaminate each other in an interesting way, to create a symbolic cityscape.

Remodelling London was an evolving interactive installation, dealing with architecture,

design, urbanism, society and spectacle. It's democratic unedited nature with uncensored
public interaction didn't aim to present a unitary vision of the cities development; rather
it uncovered a plurality of ideas and approaches - ideas that are inevitably
circumstantial, conflictual, ephemeral and above all playful.

The use of stop frame film animation to capture the event highlighted the transient
nature of the installation as a cityscape was transformed by the collective
interdisciplinary will of the participants. The physical and dynamic design
transformations of the model city were affected by the undoubted relationship between
the real and virtual. The real represented by interpretations of the existing architectural
fabric of London such as the London Eye. While the personal visions, statements and
experiments of participants provided an imaginary past, present and future of London, a
virtual reality redolent of the situationist mapping of Debord (See Figure 2).

This phenomena was discussed by Paul Virillo in his book The Lost Dimension, where
he contends that ' direct and mediated perceptions merge into an instantaneous
representation of space and the surrounding environment.'[4]

The event presented a psychological city made anew with the accumulated traces of
physical matter and the debris of previous designers, of what has been and what is yet to
come. The contested squares that made up Claystations city map became an important
domain for challenging the traditional method of urban planning. It projects a future
form of collaborative design, that engages architects, designers, inhabitants and visitors
alike in the construction of democratic design structures and identities based on crossing
boundaries.

Claystations cityscape was constantly changing, reinventing and renovating itself as the
cross-disciplinary participants interacted with the map, models and each other. The
transient nature of the claymation cityscape has parallels with Koolhaas retroactive
manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York. In which he claims Manhattan was an
architectural laboratory where ' each block is covered with several layers of phantom
architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects and popular fantasies that

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provide alternative images to city that exists.'A mythical place where '
the testing of a
metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective
experiment in which the entire city became a factory of man-made experience, where
the real and the natural cease to exist.'Rem Koolhaas [5].

The Claystation event aimed to celebrate the contemporary urban condition, transient,
shifting, expanding and remodelled. A microcosm of the city, Claystations over 400
participants conceptual design models and provocations argue to be included in future
debates on the City and adopted as a viable collaborative design methodology. Initial
evidence of this has been the integration of the Claystation projects outcomes into the
research conducted by Agora a three-year multi-disciplinary European initiative that
analyses and develops design elements for enhancing pedestrian movement. Its results
will lead to ‘soft design solutions’ that aim to positively affect citizens’ quality of life
and make European cities more environmentally sustainable.

The authors have subsequently been invited to produce further Claystation style events
exploring the creative cross-disciplinary design, most notably at the Milan Furniture
Fair and the creation of an educational and interactive new device for the National
Museum of Scotland (NMS) entitled ' My Chair' . The installation aims to complement
the Scottish showing of the Jerwood Prize for Furniture, by enabling visitors to
visualise, model and exhibit their own chair designs. Further information on the groups
projects can be found at www.claystation.org.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Thanks to Sondre Ager-Wick, Katy Buchan, Rory Dodd, Nik Green, Sean O’Mara,
Sean Pillot de Chenecy, Piers Roberts, Debbie Wythe, Paul Yuille, the MA Industrial
Design students at Central Saint Martins and all those who participated in Claystation
2003 and 2004.

REFERENCES
[1] Ackerman D., Deep Play, Random House International, New York, 2000, pp.121.
[2] Piers Roberts quoted from interview conducted with the Authors, March 2004.
[3] Koolhaas R., S,M,L,XL, 010, Rotterdam,1995, pp.22-27.
[4] Virillo P., The Lost Dimension. Semiotext(e), New York, 1991, pp.30-31.
[5] Koolhaas R., Delirious New York, 010, Rotterdam, 1994, pp.9-10.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Alex Milton
Head of Furniture, Product and Interior Design
Edinburgh College of Art, Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9DF
T: +44 (0)131 221 6132 E: a.milton@eca.ac.uk

Ben Hughes
Course Director of MA Industrial Design
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
Southampton Row, London WC1B 4AP
T:+44 (0)207 514 7111 E: b.hughes@csm.linst.ac.uk

E: info@claystation.org URL: www.claystation.org