Meet me 'here' at 2pm, Don't be late!!

Week 5, the class was foreshadowed by an email the day before with a single line written.

Meet me 'here' at 2pm, bring your notebooks and DON'T BE LATE!!

This let the class quite confused and very curious as to what we might be up to that day. 2pm the next day rolls around and we have all gathered at a place on campus that we generally not frequent as its out of the way from our studio space and is pretty much all lecture theatre style classrooms, or so we thought.

The entire class had gathered at the meeting point in the open space in front of the Shuman Building. We were chatting away in our groups wondering what was going on, and our lecturer shows up and says follow me. At this stage we thought okay maybe a walk around campus, but she lead us straight into a building that we would normally pass no regard on.

At the door we were welcomed by a few people and up on the wall there was a large ‘Johnson and Johnson’ sign. That is the point where I started to get excited. We were directed into a large open room, with tables for a group of four to sit around. Here we were introduced to the Blackbox team and what they do. (you can find out more detail about them here; https://www.blackbox.studio/)

Once we were all in the room they introduced themselves and what they do and what we were going to be doing. We were going to be creating a Social Impact Start-up Pitch, for inspiration we were shown the ‘Litre of light’ concept from Pepsi.

Taken from the presentation slides shown to us

Our start up idea was to be based around one of the six UN Sustainable Development Goals that had been selected for the workshop. The catch for us however, we only had four hours, yep you read that right four hours for an entire design process to take place.

Now that might seem extreme, but it was quite enjoyable looking back on the day now. We took part in what is known as a Design Sprint. This seemed altogether new to us, but we have been doing Design Sprints for the past year and a half in our college assignments, all be it on a slightly longer timeline. It was nice to experience what it might be like in a professional studio setting, trying to organise a group of people (our team) to design something that might have a real impact.

I think we were all taken aback by the quantity and quality of ideas and the work we managed to produce within our groups. (Here is my groups idea). There were so many cool ideas and concepts presented by all the groups that were not very far from our reach and with the right actions could be brought to life. It was nice conclusion to a workshop that was stressful although very enjoyable.

Our allotted time ended at 6pm and we went a little bit over and everyone was slowly becoming fidgety and wanting to leave, when the time came everyone was gone pretty quickly. I was the only person who took time packing up my stuff, as I was in no real rush to get anywhere my day was over and club training didn’t start for a while. I opted to look at some of the work in an adjacent room as we were invited to do so at the beginning of the workshop. Some models of different floorplans and information were on a standing desk and I found some large ideation pages too. Those ideation pages were about the workshop we had just done. How different topics might be worked in, how was the time going to be structured etc. I looked up into the next room through a glass wall, all the walls in between the rooms were glass, and it was filled with robot arms and various other CNC machines. While I was looking on a member of the Blackbox team asked if I wanted a tour of the building.

I took him up on his offer and we went through to the room with all the machines, where he described some of the projects that were being worked on. He then brought me through to another room which was filled with 3D printing resources and up into their main studio space. All the while I was in awe and amazement of how the place was setup and trying to imagine how people interacted with the space and with one another. It was very easy to see myself working in a space like that. I somehow managed to say that in our conversation and it was mentioned that there were a few 3rd year student currently on co-op with them.

I said that it would be great to get the chance to work there, and shortly there after the tour ended. Now I am not entirely sure if that because we had seen all that there was to see or because I said I’d like to work there… but in any case it was incredibly re-assuring to me, to have seen a working design studio such as this, and I can only hope to work in such a place in the future.