Presentation and demonstration of practice, Developing Community University Partnerships course, Cupp, University of Brighton April 22 2015
We were invited to demonstrate some of our working practices to students and staff on Cupp’s pilot course ‘Developing Community University Partnerships’. We did this through a creative presentation and generation of a design brief which we then responded to by working through ideas at the end of the room – generating images, listening to further presentations and discussions and inviting dialogue with the group at the end of the day.
Below are images from the session showing our planning, including our prompts to generate ‘the brief’ and then some initial directions that we took in a further workshop session.
How to get a brief from the group? We prompted the group to generate a brief for us, on the spot by asking them to consider these questions and discuss as a group for 5 minutes before feeding back the answers to us.
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- Give us a message Who is the message for?
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- Where will the message go? (we also thought an object might be useful prompt but it wasn’t used on the day)
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- Researsing with the boxes full of art and design artefacts to help us introduce ourselves
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- Jo with the wall plan that helped us work out what we needed to do and say in the presentation
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- Kelvin with the wall plan – we spent 2 days planning and practicing the 20 minute presentation and 1.5 hour live demo
How did the group respond to our prompts?
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- the message…
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- for who…
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- to go where…
So the brief was to work with the message ‘Community Engagement is vital’ that is targeted at the whole University Community (everyone?) and which will go anywhere and everywhere (email footers, posters, logos, billboards, etc, etc.) So not to big a task then!…
Now armed with something to start our thinking, we went to the back of the room where we had set up a mobile studio space and worked on some ideas. As usual we worked in a combination of ways; individually, side by side and collaboratively. People wandered over now and then in between the other guest speakers.
What did we come up with in those 90 minutes?
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- sitting together, meetings, talking – Jo started this and invited Kelvin to add drawings
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- The shape of a group – Jo drew bottom layer, Kelvin drew over the top
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- Writing out the message helps work out what it is
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- Back of people heads
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- Shapes of University buildings and groups of people
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- What do Community and University share?
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- How can we show that people come and go, freedom of movement in between spaces…?
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- Juliet, recording it all in a different way
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- People thinking and talking
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- An initial attempt to say it all, simply…
What next?
We have been asked by the group and Cupp to continue with the project and develop the ideas further to generate a solution to the brief. Below are images from our next session, discussing what we can do next and planning a realistic framework for it.
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- We have a question for the group…
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- should the message be ‘Comminuty University engagement is vital’ ?
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- Jo chooses some that she thinks would be good to keep working on..
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- Kelvin chooses some that he would like to keep working on….
Here are some more images from that first studio session:
and a film to help us think a bit more about a big, complicated concept…
We plan on doing a few more workshops to develop the ides and like the idea of widening the discussion out – by bouncing ideas back and forth between us and the client (Cupp and students on the course) but also through inviting engagement from other arts communities and Universies. More details to follow…
We will be asking the group to feedback comments and ideas for us to progress the work.