What it is
This score is a long-form assignment for students to help them get to know an institution when joining it and enabling institutional critique from the start.
Students are asked to investigate, in groups, an aspect of the institution they have just entered and create a visual proposal for an intervention, reflecting on a gap discovered while investigating.
This score is based on a common starting project in design and architecture that consists of mapping the building as an introduction to spatial drafting.
It is, however, the critical mapping of relationships that is at the core of this score. It includes basic introductions to the space, people and systems while, also, heavily encouraging a critical reading of the institution from day one.
Why it is
While entering any institution, one begins to collect keys that unlock the literal doors, but also knowledge of the institution’s tools and access to its spaces of shared engagement. We asked: what are the measurements for succeeding at this handover?
The point of this score is twofold: unleash an analytical eye while entering a new institution and give participants the keys, the context and the contacts to navigate the new institution they have just entered.
The goal is to enable students entering new environments to navigate the infrastructure and draw on available support resources, thereby building their capacity for agency within the institution.
We first tested Score #3 at HDK-Valand, Academy of Art and Design, Gothenburg in the framework of the MA Embedded Design Programme. This course aims to prepare students for a practice that dares to enter complex and systemized contexts: organizations, companies and institutions. Using a strategic plus an artistic approach, the practice embraces, on the one hand, a role as a “friendly collaborator” and, on the other, of “critical disruptor.”
How it works
The exercise asks not just how can we help students navigate the new institution, but how might we scale down the institution's newness? How can we set up engagement that is dialogue-based rather than staff informing via monologues?
In this score, students investigate the institution in a range of interactions, including workshop intros, ceremonial startups, and seminars with different design educators etc.
Students should be reminded not to forget to include any insights or understandings of how the institution and the department functions learned through these interactions. It might be in these that each group finds the most pertinent information needed for institutional intervention. They should not forget to take field notes, field observations, and field imagery along the way.
Themes
Investigations are around four major themes:
❶ Spatial
❷ Programming
❸ Management
❹ Support Structures
We organized workshops on each of these, expecting groups to dive deeper according to where they decided to focus. No team was intervening on the entire organization but found an area in the investigation with the most need, most interest.
Model displaying the four organizational themes that were used to frame the activities i.e., the workshops, support interviews and etc. of the #InstiInvest assignment 2020.
The above model of the four organizational themes was used in multiple course activities. The model and the course activities that were designed to reveal the space are in the centre. The following list was presented to the students during the introduction to the assignment:
❶ Spatial
An investigation of the building and the space the institution occupies.
❷ Programming
An investigation of the many aspects of programming that happen within the institution. At HDK-Valand this included design’s many programmes, other educational disciplines, verkstad protocols and procedures, and research groups.
❸ The Management
An investigation of management. At HDK-Valand this included the Head of Department being booked for a three-hour session, answering questions presented by students about his perspective on HDK-Valand, its vision and managerial structures.
Beyond this interaction, groups should do further investigations into other lines of management.
❹ Support Structures
An investigation of any support functions to the main organization’s objective. This includes but is not limited to the administrative bodies. Support Structures include (but are not limited to): Communications, Economy, Building Managers, Admissions, HR, Study Counsellors, GU Services, Cleaning Staff, Student Health Services, Neighborhood Cafes, etc.
At HDK-Valand, on a given date, the groups took on an administrative body to go and get to know and later there was a peer-led exchange of the information gathered.
Prompts
The following prompts were given to students to structure their investigation and submission of the test case #InstiInvest as part of the Embedded Design at HDK-Valand in 2020.
The visualized project description will have the basic components of any project description and the design methods practiced in creating such a document: the what, why, how, and project timing:
❶ The what
Introduce the focus area of the institution chosen by the group.
Each group should narrow down the point of engagement their design intervention will investigate. The institution, in itself, is too large and complex for a single project, and part of the investigative purpose is to identify areas in need of work. This most likely means each group will find a focus area where some aspect(s) of the four themes – Space, Programming, Management, and Support Structures – collide with an area not clearly acting within the four themes.
❷ The why
Display field notes and the mapping that exposes the crucial need for the proposed intervention
❸ The how
Validate and clearly argue the design approach used by the group in the final proposal. Be sure to cite theoretical underpinning(s) and sourcing inspiring design practices
❹ The timing
Provide a plan-of-action including next steps and far-future speculations
Examples of student-led approaches
These examples resulted from the first iteration of this score at #InstiInvest as part of MA Embedded Design, HDK-Valand in 2020.
One team created a proposal for students to participate in the organizational merger that had already been affecting staff for about a year. The project called “Merge Now” asserts that students could also be more informed and engaged in the process of merging and asked the main question of why students seemed so ill-informed while staff seemed so stressed?
Another team proposed an orientation tool for students entering transdisciplinary design education that distinguishes HDK-Valand from other schools. The project called “Where is the state of the art?” defined the gap between the ambitions of the design unit’s pedagogy to be transdisciplinary and the experience of navigating this openness as a student.
The third team proposed an intervention in how staff communicates with each other in the project called “The missing of the Big Kahuna.” Identifying the fact that communication seemed to be a top-down strategic process, this group proposed a more democratic approach and created a newsletter campaign, tested on the design unit to start the conversations. See student projects as presented in Open Window, a one-week public online event of the Design Unit at HDK-Valand. 1
Running the assignment
The exercise was designed to be assigned in the first course of any study programme. It is tailored for courses in need of wayfinding or support mechanisms on top of the subject pedagogy.
We tested it for approximately eight weeks of full-time study, but we can easily imagine that elements of it could be simplified into a smaller assignment or expanded into a larger one. The assignment size depends on the learning outcomes that are to be examined, programme curriculum and necessity of introducing students to the tools and facilities, e.g., the wood workshop, computer room, study counsellors, etc.
It is highly recommended that students do this assignment in small groups to be able to work more personally and confidently while investigating spaces and systems new to them. Running such an assignment is not a simple task. There is much for the community to organize and coordinate (community includes teaching staff but also other members of the institution, such as leadership, administrators and even students in other programmes and courses) The following step-by-step guide outlines the score for realization in a higher education context, such as an art school or university, with a defined curriculum and prescribed learning goals.
Preparation
- Align teaching team (if a team is involved in the set-up)
- Prepare teaching materials:
- Produce visual and easily accessible overview of the timeline and schedule of the assignment with clearly marked progress deadlines and final deadlines. This overview should the expected pace and project phases such as research phase (3 weeks), scoping phase (1 week), experimental intervention phase (2 weeks), and packaging phase (1 week). The overview also lists, schedules and outlines the seminars and workshop activities.
- Prepare a reading list and practical references.
- Create instructions for examinations connected to learning goals. In the case of #InstiInvest the examined part of the assignment was an oral presentation plus submitted Visual Proposal PDF.
- Prepare the digital learning platform communication used by your institution e.g., Canvas, blackboard, etc.
- Form student groups (it is highly recommended that the work be done in groups).
- Provide support: pre-book meetings with different actors of the institution such as with the Dean, with Communications Officers, etc. (This will result in a mix of investigative activities, including teacher-facilitated, as well as student-led investigative moments.
- Always provide clear instructions to prevent stress and anxiety due to misunderstandings or ambiguities in communication.
- Develop formats to scale down and lessen the complexity of working with any sizable institution. For example:
- Break work into a series of categories such as “student engagement,” “introductory procedures” and " management functions".
- Define project limitations such as “The institution will be limited to half its tenants," or "’The institution’ in this project should be taken to mean only the departments of design and fine art."
- Introduce theoretical focal points provided by the literature that informs the project. See, for example, the references to Hirsch et al., and Condorelli.
- Provide design skill-building workshops as supports for the design/artistic exam outputs.
- Prepare discussion topic for the student teams: How might we enter the institution intentionally?
- Alert any staff who may need a heads-up that the students are critically looking at the institution’s systems and structures.
Final Presentation
Students are examined on a detailed design intervention proposal pertaining to the institution they investigate. They are to both formulate and publish their description of this project, using the prompts (see above) for final presentation structure.
The expected quantity of pages can be finalized together in the publication workshop, but a starting rule of thumb for us was to have one spread for each of the four prompts.
Reflection
We strongly recommend that you schedule a moment of reflection after delivery of the presentations. Pedagogically, reflection is a very potent tool for students to frame their own learnings and can be effective for staff as a deepening of any systematic course evaluation and in redesigning the assignment for future groups. It can be done in many ways: discussion, workshop or writing assignment, for example.
This segment was found to be particularly relevant in the EMD11A case. Here, the learning objectives were clearly about defining a practice using examples from the field juxtaposed with an introductory Embedded Design project experience. Hence, for the final two weeks of the course (and after project delivery) the students were given a writing assignment. A writing assignment was chosen for the following reasons:
- Writing assignments in general potentially allow for students to evaluate and communicate how they have worked with or seen course literature in a practical situation.
- It is a task that can be individually assessed and can reveal how the group work went for each individual.
What we learned – practical tips to take elsewhere
- Make sure to add a support structure for student teams to deal with team conflict, e.g., methodologies for coping with team-building and group work.
- It can be tough for students who are new to also be critical. Providing coping support for the psychological position this assignment puts them in was shown to be particularly important for the international students in the first run.
- Have in-process check-in discussions, particularly if conducting multi-week timing, along the project timeline , e.g., revisit overview documents instead of leaving them behind after the introduction to the assignment.
- Be super clear about the final examination’s demands.
- Teachers have a dual role: A) the course teacher and B) a representative of the institution under investigation. Be sensitive about this and create aids for turning on and off the different positions each teacher holds at different times. Making space to be explicit about these two roles can help teachers enhance the pedagogical opportunity of working with the design process in focus when student groups bring up institutional pains and gains that may differ from the teacher's personal experience of said institution. Otherwise, we found that tutors too easily added opinions about the institution instead of focusing on the process.
- After the end of the project, an evaluation discussion within the community is naturally necessary. Do this with students and teaching staff, but also allow for the voices of the wider staff who came in and provided information to the investigation. Those who participated could need a better set up or, even, may want to put the student’s proposals to work right away.
Background, Influences
A reference for this project is the project “Spaces of Production”2 described in the book, Institution Building by Hirsch, Misselwitz, Miessen, and Görlich (2009). Although this book was written within an architectural context originally, it is a good departure point for an investigation of ours, and particularly with the added organizational lens we will add.
This work has been informed by Celine Condorelli’s work on “Support Structures,” a “manual for what bears, sustains, props and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life. It is a manual for that which assists, corroborates, advocates, articulates, substantiates, champions, and endorses; for what stands behind, underpins, frames, presents, maintains, and strengthens.” (Condorelli 2014, 6).
This score’s pedagogical approach is inspired by the progressive pedagogy of Dori Tunstall, first black Dean of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design University, who emphasizes the facilitator role’s agency: “If you are able to create conditions that open up their [the participants’] possibilities for self-determination, self-definition then they will themselves change the system and you get the honour of being able to facilitate that. They will appreciate and recognize your role in that facilitation.” (2019).
References
- Condorelli, Céline. Support Structures. Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press, 2014.
- Hirsch, Nikolaus, Philipp Misselwitz, Markus Miessen, and Matthias Görlich, eds. Institution Building: Artists, Curators, Architects in the Struggle for Institutional Space. Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press, 2009.
- European Kunsthalle, 2020.
- Tunstall, Elisabeth (Dori) and Grandoit-Sutko, Alice. “On Designing for Respect”, Deem Journal, W/S 21(two), 96-99, 2021.
- Tunstall, Elisabeth (Dori) and Kett, Robert J. “Respecting our Relations: Dori Tunstall on Decolonizing Design.” Jacobs Institute, 2019.
#InstiInvest 2020, an example case
#InstiInvest, short for Institutional Investigation, was designed as an introductory course for incoming MA Embedded Design students in autumn 2020 at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. It is based on feedback and reflection within the TTTT working group and although it has been designed for master's level students, it could easily be adapted for any other new student group.#InstiInvest’s first iteration ran in Autumn 2020 and project work ran across seven weeks of the ten-week course “EMD11A: Introduction to an Embedded Design Practice” (15 credits). It was the largest project and ran between two other examined assignments. Due to COVID-19, 80% of the course took place on video conferencing platforms: Zoom and Canvas. Students had access to the building and to individual studio desks. Overall, we met for ca. three days in person. The course was run in English, students come from all over Europe and had been awarded a Bachelor in Design or in other artistic fields. This course as a whole was taught by a team of teachers, one of whom also participated in the TTTT project while developing and implementing the course as the Course Responsible.
Teaching Team Hours
Hours conducted for this course were divided for the teaching staff in the following ways (Reporting Autumn 2020 specific to this assignment and not including full course hours):
Course Responsible: 110 hours
Including course planning, admin, workshop or seminar leading, group tutoring, grading and feedback
Sidekick: 50 hours.
Including course planning, workshop or seminar leading and feedback
Time demand for staff reaching outside teaching: 10-15 hours.
For interviews, across multiple people
Extra Design Teaching Resources: 80 hours.
For workshop or seminar leading and feedback.
TOTAL: ca. 255 hours
Numbers
Three teams of 3-4 students experienced this project briefed to create a visual proposal that intervenes into the institution they have just entered, to develop a description, reflection on a gap discovered while investigating.
Further Documents
- End of Course Report submitted to Quality and Assurance Workgroup at HDK-Valand. Includes excerpts pulled from the student evaluations.Course Report PDF found here. Course Report PDF found here.
- Embedded Design at the Academy of Arts and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
- See Syllabus #InstiInvest
- See course literature #InstiInvest
-
Open Window is an exhibition opportunity for current and graduating students and a way for the school to promote itself to prospective students. Download “Open Window Student Projects” PDF ↩
-
“Spaces of Production”, is a good example of investigating an arts institution via theory or conceptualizations while also developing a practical knowledge that informed the setting up of the European Kunsthalle in Cologne in 2020. ↩
