TXD Education teaches how to transform experience through collaborative design, together with students, organizations, and communities.
TXD Education lies in the core of TXD Lab, because it corresponds to a hands-on teaching/learning space where organizations and communities get together to design. However, it is not only about teaching and learning because through TXD Lab, education meets production. TXD Education not only teaches but also creates solutions that are used outside the realm of the lab.
Designing Together: Learning from/with local Communities
The lab develops workshops where organizations and communities come together to design in collaboration, involving a city and its neighbors, a company and its employees, or a school and its students. TXD Education uses the design models developed by TXD Research along with the technologies developed by TXD Tools. For example, in the workshops participants design together by expressing their experiences using the Five Aggregates and by using transformational materials, such as Spaghetti.
In the workshops we learn about electronics and design by attending to what we do and feel with the new technologies we are putting together. The workshop is structured around three basic rules: avoiding names, playing roles, and exchanging expressions and designs.
-Avoding Names: The participants cannot use names for their designs. Instead they will refer to their experience by drawing their doings and painting their feelings.
-Playing Roles: The participants work in pairs, involving at least one user and one designer. They play as users and designers of each other, in two separate rooms without communication.
-Exchanging Expressions and Designs: The users send expressions of experience to the designers. The designers then use these expressions as a starting point for their designs. Finally, they exchange designs and play users for each other.
Attend and Express: Draw the [Doing] and paint the [Feeling]
First, the users (u) begin the creative process by attending to a particular experience an expressing its content (e) by drawing what he does with his body (in time and space) and by painting what he feels in his body (blue for pleasant and red for unpleasant).
Open-ended exchange: expressing, observing, rearranging, experiencing, sharing, experiencing, observing...
Second, designers (d) use the users’ expressions (e) as evocations for their designs. They put materials together (m) and experience the result, in an iterative process open to do and feel something new.
Final Designs: New Names for rearrangements of materials that transform experience in surprising/unexpected ways
Third, the users receive their corresponding designs. And without knowing what these designs are, they try them in their experiences, by doing and feeling something without preconceptions.
Learn: Share and Observe one another