Conditional Design / Participation

Conditional Design / Participation:

Rob Lycett - 16th October

The seminar on Friday brought us onto new further reading of an open work Participation by Helen Armstrong.

"Some current graphic design thinking and practice is focussed upon the notion that the creative process itself can become an open system. These systems are often ludic (game-like) and participatory (with players). Negotiation and collaboration are key. They also allude to alternative designer/client relationships and the potential of participation being a valuable design research tool." from UniLean

We created some visual experiments that happened today were from  'Conditional Design Workbook . In this we had to:

Create a beach:

1a. First Place a dot,

1b. Following turns; Place a dot in the centre of the largest empty space on the paper.

1c. Stop drawing when you think the beach is crowded.

Here is my groups attempt:

Here is how it's meant to be done:

The second was to create the perfect circle:

1a. First draw a filled in circle in the centre of the paper

1b. Following Turns: Improve the circles round shape by enlarging its borders

1c. Stop when the circle is perfect.

Here is my groups attempt:

From back of paper

Here is how it's meant to be done:

I really enjoyed these "games", I felt like I had a lot of anxiety because I felt like I had to get it right and that it was a conscience study going on? It felt rather strange. I did feel as though that there was some kind of science going on, my group started to feel like that we kept seeing patterns in where we were placing our dots for the beach. We thought that it was ending up at diagonal lines and horizontal lines however, that wasn't even for the outcome. As with the circle, I kept getting really annoyed because I couldn't make the perfect circle!!!

You should also look at the Conditional Design Manifesto and evaluate its relationship to your own ideas relating to creativity and the open work. (Located Above are Screenshots)


We should be continuing to contribute to the collective notation/writing space that we started to use last week. We will look at your discussions next week on the 25th October.