The DesignLab Brew is born out of our need to reach out to our community and have interesting informal discussions about our experiences. The DesignLab as a facility is now either closed or very limited in capacity. It's the physical space where conversations about project ideas, and knowledge gained from them, were made. And we miss it. We want the DesignLab Brew to be an informal, digital and asynchronous way to have these conversations.
It all started in the Digital Workshop, the space where a full media kit can be found (camera, microphone, audio interface and computer). This space enabled us to create high quality audio and video in different projects and it became an inspiration point for the podcast.
In the beginning this series was supposed to be an attempt to showcase DesignLab projects. I pitched this podcast to Jasper who is a coordinator for DesignLab, as a way to have an asynchronous, digitalised and informal conversation about DesignLabs’ work. Jasper turned out to be enthusiastic and together we set out to make it happen.
As the idea matured we came to realise that there are a lot of powerful learning points in the process of getting projects off the ground. DesignLab is a transdisciplinary and student-driven space, but at the same time research and large external projects are also happening. The more we talked with the people involved the more we got fascinated with the challenges they faced and the solutions they came up with. We felt they had a lot more to say and our community had a lot to learn from their experiences.
The Brew changed, it became interview-based and we set out to make our Pilot. For the Pilot episode we decided to talk to Edo: a veteran DreamTeamer who led the Neura Automata project. This change was proven to be the right choice as we learned a lot about ideation, negotiation and the value of each individual member of a team regardless of their background.
We also realised that, being the hosts of the podcast, we are in the privileged position to indulge our curiosity and learn more about the aspects we are interested in. We are now glad to extend this opportunity to the rest of our community. So we set up a form (scroll down below) where anyone can send us any questions they might have on the subject we will be talking about in the next episode. At the time of our next interview we can choose some of those questions to ask our interviewees.
For this academic year we have planned 4 more episodes that will span DesignLabs’ areas of work and give us a peek at the behind the scenes. Soon we will be launching our first episode: ”Closed until Further notice: Now what?” where we follow the journey of the Social Distancing task force through the crisis and all the hard work, adaptation and innovation they did in order to keep DesignLab running.
Ask our guests!
We want you to have a voice in these conversations. This is why we extend an invitation to you to ask any questions you might have to the guests of our first and second episode. Fill in the question forms:
