Mutations of Communication

In the past week I participated in a short-term programme at the Köln International School of Design, under the leadership of guest professors Tina-Henriette Kristiansen, and Anne-Elisabeth Toft of Denmark. The title was Mutations of Communication, and honestly as the 16 participants gathered in our classroom to begin the project, we didn't know what to expect.

The guest professors were extremely well prepared with a concrete assignment (something traditional KISD professors might learn to do better). We began the project with a short presentation on the concept of bodily mutation. We discussed what could be considered mutation (everyone) and how mutation works in the human body.

We were then paired into teams (I worked with Mathilda Oluoch) and given artefacts to work with. The project was exucuted in steps, with specific rules of mutations that we were requred to follow in each step, with each new mutation building off of the final product of the last step, in order to allow a generational growth of the objects. We were instructed not to think about beauty or function at all during the project, just to follow the principles given.

The steps of the project were as follows:

Photograph the artefact
Name the artefact and it parts
Draw the original artefact, "wildtype", in a detailed and accurate technical drawing (or render in 3D)
Mutation 1: Duplication
Mutation 2: Translocation (switching features of the object with eachother)
Mutation 3: Insertion (duplicate feature, or add features from a nearby object - in other words the area of the body where the artefact meets the body)
Mutation 4: Deletion (can also be fusion of parts)
Mutation 5: Multiple Choice (bring the artefact and the body back together, and Design. Here we were allowed the freedom to think more creatively, use all of the mutation principles and also think about function and form a little bit more. Although the end result was required to make sense in terms of it being a further generation of the product before
Finally, build a model of the final design

To accomplish this all in 5 days was quite a feat. Many of us were in the work room morning to night, every day (I only slept a few hours every night). But the end result was fantastic, the students and teacher at KISD were all very enthusiastic about the results, and we were asked to display our results for the Long Night of the Museums in Cologne.

Original Artefact




Wildtype
We drew the original artefact by hand, but later decided that using Illustrator would be a more simple, and correctable choice.


Mutation 1: Duplication


Mutation 2:Translocation


Mutation 3:Insertion


Mutation 4:Deletion


Mutation 5:Multiple Choice