Students make their mark at Semi-Permanent

When people at New Zealand’s premier design conference last weekend emerged from a talk by Australian paper engineer Benja Harney, they were handed a postcard featuring the paper planes they had just made.

In fact, for every session of the two day Semi-Permanent conference in Auckland, a team of six Massey University art and design students produced rapid-turnaround postcard mementos. The team, operating as a pop-up design studio in the conference foyer, also produced a conference zine, VIP envelopes, and pin boards where participants could post responses to the conference.

The students were there to work for Open Lab, from Massey’s College of Creative Arts in Wellington. Ten days before, Open Lab had issued a short-deadline call for proposals asking students how they would respond dynamically to the design ideas on show at Semi-Permanent.

Senior design tutor Karl Kane says the winning group had a great idea, good skill mix and demonstrated ability to work fast. The project – themed #overheard – was entirely student-led. “People at Semi-Permanent could see there were no puppeteers,” Mr Kane says.

Open Lab, explains its director, design lecturer Anna Brown, is an avenue for mentored work-integrated learning. “We aim to produce better designers who are better able to be in the design workforce by giving our students experience working on real briefs for real clients, often businesses which haven’t used designers before.”

This is the first time Open Lab has been off-campus to a conference or event.

Many of the conference attendees were aspiring designers, either senior secondary school or tertiary students. For them, Mr Kane says, “Open Lab’s gig was the link between where they are now and the international design stars on stage. Our students were demonstrating the design processes that the conference speakers were outlining: prototyping, putting yourself out there, taking risks, trying again and getting results.”

The Open Lab team at Semi-Permanent was: Jo Bailey (Master of Design candidate), Charlotte McCrae, Max Scott-Murray, Kieran Stowers, Simone van Tiel and Ashley Williams (Bachelor of Design (Honours) students). They were supported by Fuji Xerox, which provided printers, peripherals and technical support.

View #overhead on tumblr: openlabnz.tumblr.com