7-11 March 2010
From Process to Product
This five-day workshop at Hadassah College Jerusalem brought together Hadassah's 3rd year industrial design students and their visual communications counterparts from the WIZO Design Academy in Haifa.
Working with SHEKEL, a non-profit organisation employing adults with learning disabilities, this workshop reversed the usual process by which designers progress their ideas. The aim was to design a new portfolio of products for an organisation whose main products were ceremonial candles and sewn items and who undertook contract assembly for plastic products.
In the brief, students were asked to place equal emphasis on the design of the production process and to embed error and difference as a positive feature of their final design solutions.
The group visited SHEKEL and studied the existing capabilities of the workers, the equipment available to understand the limitations and possibilities, particularly relating to the production process and maintaining quality control.
From this, using the available material and machinery, they were asked to design a signature product or family of products, which exploited these limitations and possibilities. The brief stipulated also that the students had to design the manufacturing process itself and create design guidelines so that quality could be maintained by SHEKEL. In addition they were asked to design a brand for each of the products under which they could be marketed.
The first team produced a new paper material and designed a range of goods using the paper (Patches). The second team focussed on cardboard and designed a set of products for urban gardening - a bird house, a set of planters and a label system that store and dispense seed (Inbetween). The third team created a signature casual handbag (Gifted), the fourth team created a durable lunch bag to replace the standard brown paper one and a set of drawers (Petel), while the fifth team designed a candle with integrated packaging (Quarter).
See pictures of the workshop here.
The Hadassah students have continued to work with SHEKEL refining and developing the products so that they can go into regular production.
