PerForm the Unseen

In this course students will research "unseen" issues and render them tangible through (iterative) design processes in which formgiving "the development, assessment, and determination of form" takes centre stage.

Designers can use their aesthetic sensibilities and communicative skills to support engagement with individual and collective concerns. Through their work, designers can spark and sustain public debate about these issues or revive controversies about long standing taboos. Matters of concern, moreover, of which many are intangible.

Students will use an interdisciplinary set of skills to investigate how body language, individual perception and context influence the meaning of form in relation to design physical and/or digital artefacts. Students will investigate the communicative potential of form by means of embodied sketching and prototyping, experimental image and shape studies, observing and discussing.

Students will develop their form studies into a design intervention that seeks to render tangible an "unseen" issue they chose to investigate. At the end of the course, they will evaluate the "performance" of their design intervention by means of a public presentation.