LETTER no. 70Week no.10: Making Things. SaturdayDesign 101 MOOC, Abadir for iversity

Greetings from Milan,

Home is where the heart is they say...Here we are inside Giulia and Anne-Sophies new home (right next to our studio and the Big Bag Box). The two felt like changing space for a little while...

Concrete walls, concrete floors, concrete ceilings...Curious space, dont you think? Some say its a cold space, but Giulia and Anne-Sophie like it very much and find it to be a very cozy one.

We like to travel the world and visit new places, but it demands so much energy! To plan, to make lists, to choose all the places to visit, to make sure the atmospheric conditions are ok for our zeppelin, to prepare maps, to find / call / make sure all those we want to meet are available...

To arrive there, most of the time, totally amazed, sometimes, over-excited. Then, to put ourselves in the right state of mind to properly share things with you.

Anyways, Giulia and Anne-Sophie felt like returning to their cozy little space to share our workflow with you.

Question of the day: How-to navigate our own Design 101 world?This is a complicated how-to!

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https://iversity.org/courses/design-101http://www.abadir.net/?lang=en

One that we do everything while trying to refine the process.As we noted a couple of weeks ago, in design the process in more important than the final product. And although we enjoyed our postcards and letters, when some of you asked us how we did things, we had to agree that it was very important for us to share the whole thing with you.

We told you about the overall process, mostly about how things flow between each one of us. We remember that some of you asked us more technical questions such as: What program do you use for making your videos? and What program do you use for making your letters?.

As we mentioned in our video, the animations are made by Pierluigi and Carlo. In fact, they use After Effects to animate the various photoshop layers we send them. Then, Mr. Duccio adds the special sound effects, music and voices over the whole thing.

Regarding our letters, we prepare our stickers and santini (our little saint cards of our favourite people and designers) in photoshop. Then, we edit the letter, add the hyperlinks etcetc. in InDesign.

Finally, one thing we want to say is that we truly believe that all these technical things can also be done using an infinite number of other tools or programs.

We chose these ones because we already knew how-to use them and thus, it made things simpler.

:-)

Homework no. 70Today, you relax and catch up on the weeks homework.

If you want, you could also think of how you generally proceed when doing a Design 101 homework. Do you always follow a certain workflow?

http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.htmlhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_cardhttp://www.adobe.com/products/indesign.html

Share it with us if you have time We would love to see how you explain processes!

:-)

You can write it down, make a flowchart (mural.ly can help you in this), register yourself talking, make a short video There are so many ways to design ways of explaining proceses!

What will I learn today? To work with your given ingredients, factors, skills and, most of all, those of your team members. Just as the great Stevie Wonder once said, Ya gots to work with what you gots to work with.

Born prematurely, Stevie Wonder became blind just after birth. He played instruments from an early age and nurtured his natural gift. His blindness was never an obstacle nor a limitation:

Do you know, its funny, but I never thought of being blind as a disadvantage, and I never thought of being black as a disadvantage. I am what I am. I love me!

Indeed, take whatever you have and make something out of it. A project like ours is about making the most and the best by empowering, enabling the strengths of each member of the team. We have to say we have a fabulous team!

Why do we do this? To have you think of the way you process things, information.And then, to think of the best ways of maximizing, optimizing these processes and how to share them with others.

Optimizing, clarifying and finally simplifying the whole thing. Lean, clean and simple. Imagine you had to explain very complex operations to a child. Every step, every main element.

https://mural.ly/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevie_Wonder

Something to remember: Explaining things is the best way to test and measure your own understanding.

Further inspiration...The flowchart...

Since design is foremost a process, the procedure illustrated by such a diagram is key to us designers. The flowchart is a way of visualizing, of thinking.

Here you can find all kinds of free on-line tools to create flowcharts.

By the way, on todays postcard, we have our dearest Pierluigi on the stamp and the Super 8 Camera as our printed object.

My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks, says Michel Gondry.

This camera was first manufactured in 1965 by Kodak for amateurs to use. Pierluigi does not use a Super 8 camera, but we still thought it was a nice thing to mention.

:-)

http://www.smashingapps.com/2011/08/26/45-free-online-tools-to-create-charts-diagrams-and-flowcharts.html#ixzz2cMD6CXuDhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwtfVVSzvQ4

Design 101. A How-To.We know we have some late-comers, here are a few instructions on how the whole thing functions...

A typical Design 101 day:

We send you an email around 9 in the morning (Berlin time) with the link to our daily unit + some news, updates, cool Design 101 things we found etc.etc.

Note: you can find all of our previous emails in the Announcements section of Design 101 on iversity.

Once you land on the units page, you find our shipment (which consists of a video-postcard + a letter). You watch the video, read our letter, get to work and complete the assignment (or relax if its a weekend day). For even more fun, you can always refer to the Design 101 encyclopedia, which is updated every week.

Dont forget to take part in the conversations of the Discussions forum!

Now, going beyond the iversity platform, we have setup other places for us to meet and spread things we do.

On Facebook:the Design 101 page: to follow whats going on (in general terms)the Design 101 Exercises page: to check out picks (things that fascinate us the most)the Design 101 Arena group: to post your pictures, share your thoughts, emotions, references, lalala (as a complement to the discussions happening on the platform).

On Twitter,@design1o1: to follow whats going on + discuss with each other.#design1o1: to connect us all under a same hashtag.

On YouTube:the Design 101 channel: to view + share our video postcards (which is not possible to do from the iversity platform)

https://iversity.org/my/courses/design-101-or-design-basics/announcementshttps://iversity.org/my/courses/design-101-or-design-basics/discussions?category=course_relatedhttps://www.facebook.com/design1o1https://www.facebook.com/design1o1.exerciseshttps://www.facebook.com/groups/design1o1/https://twitter.com/design1o1http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu_Cu5Z4-rSCRwbx45QzdIw

On Instagram:#design1o1: to connect us all under a same hashtag.

Regarding the hashtag, make sure to use #design1o1 with an o and not a 0...

:-)

PS Uploading your homework to the iversity platform is very important in terms of archiving. It is the only way we can collect all the things we do in one same place. Once the course ends, it might turn out to be reorganized into a wonderful book and/or exhibition

http://statigr.am/viewer.php#/tag/design1o1/

Pierluigi

Super 8 camera

Todays postcardSkype call with Design 101