Diagram Works

Diagram Works

By Thomas Leerberg Ph.d., Associate Professor, Designskolen Kolding

In the late spring of 2006, we taught a workshop on diagrams at Designskolen Kolding. The workshop began with a short introduction to mapping methods, which were later used by the group of students during a study trip to Berlin. Back in Kolding, the students had two weeks to use the mappings – first to do analytical diagrams and later producing diagrams.

In the context of PRE Design Forum this workshop is interesting from two points of view: First of all it was an exercise in bridging the ever-present gap between theory and practice, by applying theoretical knowledge about diagrams to the students design practice. Second, it was an exercise in how students produce new knowledge about their own methods and their subject matter through the act of design – their practice.

The initial question of the workshop was that we as designers often design things that are processual and immaterial. If we have to design a beverage vending machine, where you insert a coin in the top and receives a hot cup of coffee at the bottom, then the important part of that experience is not what you see on the cover. The quality of the coffee is not – sadly enough – determined by the colorful front of the machine, but rather by the experience that stems from the process under the hood. So if we as designers want to qualify this experience through design, we have to develop tools that can handle processes that are hidden, covered up or immaterial.

To get the workshop going, students were asked to map different things in Berlin – a static space with people in motion, a dynamic space, the function of an object or a natural phenomenon. All these things had to be documented and in that, respect brought back home to the studio.

The students were then presented with theories of diagrams as systems of signs, how diagrams has been used through history and how it is used in related areas as architecture and natural science. Connected to this theoretical presentation was PhD.-student Thomas Lagoni, who has the representation of natural science through spatial diagrams as a part of his project. This gave the students the grounding for doing the analytical and the producing diagrams.

The result of the workshop was a wide range of different diagrams, spanning from the literary splitting of a tape recorder and diagramming its inner workings, a diagram that shows emotions related to different locations in Berlin, to a beautiful game-book of the way people acted in the U-bahn and the diagrammic deconstruction of a small written story about Berlin that constantly formed new stories by it self.

So not only was the workshop a transfer of knowledge from theory to education through practice, it was also a chance for the student to acquire new knowledge and experience about the way they work and conceptualize design questions. In this way, the students produced new knowledge through practice – a knowledge that was created based on a body of theoretical knowledge and a knowledge that will qualify their further work as designers.