After completing the „Bauwhat?! Free Summer School“ we were approached by the team organizing „Hurra Hurra Festival“, a weekend festival held at Burg Halle to examine existing school systems, experiment in learning methods and go into an open discussion about the future of design and design education. We (6 people from the summer school) were asked to hold a workshop but were left creative freedom in the exact topic. Building on our experience at Bauwhat?!, we constructed a manifesto workshop aimed to give the participants the right tools to form an (educated) opinion and to argument it. Our team's approach was to make it fun and try to get the participants to use their voice (1). The workshop was composed of two sessions and a public proclamation of the manifestos resulting from the workshop. Each session started with a warm up game (2) that was targeted to give a fun and spontaneous approach to the next task and to get to know the other participants and their design education background. During the second workshop I was also dedicated lead workshop tutor which meant that I had to introduce the next tasks in a way that would be understandable to a group of creatives with different professional and cultural backgrounds and that I had to mentor (3) and give feedback to the participants during the workshop.
Participating at Hurra Hurra was a great opportunity to dip my toes into constructing and holding workshops as well as networking with likeminded people. I enjoyed coming up with playful ways of learning and teaching as well as helping people find their voice.
(1) By making the workshop entertaining and educating at the same time, we tried to connect the gained knowledge to an experience that can be turned into an emotional memory. We did this because we believe experiences stick with the brain longer than plain knowledge.
(2) Constructing the warm up games was my task. In order to create a valuable game I had to isolate the key learning value and possible hurdles to then find out how to make them more approachable.
(3) Beforehand we had agreed to an open and supportive mentoring style, breaking with hierarchic structures of mentor and mentee. Rather than giving my opinion I tried to ask the right questions so that the participants would find their own path.
