Supervision with Søren

Through gentle manipulation ;-) Søren made me decide to keep the evaluation on the process of Havlandet in the form of a bulletted list rather than in prose. The measuring and reporting fashion of the list makes it feel as if it is made by a machine analysing all the data available judging the different parts of the process against god-given questions.

The evaluation of the exhibition itself will be differeent from that with two parts; "what worked/what was good" and "what didn't work/wasn't good". With visuals ofc, and also with explanations (where relevant and possible).

What are we doing?

Wednesday there was a full day seminar about research and development at KhiB (Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen). I really enjoyed the discussions, even if they were not so much about research and development as such. The seminar is one of three this autumn and is obligatory for all teaching and researching personnel at KhiB.

We were placed in groups of ten and were presented with two projects, in our case very different ones. Professor Rita Marhaug was presenting a proposal for creating a platform for cooperation in development projects. And Professor Dave Vikøren presented his work with InsideNorway, a project where he works on increasing the reputation of Norwegian furniture design.

For me it was interesting to see that I felt more connected to Rita's project than to the industry of the furniture business. I realise that exhibitions (like all other spacial design projects) are "unika design", not mass produced (Yes it is obvious, but putting this into words put some things in place for me ^^).

I was pondering what the research part was in Dave's project and what differed it from a branding project in say visual or marketing communication.

In research by design it is the finished product that is the important result, in addition there must be reflections on the process, trials and errors. As the discussion progressed it became clear that Dave's project is twofold; he does design exhibitions for very different settings to display the furnitures. But the other, and I would perhaps say more important, part of the project is to actually design a system for promoting Norwegian furnitures, and give young designers a way into the market. The design of the system is in correspondence with the notion of the designer as an expert in problem solving. An exsample of this is the School of Design at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Their focus on design as a problemsolver has given them projects that is not typical for a design school. They have, among other things, re-organized the entire US Postal system and designed a new tax-system for Australia.

Plan for week 39

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Describe the exhibition idea
• Evaluation of Havlandet
  

Meetings

• Søren on thursday - discuss the evaluation and the new projectdescription

Seminar

• Research at KhiB - What are we doing?
  

Summing up Week 38

• Continue the description of the exhibition idea
• Transfered to week 39
  
• Detailed project plan for the autumn
• who do we need to contact?
• sponsors - how do we work with them? when to contact who? (fylkeskommune, kommune, business sponsors)
• Jo-Anne starts this process in Week 39

• Work on the projectdescription
• Getting there! We managed to crack the nut!

• Monday - Jack
• Good meeting with Jack, evaluating the design of Havlandet and discussiong the new project.
  
• Wednesday - Lykkejegerne
• As mentioned again and again; the meeting where we cracked ... it. ^_^
  

Cracking the nut!

I think we managed to crack the project last night!
The name of the project is Fiskeboller i karri
The aim is to make a traveling exhibition.
The goal is to make the visitors ask themselves "What is Norwegian?"
The takeaway message is that Culture doesn't stand still.


It has been a long discussion, and an emotional one for all of us and we were quite happy when it suddenly grew out of the pages and in our minds. Now we will have to test it with our key resources (collegues, friends, supervisors etc, both professionals and people who are potential visitors to this exhibition) and see if it holds water and endures scrutiny. Here is a video clip of our discussions at the slightly noisy kafé. We have decided to start meeting at Kunsthøgskolen, department of design, from now on.

Plan for week 38

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Continue the description of the exhibition idea
• Detailed project plan for the autumn
• who do we need to contact?
• sponsors - how do we work with them? when to contact who? (fylkeskommune, kommune, business sponsors)
  
• Work on the projectdescription
  

Meetings:

• Monday - Jack
• Wednesday - Lykkejegerne

Summing up week 37

• Continue writing the evaluation
• done
  
• Prepare for meeting with Jack next week; what do I want to discuss with him?
• project development, the evaluation of Havlandet, the exhibition theme
  
• Continue research for the exhibition; food history, installation inspiration.
  
• Visit two of Museum Vest's museums; Herdla and Kystmuseet i Øygarden.
• Only visited Kystmuseet, Herdla was closed
  
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn. (Transfered from last week)
• and transfered again
  

Plan for week 37

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Continue writing the evaluation
• Prepare for meeting with Jack next week; what do I want to discuss with him?
• Continue research for the exhibition; food history, installation inspiration.
  
• Visit two of Museum Vest's museums; Herdla and Kystmuseet i Øygarden.
  
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn. (Transfered from last week)
  

Summing up week 36:
Work

• Work on the process evaluation Havlandet (for meeting with Linda wednesday)
  
• Done
  
• Write out the new concept for the exhibition
• Started
  
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn
• transfer to week 37
  

Meetings

• Department of Design, Petter Bergerud
• Good meeting with Petter, defining what the design department can do for me (maybe not so much what I can do for them...)
  
• Linda Kragseth (for work on the evaluation)
• Very good! So that is what evaluating means!
  

Evaluation

In order to truly learn from the process of developing Havlandet I have started to evaluate the process together with Linda Kragseth. Linda has a Bachelor of Marketing in Market communication and has been working for several years with developing the intranet for SkandiaBanken. She has a special interest in organisation development, and she seems to be asking all the right questions to bypass the obstacles of memory and personal grudges. It is very interesting to look at the process through these kind of glasses and be able to cooly draw conclusions for the benefit of future projects.

Mind you; we are not trying to make an complete evalution of the whole process, we are doing it from a slightly subjective angle; mine. As my project focus on defining my role, the role of the exhibition designer, we have decided to focus on that rather than trying to get a compelete and objective overview of the whole process. The evaluation will be finished in a few months time, I will then publish it on www.designingculture.no

Reviewing exhibitions

I received Museumsnytt (the Norwegian museum magazine) in the mail yesterday, and was happy to see Åse Enerstvedt doing a review of Kongospor at Museum of Cultural history in Oslo. I went there this summer and was not too impressed. But whats more was that I decided not to read here review before I had written my own (a quick one anyway), using my structure of Narrative, Method and Design.

After doing that and reading her review I saw that we agreed very much on the Narrative side (although; she writes it, I just nod enthusiastically at everything she writes!) but we disagree on the design side! She finds it elegant, I find it dark and unrelated to the subject. Very interesting! Maybe she would be interested in collaborating on exhibiton reviews with me?

Meeting with Department of Design

Monday, September 3.
Present: Petter Bergerud, Hanna Hilt

The aim of the meeting was to define how the department of design can contribute to the project. The following was concluded:

• Through the development of the new exhibition, both process and design
• Through critical reading of the reflection texts

Petter came with valuable insights and comments both regarding the exhibition theme, and on the research fellowship itself. He made the valuable comment that even in the endresult, the final work I produce (the reflections) there must be something more important, one single thing that is the final aim. This aim should inform all the work I am doing up to that point.

Fiskeboller med karri

Things have moved fast the last weeks. Lykkejegerne has really taken off and we have had enthusiastic discussions about concept and about organisation of the project. I have also been very aware of taking my supervisor's, and other people's, advice of making the project focused enough. It is so easy to get pulled away into the energy and excitement of the work, so many things that would be fun to do! But I started to feel the same rapid heartbeat as I felt when working on Havlandet (both good and bad; exciting to work with but also stressful to balance). So we narrowed it down to one exhibition idea; "How are you connected to the world?". The idea based on the model I sketched for mapping out different foods. This would be an installation were visitors could register their family's touches with the world outside of Norway (e.g. myself: Grandma Icelandic, uncle living in Argentina, the Hilt family shipwrecking outside Bergen on their way from Germany to America, great grandpa working as a doctor for the Indians in the wild west, father born in Brooklyn, etc.) . After registering they could enter the installation and see these connections visualized around them.

But, as the professional reader will see, it is still a huge project. In addition to the immediate technical problems, there are also questions like: What audiovisuals do we show from each country? How do we deal with politically charged areas?

So we narrowed it down even further, saying that what we want to talk about is how a culture that is alive (and we want our culture to be living) will allways be open and constantly changing. It is open to new impulses and molds new and old into something unique for that place and time. We want to show this by looking at traditional food in Norway.

Risengrynsgrøt, pepperkaker, raspeballer are some examples of food we regard as truly Norwegian. But how long have they been traditional? When did they become Norwegian? They all have ingredients like rice, sugar, potatoes, black pepper and cinnamon, foods that at some stage was imported by travelling humans. (And through this we also touch the debate of who is a Norwegian. What is a second generation immigrant? Third? Fourth? Nice comment by Jill Walker Rettberg here.)

Interestingly narrowing the project down thematically, opened it up for exploring exhibition ideas and design solutions. It seems by being focused thematically we have managed to get the project to focus more on the design of the exhibit.

Plan for week 36

Every week
Keep the blog updated


Work

• Work on the process evaluation Havlandet (for meeting with Linda wednesday)
• Write out the new consept for the exhibition
• Look at a weekly plan for the autumn

Meetings

• Department of Design, Petter Bergerud
• Linda Kragseth (for work on the evaluation)