Zero / wiki

DESIGNING FROM ZERO

Jb Labrune, Designer Marcelo Coelho, Designer

Traditional education institutions and alternative systems like montessori schools, freinet or waldorf kindergarten have been created in a context of abundance of resources, managed by institutions. Makerspaces and Fablabs have been created outside of these institutions but still require consequent investments and facilities to be launched, leading eventually to informal yet new institutions.

This class investigate how to imagine networked constructionist design environments that could be bootstrapped from the ground up, from zero. Using very minimal resources, how would you build a pencil, a chair, a well, a website, a kiln or a house without abundance of materials and tools ? Students will be asked to scavenge materials around MIT campus in Cambridge and come up with design tutorials on how to build simple objects that could be replicated in other places in the world, especially in non-technical environments, outside from universities and specialized makers workshops.

Class program:

• Day 1 - Introduction, presentation, group forming
• Day 2 - Scavenging for materials, concept development, group presentation
• Day 3 - Prototyping, documentation servers & tools discussion, projects reviews (+guests)
• Day 4 - Prototyping, documenting, projects reviews
• Day 5 - Wrapping-up documentation, Final project presentations (+guests)

The class also aims at thinking of tutorials formats, documentation methods and decentralized infrastructure (electronic boards & servers) for people so they can learn, share their own knowledge and nurture their own cultures and environment. It is indeed very different to bootstrap a design class in a favela in Rio, in a yurt in the Gobi desert, in a settlement in Odisha, in the streets of Parisian suburb or in a design school in Boston. Students will be introduced to some existing methods and tools for documentation. They will also use minimal servers to host their design steps and prototype ways to distribute them as minimal nodes in a global mesh network.

Inspired by project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education and by Internet0 at MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, the Zero class intends to facilitate the organisation of informal design learning activities around the world, sharing creative patterns and experiences and developing a global community of networked makers who own their infrastructures.

Website: http://zero.mit.edu

To sign-up: jb@media.mit.edu, marceloc@mit.edu

Sponsor(s): MIT International Design Center

Contact: Jb Labrune, jb@media.mit.edu | Marcelo Coelho, marceloc@mit.edu

Are they scavenging for materials, do we give each student $10 to spend?

Both, they should try to do as maximum with found / recycled / given materials and can also use their budget for specific stuff if they don't find it elsewhere. How do we frame this?

In one sentence: Zero is an experimental design method for people that need to learn how to build simple objects (design) but who live in places with limited resources (rural areas, settlements, non-places) or limited access to them