Flickr Photo Pool

Design Week at the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture finished up last Friday (Jan 29th). This year the format was slightly different, instead of inviting a single practitioner/academic to host design week we decided to invite four visitors with varying backgrounds. The topic of design week was LSU tailgating, a topic that most students are intimately familiar with and the visitors were asked to re-imagine. For someone who is unfamiliar with tailgating it was an educational event and I learned a lot about the spectacle. Each day began with a review from the day before and a lecture from the visiting critic which provided students with a context for the project brief they were given. The students then had 24 hrs to complete the assigned project. The LSU students responded and consistently delivered amazing work in the short time they were allotted. The projects explored stakeholder research and problem definition, diagramming of latent systems, fashion and garment design and static/dynamic infrastructures. The entire event ended with a tailgate party located in the Design Building courtyard. The week started with an inaugural event in which LSU Professor Van Cox setup his tailgate in the Design Building parking lot. The visitors for the week were as follows:

Designing the Problem

January 25th . Scott Pobiner, Assistant Professor of Design + Management, Parsons the New School for Design, New York, NY

On Course

January 26th . Ivan Valin, Landscape Designer, Tom Leader Studio, Berkeley, CA

Body/Territory . Extension

January 27th . Liz Burrow, Wave Hill Fellow, Artist and Designer, Brooklyn, NY

An exploration of how the body could function as a conduit for social action. Students designed a wearable piece that addressed/altered an identified social or cultural issue. The presentation was delivered in a runway show where the students performed the interaction with the wearable piece. A 2 minute song accompanied each performance, sadly the videos below do not have sound.

Deployable Infrastructure

January 28th . Beau Trincia, Environmental Designer, IDEO, San Francisco, CA

Students were asked to imagine a component of tailgating infrastructure that was deployable/mobile but plugged into landscape systems or infrastructures. The projects were prototyped at 1:1 and documented with video.

awards and party

January 28th . more to come