Drawing Conversations that emerged in the workshop
About
You can read our workshop abstract ︎ here ︎
This in-person workshop held in Venice at the 2022 ACM Creativity and Cognition conference invited designers, artists, technologists and scientists to collectively speculate about artefacts and technologies through the practice of drawing. We focussed on the use of drawing as a method for collaboratively generating connections between different artefacts and between perspectives from participants coming from various disciplines. Through drawing, we engaged in conversation with concepts and with each other and potentially create new forms, functionalities and interpretations. Our one-day workshop encouraged a shared engagement with ambiguous spaces in order to stimulate creativity and collaborative design.
Venice, the city hosting this conference, has been historically drawn and painted by both amateur and professional drafts people and artists seeking to capture its character, architectural beauty and craftsmanship. Our workshop seeked in part to join in this rich cultural tradition through hands-on drawing activities that combined speculation and creativity.
We believe that drawing together on the “City of Water” can be an inspiring experience for exploring forms of creative inquiry. Getting together to draw, after the long period of isolation caused by the global pandemic, enabled us to connect with each other in the research community and with Venice, the location of our conference. We invited anyone interested in playing with ambiguity and experimentation – regardless of their drawing skills – to join us in this speculative work.
Workshop Goals
-To prompt collective free associations and speculation of ideas with a group of researchers and practitioners coming from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
-We aimed for the workshop to be open, playful and fun, to comfortably play and create new, strange and even silly forms and functionalities in artefacts and technologies.
-To learn about each other’s research interests and develop fresh reinterpretations of what might have become familiar.
Outcomes
Through discussions of themes emerged through our speculative drawings we produced a collection of visual ideas and identified potential opportunities we may want to further pursue.