Team Building Week at CIID was less of the sitting around the campfire and sharing stories than it was getting down to some real mentally (and physically) engaging design madness. Simon from the KaosPilots didn’t hold back. We were immediately given the responsibility of a Live project in which we were asked to deliver a final design concept/opportunity based around one word, Horizontality. It wouldn’t be fair of me to reveal too much of the weeks activities but it would suffice to say that it was one of the best collaborative creative weeks of my short life so far.

A blend of emotion interrogation, breaking down creative barriers and down right ‘getting stuff done’. We worked with CIID alumni in groups, each given a specific word/concept and asked to join forces at the last minute to provide an over-arching “design message” to be presented by the end of the week.

It was interesting to me that this way of teaching grounded everyone at the same level of thinking. For example, coders became designers, designers became coders. People in the groups were involved at every stage in the design process and each bought their own ideas and evaluations. It was interesting for me to observe other learning a process that I had been so used to. It made me realise just how much the design process is something to be experienced and practiced, the same way drawing or coding is perfected. It like training your mind to operate in a specific way so that you can quickly iterate through ideas and build upon them, but also quickly inspire the people that your working with. I can’t emphasise enough the power of enthusiasm for other people ideas. It pushes the process forward and takes everyone along for the ride.

A core message throughout the team building week was the importance of doing. Doing funnily enough leads to results, even in places you weren’t planning on getting results yet or at all. During our team project we ventured outside into the cold heart of Copenhagen on field research. Having a loose plan of what we were looking to explore pushed us to the brink of a crazy idea. For a moment we all stood on the cliff edge of this idea, looked in and all together decided to jump in, head first. It was simple; to experience the city in a different way you needed to be on a different plane; horizontal. This forces you to look up and be presented with a whole new field of view. The interesting thing here wasn’t so much the space above streets and between buildings not being utilised but the way you are interacting with the city by looking up or lying down. A brave team member put this theory to the test and indeed we did incite some public concern forcing us to stop. There is a design opportunity here but sadly abandoned due to lack of time. Maybe one day when I’m lying on my back in park looking up into the blank space above the streets I will think of it again.

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