Tobias Toft

The second week is where we are getting an introduction to some of the most important workshops at DKDS. Monday was glass (both hot and cold), today (Tuesday) was ceramics (mainly plaster) and the rest of the week is metal and wood.

Gathering some very hot glass. Kevin is protecting my hands from the heat.

Especially the hot glass workshop was extremely cool (is that self-contradictory?). It looks a lot easier than it is, but I managed to blow my own “Snaps”-glass. I’d say the design is more unique than it’s pretty… In the cold glass workshop we made glass-weapons to keep the Swedish trolls from crossing the bridge. Apparently that’s the Design School’s responsibility – at least according to the case that the workshop leader Charlie had written for us.

Working on the knives in the cold glass workshop

The pictures were taken by Alie (as usual).

Alex put together this video summing up the activities from the first week of the pilot year. It’s going to be great to watch again in September 2009.

is visiting twitter for the first time in 6 months

And what a week. I almost can’t remember all the stuff that we have been doing – but I know it’s been great. I began the second day by coming in 30 minutes late, because I had misread an e-mail. Great start… That morning we were introduced to a technique called something like “creative writing” (can’t remember the exact term), but the concept is that we write for approx. 15 minutes or three full pages about anything that comes to mind. Karen Ward (our excellent teambuilding facilitator) gave us a journal each (mine is brown) to get started with. In the beginning it seemed a bit weird, but already next morning I actually found myself looking forward to this exercise. There is something relaxing about just emptying the brain for 15 minutes. I think I will try to continue doing this at least every weekday – but let’s see. I have a habit of forgetting these kinds of things after a while.

The Brown Book and a matching pair of bananas

Later that tuesday we did our first development project – it was very short and based on some materials that Karen gave us in a box. The development process was supposed to be the opposite of what is best practice – so we started out by designing a product, and then later we defined a target group and the needs and pains of this group. We ended up designing a product called “the Camelo” – the Carnival Member Locator. A device for locating lost and/or drunk friends at a party or carnival. Of course the product was a true multi-purpose product, that would also solve all your other problems. Well, at least most of them…

The Camelo under development

When the projects were done, we presented them to the other groups, while Vinay documented it all on video.

The next project to come was the “Copenhagen Survival”-project, which was a 2-day project from wednesday to thursday. The brief was to design a product or a service that would help foreigners survive in Copenhagen. It could be either short-term or long-term. A lot of fun products came out of the project, especially the “Aesthetical Integration Tool” (in short: AI), that would help foreigners blend in with the stylish Danes was quite cool. After the presentations Thursday afternoon, CIID set up a nice party for the students and people with relation to CIID. Nice party means lots of beer, pizza, cake, wine and mighty fine people.

Sara and Francesco having a beer. Photo by Alie.

I finally started school today at the CIID/DKDS Pilot Year. It is everything I hoped for! The next year is going to be extremely exciting, fun, educational and probably also a bit hard. We’re starting out with some team building and an introduction to the workshops. After that we’re digging into the hot stuff, like physical computing, computational media design and video prototyping.

Me and my classmates at CIID

My classmates come from all over the world, and have very different educational and cultural backgrounds – and they’re all just really nice people. The school (Danmarks Designskole) is a quite nice place with all the facilities I could ever want (at least it seems so), and as a bonus it is pretty close to where I live. I almost can’t wait until tomorrow, and next week, and next month, and…

By the way, the picture above belongs to Alie.

I stumbled upon this cheesy promo-song from somewhere back in 80’s. I must admit that it makes me miss my trusty old Amiga 500 even more. And the song keeps on playing in my head… Maybe Gates and Seinfeld could learn something here?

I’m not that impressed by the new iPod nanos – usually Apple comes out with something interesting, but honestly, an accelerometer and an “intelligent” music-analyzing algorithm does not really impress me. And the design is just a step back towards the iPod mini. I like the form factor of my old nano (3rd gen) – it fits perfectly into that (previously) useless pocket that’s partly inside the right front pocket on almost every pair of jeans. I’d rather see capacity improvements on the 3rd gen nano, than the launch of the 4th gen.

Well, enough with the grumpy old man. To the point: One good thing about the new nanos, is the video at Apple.com, which is showcasing some of the new features. In that video, the nano plays a bit of Datarock – a Norwegian band that I had totally forgotten about. Watching that video made me rediscover Datarock and now they’re on repeat (especially the track “Fa-fa-fa” with the funky bassline and guitar). Thank you Apple, for reminding me about Datarock. Looking forward to the 5th gen nanos.

Take a look at Datarock on YouTube. The image belongs to Apple.