‘PACCO’ CHAIR
Flat Pack Chairs designed for Homestead Senior Secondary Cafe
ABOUT
I was selected to be one of 150 artists and designers to undertake a new 6 month creative schools’ program – which would be mentored through my design practices. It certainly has been an amazing gig so far, with countless opportunities to develop my design process and co-design with so many interesting people from other creative artists, students, teachers, mentors, and the wonderful staff of Regional Arts Victoria ( RAV).
I was paired with Homestead Senior Secondary College. Homestead Senior Secondary College, only being a year old has been significantly impacted by covid through their arts and design department. With lockdown, you can imagine students were highly limited and impacted on learning about design & art in ways in which they would usually get with face-to-face learning. Understanding this, I went into this job wanting to use my design practice to allow students to explore design and art through a very collaborative design process. To encourage the students to take the design lead and be at the centre of the design process – allowing them to be the designer and to take control of what their creative project looks like, whilst also being mentored through a designer from industry and their lead by their amazing teacher Brenton!
The students so far have been very successful in learning various design thinking processes from rapid prototyping of their chairs from the two-point perspective, Isometric drawings and participating in a shark tank pitch amongst their peers .
From the shark tank pitch, we selected a few design and now are in the process of being fabricated by me in their new design and technology workshop. Just from the first couple months being in this role seeing the students light up and so engaged with this project has been amazing not only for them but has encouraged me in my design practices and processes. Certainly from teaching role to designer, they're completely different, however I'm finding myself wearing both caps - and its been the most extraordinary thing to experience and learn how to adapt . Especially learning when to take a step back and allow students to just have fun and be creative as possible .
