Team X shuffles out of Urban Central in the cold Melbourne morning and makes its way to Docklands, adding 10 more members to the other 90 white jump suited participants gathering by the waters edge. Do passing motorists wonder if a newly formed cult has come to worship the cow in the tree,100 believers awaiting some divine bovine inspiration? Perhaps we really are a newly formed cult seeking some new understanding.
We are given our brief and the location of our site. Our intent is to cut & fold the surface, opening & revealing to create an inhabitable skin. Our uniforms of white plastic overalls befit the emergency surgery we must now undertake on our site.
The siren sounds and all 100 participants run to their site. Team X bigness to test their site, measuring the parameters, mapping the groundplane with their bodies, walking, sitting, looking, talking, posing, ideas start percolating.
The excitement of physically exploring the site transforms as the 10 of us quietly sit together and absorb it, thinking about the project. Ideas start percolating and we head back to the industrial cavern of Shed 4 where the trace paper is rolled out after lunch and the conversation begins in earnest.
The conversations intensify - how do we realise the intervention? What do we want to generate and build? What do we want to avoid creating? Egos emerge - ideas are debated - and take on a life of their own - ideas are torn apart and discarded- new ideas are thrown down on the table and interrogated - former ideas reappear evolving into hybrid designs - a Frankenstein stitched together starts to take on a life of its own. The monster idea gets cut up - cosmetically enhanced and emerges as something elegant and functioning.
Final agreement? - a design concept has taken form for which there is shared agreement & shared excitement in the team. There is a sigh of relief as we realise that no one felt compelled to pull out a tazer or start stabbing anyone with a stanley knife in the process of realising this concept. Birth is never an easy process.
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