D.I.CE Workshops 2020 | British Council & Karani Leadership
The Dice Workshops - which if youre interested stands for 'Developing Inclusive Creative Economies' and hosted by the British Council in collaboration with organisations as ways to which innovation surrounding issues within Developing Countries and their Creative Economies can be resolved through the tool of dialogue. Due to the pandemic of 2020 we were truly challenged to adapt and demonstrate our resilience as workshop facilitators - by having to do so online.
Digital spaces have been of interest to my practice since 2015 when I went through my post-graduate studies obsessed with the topic of 'Virtual Matter' and discussed in detail the transference of space and place through digital rendering, gamification and everyday tools like Google Street View - yet here for the first time in my work I was asked to host a digital sandbox to 'Build a City from Scratch' - opening up my screen as the space in which to begin the formings of place.
The following images are outtakes from the workshops, each of them were used in various ways either as promotion content, tools for reporting or just views into the city we built collectively with a set of symbolic 3d forms - some exisitng from my library of images and urban language collections and some newly made in collaboration with team members based on their insights into urban life, city joys and fears - all of which then begun to build a city like never before, which we could then host from the next workshop and then the next until we had a city resilient and adapting to our needs and those economic hurdles which we may not have been prepared for.
There are a series of take-aways for myself personally but I have to say the greatest was to be able to share the isolated realm of the digital space in such a playful way - and to really engage with the tool of communication, languauge, image, colour anf form to connect with across the world - to be removed from the room in which signals of the body are usually tools for communication in the real spaces we exist in -and this cognitive awareness relating to how we collaborate has been beyond beneficial to my practice - and pushed my thinking about the meaning of 'COLABOURs' in totality and will hopefully see these lessons further expressed in the work I am working on during the year 2021.
Living Unit - A whole within it carved out a space for every function of the post-covid lifestyle - work/play/live/eat/rest/bath
The Cycle Circle - Healthy Pyramids as landmarks relating to a concentric systems of waste management tying into the urban and the infrastructure
Play platform - Adapatable urban folly for play interpretation
Avenue of Trees - but also fruit food trees
City & Sandbox View - Water & Land of Equal Value
Education & Market Place - Safety of Children within Public space was one of the most challenging topics of dialogue